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48 free Salesforce trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Whether you are a Trailblazer prepping for a Dreamforce team night, an admin who wants to test the sales floor, or just curious how a 1999 apartment startup became the world's biggest enterprise applications company, this quiz has you covered. It runs through Salesforce's founding by ex-Oracle executive Marc Benioff, the 'End of Software' guerrilla marketing against Siebel, the 2004 IPO under the ticker CRM, and the company's rise into the Dow Jones Industrial Average. There are questions on the big acquisitions (Slack, Tableau, MuleSoft, Heroku, Informatica), the products (Trailhead, AppExchange, Apex, Einstein and Agentforce), the buildings (Salesforce Tower's LED crown, the Transit Center's rooftop park, the tallest tower in Indiana) and the culture, from Ohana and the 1-1-1 model to the year Matthew McConaughey's pay became a story. Difficulty ranges from easy questions any customer could answer to hard ones about early investors, executive turnover and a security tool called MEATPISTOL. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia and company sources, so you can run it as an internal quiz, an onboarding icebreaker or a tech-history round without a wrong answer slipping through.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which former Oracle executive founded Salesforce in March 1999?
Marc Benioff
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.
Q 02How many years did Salesforce's founder work at Oracle before starting his own company?
13
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.
Q 03At which company did Salesforce's founder intern as a USC student, writing Macintosh assembly code?
Apple
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.
Q 04Salesforce's early guerrilla slogan, aimed at rival Siebel, declared the end of what?
Software
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.
Q 05Under what ticker symbol did Salesforce list on the New York Stock Exchange in June 2004?
CRM
Salesforce listed on the NYSE as CRM in June 2004, raising about $110 million; the ticker is the acronym for customer relationship management.
Q 06What is Salesforce's annual conference, first held in San Francisco in 2003, called?
Dreamforce
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.
Q 07Which two tech figures were among Salesforce's earliest investors?
Larry Ellison and Halsey Minor
Ellison co-founded Oracle, the founder's former employer, and Minor founded CNET.
Q 08Which company did Salesforce agree to buy for $27.7 billion in December 2020?
Slack
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.
Q 09The name of the messaging app Salesforce bought in 2021 is an acronym for what?
Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge
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.
Q 10Before pivoting to messaging, Stewart Butterfield's startup Tiny Speck built which failed online game?
Glitch
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.
Q 11Which visual analytics company did Salesforce buy in August 2019 for $15.7 billion?
Tableau
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.
Q 12Tableau, bought by Salesforce in 2019, was founded by researchers from which university?
Stanford
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.
Q 13Which integration and API-management company did Salesforce acquire in 2018 for $6.5 billion?
MuleSoft
It grew out of Ross Mason's open-source Mule project of 2003 and was originally called MuleSource.
Q 21What is Salesforce's online marketplace for third-party apps, launched in 2005?
AppExchange
AppExchange, unveiled at Dreamforce in 2005, is Salesforce's marketplace for third-party apps and predates Apple's App Store by about three years.
Q 22What is the proprietary Java-like language used to build apps on the Salesforce Platform?
Apex
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.
Q 23By what name was the Salesforce Platform, its platform-as-a-service, formerly known?
Force.com
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.
Q 14Which Ruby-only cloud platform did Salesforce buy in December 2010 for $212 million?
Heroku
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.
Q 15Which data management company did Salesforce agree to buy for about $8 billion in May 2025?
Informatica
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.
Q 16Which email-marketing firm, bought for $2.5 billion in 2013, became Marketing Cloud?
ExactTarget
ExactTarget, founded in Indianapolis in 2000, was bought for about $2.5 billion in 2013 and became the core of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Q 17Salesforce's 2016 e-commerce acquisition, for $2.8 billion, was which company?
Demandware
Demandware, a Massachusetts-based e-commerce software maker, was bought for about $2.8 billion in 2016 and became Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
Q 18Salesforce's 2016 AI platform is named after which scientist?
Albert Einstein
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.
Q 19In late 2024 Salesforce rolled out which agentic AI product, succeeding its earlier AI platform?
Agentforce
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.
Q 20What is the name of Salesforce's free online learning platform, released in 2014?
Trailhead
Trailhead launched at Dreamforce 2014 as a free, gamified site for learning Salesforce skills; its badge-collecting learners call themselves Trailblazers.
Q 24Which company did Salesforce replace in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 2020?
ExxonMobil
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.
Q 25Salesforce's culture is built around which Hawaiian concept of family and community?
Ohana
The 61st floor of Salesforce Tower, an observation lounge for employees and guests, is called the Ohana Floor.
Q 26Salesforce's '1-1-1' model gives one percent of equity, one percent of product, and one percent of what?
Employee time
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.
Q 27Which magazine did Salesforce's founder and his wife Lynne buy for $190 million in September 2018?
Time
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.
Q 28How tall is Salesforce Tower, the tallest building in San Francisco?
1,070 feet
Salesforce Tower rises 1,070 feet (326 m) over 61 floors and opened in 2018; its top roughly 150 feet form an ornamental crown.
Q 29Which architect designed Salesforce Tower in San Francisco?
César Pelli
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.
Q 30Roughly how many LEDs does the art installation crowning Salesforce Tower use?
11,000
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.