And he’s gone, another one less. It was considered a coup in the industry that the boss of the cloud software company Salesforce, Marc Benioff, managed to get a man like Bret Taylor on board. He founded the start-up Quip, which Salesforce also bought because of him. In Silicon Valley he was considered a brilliant entrepreneur. But after just a year as co-head of the software company, Taylor, 42, quits. According to his own statements, he wants to get back into the start-up scene, “back to my entrepreneurial roots”. After Keith Block, he is the second co-boss to resign after a short time.
Sole boss is now again founder, boss and father Benioff. “It’s extremely hard for me,” Benioff said in a conference call about Salesforce’s quarterly results. “It makes me think of all the great people we’ve lost in the past too. So many good leaders.”
However, if you listen closely, you will notice that Benioff is primarily emphasizing his own dismay. Taylor’s departure is extremely hard for him, so for Benioff. Anyone who has met him will have noticed Benioff’s ego – it is at least as big as the massive Benioff himself. His claims are also large. In San Francisco he has moved into the tallest office tower on the West Coast, the annual Dream Force customer conference paralyzed part of downtown San Francisco at least before the pandemic due to its size and attracted well over 100,000 guests. And his company should also grow on such a scale. First of all, his companions have to keep up.
Apparently, that was nothing for Taylor, who was considered calm and level-headed, but also brilliant. And Keith Block hadn’t quite managed to keep up either. The former head of day-to-day operations at Salesforce joined the company in 2013 with a reputation as a gifted salesperson. In 2018, Benioff promoted him to co-boss, but it was already over in February 2020. Both then praised each other beyond measure, but the numbers were not good. Salesforce’s revenue grew, but profit fell 90 percent.
The pressure on Salesforce is growing
A similar picture emerges today. The economic outlook is not rosy for the company. For the first time in its history, Salesforce failed to report year-over-year growth of 20 percent or more. Instead, the company got stuck at 14 percent. And the management team did not even want to comment on the further prospects, although they had always done so in the third quarter. CFO Amy Weaver said it was “too early” for a forecast given the uncertain economic developments and fluctuating exchange rates.
How to proceed now? Will Benioff go back to running the company on his own like he has for a long time? Does he get a co-boss from outside – or does he promote one of his managers? There is potential, for example Stewart Butterfield, head of the communication tool Slack. Salesforce bought Slack for a lot of money. Adam Selipsky, head of the company for visualization software Tableau, another acquisition by Benioff, is hardly an option – he left Salesforce in 2021 and is now head of Amazon Web Services, the online retailer’s very successful cloud division.
One thing is clear: the pressure on Salesforce, which has so far been spoiled by success, is growing. Investors are increasingly asking themselves whether the expensive acquisitions will actually pay off. After the announcement that Taylor would leave the company, the share price fell by seven percent. This year, the price of the Salesforce papers has already fallen by around 37 percent.