48 Fun Facts About Salesforce

Which former Oracle executive founded Salesforce in March 1999?

Marc Benioff founded Salesforce in March 1999 with Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez, working from a rented one-bedroom apartment on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill.

How many years did Salesforce's founder work at Oracle before starting his own company?

Benioff spent 13 years at Oracle, from 1986 to 1999; he was named Rookie of the Year at 23 and became a vice president at 26.

At which company did Salesforce's founder intern as a USC student, writing Macintosh assembly code?

Benioff interned at Apple's Macintosh division in 1984, writing assembly code, while studying at USC; after graduating in 1986 he joined Oracle in customer service.

Salesforce's early guerrilla slogan, aimed at rival Siebel, declared the end of what?

Benioff's 'The End of Software' campaign targeted Siebel Systems: in 2000 Salesforce staged a mock protest outside Siebel's user conference, and its early logo struck a red 'no' slash through the word software.

Under what ticker symbol did Salesforce list on the New York Stock Exchange in June 2004?

Salesforce listed on the NYSE as CRM in June 2004, raising about $110 million; the ticker is the acronym for customer relationship management.

What is Salesforce's annual conference, first held in San Francisco in 2003, called?

Dreamforce debuted in 2003 at San Francisco's Westin St. Francis hotel with about 1,300 attendees and grew into a multi-day event filling the Moscone Center.

Which two tech figures were among Salesforce's earliest investors?

Ellison co-founded Oracle, the founder's former employer, and Minor founded CNET.

Which company did Salesforce agree to buy for $27.7 billion in December 2020?

Salesforce announced the $27.7 billion Slack deal on December 1, 2020 and closed it in July 2021, keeping co-founder Stewart Butterfield as Slack's CEO.

The name of the messaging app Salesforce bought in 2021 is an acronym for what?

Stewart Butterfield coined Slack as a backronym for Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge; the app grew out of an internal tool at his game studio Tiny Speck.

Before pivoting to messaging, Stewart Butterfield's startup Tiny Speck built which failed online game?

Tiny Speck's browser MMO Glitch shut down in December 2012; Butterfield had earlier co-founded Flickr, which likewise grew out of the abandoned game Game Neverending.

Which visual analytics company did Salesforce buy in August 2019 for $15.7 billion?

Tableau, the Seattle-based maker of drag-and-drop data visualization software, was bought in an all-stock deal valued at $15.7 billion that closed in August 2019.

Tableau, bought by Salesforce in 2019, was founded by researchers from which university?

Tableau grew out of Polaris, a Stanford University research project by Pat Hanrahan and Chris Stolte; the company was founded in 2003 and later moved to Seattle.

Which integration and API-management company did Salesforce acquire in 2018 for $6.5 billion?

It grew out of Ross Mason's open-source Mule project of 2003 and was originally called MuleSource.

Which Ruby-only cloud platform did Salesforce buy in December 2010 for $212 million?

Heroku, then a Ruby-only platform, was bought for about $212 million in a deal announced in December 2010; it went on to support Java, Node.js, Python, PHP and Go.

Which data management company did Salesforce agree to buy for about $8 billion in May 2025?

Salesforce agreed in May 2025 to buy Informatica for about $8 billion, or $25 a share, after earlier talks had collapsed in 2024 over price.

Which email-marketing firm, bought for $2.5 billion in 2013, became Marketing Cloud?

ExactTarget, founded in Indianapolis in 2000, was bought for about $2.5 billion in 2013 and became the core of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Salesforce's 2016 e-commerce acquisition, for $2.8 billion, was which company?

Demandware, a Massachusetts-based e-commerce software maker, was bought for about $2.8 billion in 2016 and became Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

Salesforce's 2016 AI platform is named after which scientist?

Salesforce Einstein launched in 2016 under a licence from Albert Einstein's estate, whose name-and-likeness rights are held by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In late 2024 Salesforce rolled out which agentic AI product, succeeding its earlier AI platform?

Agentforce, unveiled at Dreamforce in September 2024, lets companies build autonomous AI agents; Benioff said in September 2025 that agents handled about half of support interactions.

What is the name of Salesforce's free online learning platform, released in 2014?

Trailhead launched at Dreamforce 2014 as a free, gamified site for learning Salesforce skills; its badge-collecting learners call themselves Trailblazers.

What is Salesforce's online marketplace for third-party apps, launched in 2005?

AppExchange, unveiled at Dreamforce in 2005, is Salesforce's marketplace for third-party apps and predates Apple's App Store by about three years.

What is the proprietary Java-like language used to build apps on the Salesforce Platform?

Apex is Salesforce's proprietary, strongly typed, Java-like language that runs on its own servers; Lightning is the newer UI components framework, not a language.

By what name was the Salesforce Platform, its platform-as-a-service, formerly known?

Force.com, launched in 2007, was Salesforce's platform-as-a-service for building apps with Apex; it was later rebranded Lightning Platform and then Salesforce Platform.

Which company did Salesforce replace in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 2020?

Salesforce replaced ExxonMobil in the Dow on August 31, 2020, in a reshuffle prompted by Apple's 4-for-1 stock split cutting the price-weighted index's tech exposure.

Salesforce's culture is built around which Hawaiian concept of family and community?

The 61st floor of Salesforce Tower, an observation lounge for employees and guests, is called the Ohana Floor.

Salesforce's '1-1-1' model gives one percent of equity, one percent of product, and one percent of what?

The 1-1-1 model donates 1% of equity, 1% of product and 1% of employee time to charity; Salesforce co-founded Pledge 1% in 2014 to spread it.

Which magazine did Salesforce's founder and his wife Lynne buy for $190 million in September 2018?

Marc and Lynne Benioff bought Time from Meredith Corporation for $190 million in September 2018, holding it personally through Time USA, LLC rather than through Salesforce.

How tall is Salesforce Tower, the tallest building in San Francisco?

Salesforce Tower rises 1,070 feet (326 m) over 61 floors and opened in 2018; its top roughly 150 feet form an ornamental crown.

Which architect designed Salesforce Tower in San Francisco?

César Pelli, whose firm Pelli Clarke Pelli also designed Kuala Lumpur's Petronas Towers, designed Salesforce Tower; he died in 2019, a year after it opened.

Roughly how many LEDs does the art installation crowning Salesforce Tower use?

Jim Campbell's 'Day for Night' crowns Salesforce Tower with about 11,000 LEDs that play low-resolution video shot around San Francisco each night.

What discovery closed San Francisco's Salesforce Transit Center for repairs in September 2018?

Buses returned in mid-2019; its 5.4-acre rooftop Salesforce Park is reached by a free aerial tram from street level.

Indiana's tallest building, Salesforce Tower since 2017, was previously named for which bank?

The Indianapolis tower opened in 1990 as Bank One Tower, became Chase Tower in 2005 after JPMorgan Chase absorbed Bank One, and took the Salesforce name in 2017.

Which former Facebook CTO and Google Maps co-creator was Salesforce co-CEO from 2021 to 2023?

Bret Taylor, who co-created Google Maps and was Facebook's CTO, served as Salesforce co-CEO from November 2021 to January 2023; he later chaired OpenAI's board and co-founded Sierra.

Which co-CEO stepped down in February 2020, leaving the founder as sole chairman and chief executive?

Keith Block, co-CEO since August 2018, stepped down in February 2020, leaving Marc Benioff as sole chairman and CEO until Bret Taylor became co-CEO in 2021.

Which Hollywood actor was reported in 2023 to earn about $10 million a year from Salesforce as a 'creative advisor'?

The Wall Street Journal reported in 2023 that Matthew McConaughey was paid more than $10 million a year as a Salesforce creative adviser; musician will.i.am was also reported to be on the payroll.

Roughly how many positions did Salesforce cut in its January 2023 layoff, about 10% of staff?

The January 2023 cut of about 10% of roughly 80,000 employees came to some 8,000 positions; Benioff blamed pandemic over-hiring, and Elliott Management took a stake the same month.

Two Salesforce security engineers were fired in 2017 after presenting which pentesting tool at DEF CON?

It was named after Metasploit; a message telling them to cancel arrived half an hour before the talk but they saw it only afterwards.

In 2008 Salesforce moved from Sun servers on Solaris to Dell servers running which operating system?

Salesforce's 2008 migration moved its systems onto Dell servers running Linux with AMD processors, replacing Sun Fire servers with SPARC chips running Solaris.

Which German company did Salesforce overtake in 2022 as the largest enterprise applications vendor by revenue?

Salesforce passed Germany's SAP in 2022 to become the largest enterprise applications vendor by revenue; the same year it shortened its legal name from salesforce.com, inc. to Salesforce, Inc.

Which Meta-owned messaging app agreed in 2022 to integrate Salesforce's Customer 360?

Salesforce and Meta announced at Dreamforce in September 2022 that WhatsApp messaging would be built into Customer 360, letting businesses chat with customers from Salesforce.

Which of these was among the five largest investments in the Salesforce Ventures portfolio in 2019?

Salesforce Ventures, the company's investing arm, counted Twilio among its five biggest holdings in 2019, alongside Domo, SurveyMonkey, Dropbox and DocuSign.

What was the 2009 bestseller Salesforce's founder co-wrote about the company's rise?

Behind the Cloud, written with Carlye Adler, carries the subtitle 'The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company' and became a bestseller in 2009.

Which public cloud did Salesforce name its preferred infrastructure provider in May 2016?

Salesforce named Amazon Web Services its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider in May 2016, committing about $400 million over four years to run services on AWS.

On which date does Salesforce's fiscal year end?

Salesforce's fiscal year ends on January 31, so its 'fiscal 2026' ran from February 2025 through January 2026, and results are reported about a month later.

Which two companies joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average alongside Salesforce in 2020?

Amgen and Honeywell joined the Dow with Salesforce on August 31, 2020, replacing Pfizer and Raytheon Technologies while Salesforce replaced ExxonMobil.

Which word-processing app did Salesforce buy for $750 million in 2016?

Quip, the collaborative word-processing and spreadsheet app co-founded by Bret Taylor in 2012, was bought by Salesforce for about $750 million in 2016.

In which year was Salesforce added to the S&P 500 index?

Salesforce joined the S&P 500 in September 2008, replacing Fannie Mae after the mortgage giant was placed in government conservatorship.

Which immigrant-rights non-profit rejected a $250,000 Salesforce donation in 2018 over its border-agency contracts?

RAICES, the Texas-based Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, rejected a $250,000 Salesforce gift in July 2018 because Salesforce supplied software to Customs and Border Protection.