00:19:29 · Alex Immerman, John Somorjai
[00:19:29] S1: Yeah. [00:19:30] S0: Actually. And that that was incredibly effective. But we do... By the way, our diligence process is pretty rigorous and the customer element, the customer feedback that we do is one of the most important ways of really judging how good the product is, and, you know, are these customers likely to renew? [00:19:52] S1: We're happy Listen Labs customers ourselves, and use it as a diligence tool as well. Very cool. Maybe on on this piece of, like, accelerating capabilities, another acquisition that that you were talking about earlier was Fin. Mhmm. You guys have long had a role in customer support. Maybe talk about what capabilities Fin brought to you all, and maybe the story behind that acquisition.
00:20:23 · John Somorjai, Alex Immerman
[00:20:23] S0: Yeah. And I think I think it goes back to what we talked about earlier, Mark's focus on having a beginner's mind. And so we have built an incredible service cloud business. It's now almost $11,000,000,000 in AOV. And the business, actually the foundation of it was an acquisition that we made in 2008, a company called Instinct, which was Alex Dayon's company. Another person that went on to be our chief product Amazing. He's exceptional. He's you know, has one of the greatest entrepreneurs to come out of France. And I think that what was very clear to us is that the whole movement towards native AI applications and the way that they were priced based on outcomes and the very fast time to value, how quickly you could get it implemented and up and running and having happy customers using it. It just wasn't something that we could build quickly enough. And so we had a wonderful relationship with Eoghan who we'd known for years. We got to know his AI team in Ireland who were just outstanding. Absolutely outstanding. Some of the best AI talent actually in Dublin, Ireland. And we we realized like, this could just turbocharge what we're trying to do with Service Cloud. And and so we were able to to buy the company. And it's it's real... As I said earlier, it's it's proving to be quite a a very valuable acquisition for us. [00:22:01] S1: Yeah. I mean, that that one's an amazing story from a rebirth of the company perspective too with, you know, the transition from Intercom to Fin and, you know, him coming back as founder.
00:22:01 · Alex Immerman, John Somorjai
[00:22:01] S1: Yeah. I mean, that that one's an amazing story from a rebirth of the company perspective too with, you know, the transition from Intercom to Fin and, you know, him coming back as founder. [00:22:12] S0: And he's having a big impact at the company. Like, is... Eoghan is someone with a loud voice, and he makes his views known. Free spirit. And really trying to shake us up, and that's that is another benefit to bringing these people in. [00:22:27] S1: Amazing, amazing. Another product that, you know, I use every day, certainly you do, is Slack. I'd be curious if you were to rewind the clock, like, you had a rationale for acquiring Slack. Slack's role today in AI is pretty important and different than maybe what you could have expected then. I'm curious, like, how your thinking about Slack has evolved over the years. [00:22:55] S0: I think the core thesis for why we bought Slack holds true today, but it's even bigger than I think we all imagine because it is the perfect conversational interface for AI. And when we thought about it back in... So we bought the company in 2020, so it's now been [00:23:14] S1: There's a rumor out there that Mark only spent an hour with Stewart before the acquisition. I don't know if that's typical.
00:23:14 · Alex Immerman, John Somorjai
[00:23:14] S1: There's a rumor out there that Mark only spent an hour with Stewart before the acquisition. I don't know if that's typical. [00:23:22] S0: A lot more time than that. Definitely. Definitely. And and I think we... No. We looked at it very closely. We had been using Slack. It was clearly a beloved product in in among its users and and something that needed more distribution. Like it was just really... It was losing to teams. And they were really... They were stuck. I don't know if you remember back in 2020, but there was like one bad quarter, stock went down. And and that's really what triggered a lot of the discussions is that, you know, how can we bring these two companies together and turn Slack into what it really needed to be, which was the user interface for everyone and the collaborative tool where humans and and apps would work together. [00:24:10] S1: And now agents. [00:24:11] S0: And now agents. Yes. And we didn't know the agent part, that came later, but you can just see that it was the perfect interface for that. We also knew that it would be the the interface for all of our products. And so you can access all of Salesforce products now through Slack. And and that was always, one of the key strategic rationales that we had at the beginning. So since then, Slack revenue is now almost three times from what where it was when we bought the company. And it is our fastest growing product. So it's it is taking off like wildfire in this day and age because it's just perfect for agents.
00:24:11 · John Somorjai, Alex Immerman
[00:24:11] S0: And now agents. Yes. And we didn't know the agent part, that came later, but you can just see that it was the perfect interface for that. We also knew that it would be the the interface for all of our products. And so you can access all of Salesforce products now through Slack. And and that was always, one of the key strategic rationales that we had at the beginning. So since then, Slack revenue is now almost three times from what where it was when we bought the company. And it is our fastest growing product. So it's it is taking off like wildfire in this day and age because it's just perfect for agents. [00:24:54] S1: Yeah. Makes a ton of sense. I think I think of Slack in this current era as the unofficial org chart. Like, it knows who reports to who, how people talk to other people. It has all the context on how decisions are made. Yeah. And so, it's a really important corpus for AI. Yeah. But, it's an interface product, as you alluded to, and so, as other products are more headless, it can be the central, you know, repository central, like ground for decision making. [00:25:29] S0: Absolutely. And and because it has all the context from all of your work, if you use Slackbot ever, like you can just get the richest answers that you've ever seen from AI right there within your interface. And so it just couldn't be easier and we're thrilled that we were able to buy the company. And you know, it's been like five years and a quarter since we've owned it, and it's it's just, I think, transformed Salesforce.
00:25:29 · John Somorjai, Alex Immerman
[00:25:29] S0: Absolutely. And and because it has all the context from all of your work, if you use Slackbot ever, like you can just get the richest answers that you've ever seen from AI right there within your interface. And so it just couldn't be easier and we're thrilled that we were able to buy the company. And you know, it's been like five years and a quarter since we've owned it, and it's it's just, I think, transformed Salesforce. [00:25:57] S1: Amazing. And maybe just to, like, hit on that, right? Like, you said it's grown nearly three x, and you know, a bit over five years, that's really strong growth at scale. What about that, you know, story, that integration, what has gone so well with that one relative to, you know, other acquisitions? [00:26:16] S0: Yeah. And I I think you know, it was it wasn't clear that it was going to go so well from the beginning, especially when we were buying it during the pandemic. Right. And we basically negotiated the deal, did everything, all the diligence through Slack, you know, by the company without ever having a lot of face to face meetings. And then it took a little bit of time for the integration to really hit its stride, but once it did, it has taken off. And I think getting again, it's like great technology that was starved for distribution. And I think this is sort of the point I was making about Listen Labs as well. This is the benefit that an entrepreneur can get from a great acquisition partner. [00:27:05] S1: How many of those face to face meetings happened to happen in Hawaii?