Smash Notes

Back to Inside Salesforce’s $100 Billion M&A Playbook | John Somorjai, with John Somorjai & Alex Immerman.

Why Is Salesforce Ventures Investing in Robotics?

John Somorjai says Salesforce Ventures is investing in robotics because dexterity and mobility are improving, and he expects a huge future for that industry. Robotics is the part of the portfolio he is most excited about. The bets include Figure AI and humanoids, Physical Intelligence, Dyna Robotics, and Skilled, plus Zipline, which does drone delivery. In Japan, Salesforce invested in Mugen, a robotics company he describes as really big in logistics. He says these companies are not only about software, and that they are going to be important to the industry.

The path into that book is the billion-dollar AI fund Salesforce created at the beginning of 2023. Beyond Anthropic, it included Mistral and Cohere, voice through 11 Labs, and video through Runway. Physical AI is the next area he describes, which is why the robotics companies are in the portfolio.

Transcript

Inside Salesforce’s $100 Billion M&A Playbook | John Somorjai ·

a16z

More from this episode

  1. How Does Salesforce Decide Which Companies to Buy?John Somorjai says Salesforce follows an internal framework and stays pretty disciplined about following it. The framework looks at three elements.
  2. Why Is Salesforce Moving From Seats to Outcome-based Pricing?John Somorjai says the technology industry is moving toward outcome-based pricing, where a customer pays for resolutions instead of paying for a seat.
  3. How Do Acquisitions Put a Startup in Front of Salesforce's Sales Force?Alex Immerman says an acquisition can put a startup in front of Salesforce's 15,000 sales reps, and that in the case of Listen Labs a handful of those reps…
  4. What Makes a Startup Worth Acquiring at Salesforce?John Somorjai says a startup is worth acquiring when Salesforce's product teams cannot build the next three years of the roadmap with the people they have…
  5. Why Does John Somorjai Say Many Venture Valuations Will Not Last?John Somorjai says many venture valuations will not last because they are way too high, the set of buyers is small, and the companies will not be able to grow…
  6. What Can Kill a Salesforce Deal?John Somorjai says security is the one function that can hold up the red flag and kill a deal.
  7. What Happened When a Salesforce Security Test Reached the CEO's Laptop?John Somorjai says one Salesforce penetration test reached all of a company's source code, got into the CEO's laptop, and pulled information about employees…

People

More answers like this

Related episodes

Plays from this note through the rest of the episode.

Note

Weekly highlights

One letter a week.

The notes worth hearing, with the minute they were said.