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Parker Harris, a co-founder of Salesforce, speaks during a keynote at the company’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on Sept. 12, 2023.

Marlena Sloss | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Each year, Salesforce updates its V2MOM, a planning document laying out vision, values, methods, obstacles and measures. CEO Marc Benioff has said it’s “been used to guide every decision at Salesforce” since the software company’s founding 25 years ago this week.

But in early 2023, there was a problem. ChatGPT was going viral, and Salesforce’s strategy didn’t account for it.

“The V2MOM had nothing about generative AI,” Parker Harris, who co-founded the company with Benioff, told CNBC in an interview.

It was a first for Salesforce, which had never been caught so off-guard about an emerging technology trend. If Salesforce was to become a leader in generative artificial intelligence, the company would need to quickly revise its guiding document to redirect the company — and its 73,000 employees — toward the technology that’s sweeping across Silicon Valley and making its way into every industry, from manufacturing to medicine.

Salesforce would have to go to battle with tech giants Amazon, Google and Microsoft, as well as red-hot and well-capitalized startups. But following a handful of hefty acquisitions and a run-in with activist investors that led Salesforce to disband its M&A committee, a splashy deal was likely off the table.

Salesforce would have to build. And that’s when Benioff turns to his longtime sidekick, Harris.

Well known in the software industry but largely unfamiliar outside of it, Harris has always been core to the fabric of Salesforce. In the past six years, Benioff has elevated two different top lieutenants to the role of co-CEO, but neither lasted in the job longer than 18 months. Harris, a Salesforce board member and now the technology chief of Slack, which Salesforce bought in 2021, said he’d rather avoid the limelight.

“I don’t like being front and center,” Harris said, in an interview tied to the company’s 25th anniversary, which was officially March 8. “I don’t like the articles necessarily to be written about me. I like being behind the scenes.”

Internally, Harris is in the thick of it. After generative AI made its way into the revised V2MOM last year, Harris supervised its brisk insertion into the company’s sales, customer service, marketing and commerce applications. He studied new techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation, which involves feeding information outside of an AI model’s training set to yield a better answer.

Questions swirled about whether Salesforce should spend billions of dollars to assemble its own general-purpose large language model for spitting out text in response to a few words of human input, Harris said. But the company started seeing clients use multiple LLMs.

Salesforce slashed its investment in some areas while doubling the size of its research group, which was fleshing out its own AI models. At the same time, it started drawing on models from AI startup Anthropic, as well as GPT-4, the model powering OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In September, Benioff brought OpenAI CEO Sam Altman onstage at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference, which takes over a chunk of downtown San Francisco.

At past Dreamforce shows, Harris has appeared in superhero costumes, entertaining the audience of tens of thousands. But 2023 was not a time for jokes. Harris was busy repositioning the company. He chose a professional look: a checked blue suit that matched his glasses with thin blue frames.

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, right, and Parker Harris, co-founder of Salesforce, introduce Salesforce 1 Lightning during the company’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on Oct. 14, 2014.

Noah Berger | Bloomberg | Getty Images

In his keynote, Harris talked about the Data Cloud, a product originally called Genie that surfaces real-time information. In about 2016 he had decided to push much of Salesforce’s IT infrastructure into the public cloud, enabling tighter integration of many assets the company had acquired over the years. That helped Salesforce launch the Data Cloud.

Without the Data Cloud, Harris told CNBC, “I think we would have been in a much worse place.” It’s such a critical part of the company that Benioff mentioned it 58 times on the company’s earnings call in February.

A Robin for Batman

Despite his status as the most decorated technical leader at one of the world’s largest software companies, Harris was an English major. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Middlebury College in Vermont.

His love of computers came early, though. He told Business Insider in 2015 that he started programming on an Apple II as a kid growing up in North Carolina.

In the early 1990s, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and took a software-engineering job at a company called Metropolis Software, where he got to know developers Frank Dominguez and Dave Moellenhoff. The trio founded a Java consulting firm called Left Coast Software.

They were contracting at Saba Software, an online learning company co-founded by former Oracle executive Bobby Yazdani. Benioff, who was still working at Oracle under Larry Ellison at the time, told Yazdani that he had this idea to build web-based sales software. Yazdani told Benioff he needed to meet Harris, Dominguez and Moellenhoff.

“He was a very abstract thinker,” Yazdani said about Harris, in an interview with CNBC. “He had clarity around capability of what’s possible.”

In the fall of 1998, Benioff and Harris met for lunch at Kincaid’s, a seafood and steak restaurant in Burlingame overlooking the San Francisco Bay. It was an uneven match. Benioff is hard to miss at 6 feet, 5 inches tall. He’s loud and loves to talk.

Harris is scrawny and quieter. He said he’s averse to conflict. He defuses the drama, said Brett Queener, a former Salesforce executive who’s now a venture capitalist.

“Every Batman needs their Robin,” Queener said.

After the lunch meeting, Benioff had Harris, Dominguez and Moellenhoff over to his home in San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill neighborhood. They were all in.

Salesforce.com was born on March 8, 1999. Harris was 32. His parents, wife and young daughter came by corporate headquarters — a one-bedroom apartment next to Benioff’s home — to commemorate the moment, which Harris posted to YouTube eight years later.

“We are going to probably work here for six months to a year, and we’re going to just really enjoy it,” he told his father, who was behind the camera. Salesforce played the clip for employees this week during a celebration.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: Co-pilot uses our customers data to make decisions

While Harris shared the title of co-founder with Benioff, his partner held much more of the equity. That’s why Benioff is now worth around $11 billion, with a current stake in Salesforce that exceeds $7 billion, while Harris’ holdings are worth nearly $600 million.

Though he’s relatively soft spoken, Harris has his indulgences. He’s spent money on red wine from France and Italy, works of art by Ruth Asawa and Josef Albers, a home in Nantucket and a renovation of the family home in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights.

“We really shifted it to a focus on sunlight,” Harris said.

In his office at the top of the house, he likes to put on headphones and crank up the music. He listens to the Avett Brothers, Radiohead and Miles Davis. He plays golf and surfs. A coworker said Harris is an “enthusiastic” dancer. He belongs to Middlebury’s board of trustees.

At Salesforce, Harris led the development of the platform that enables companies to build on top of its software, along with an initiative to make Salesforce work well on mobile devices. There was also the push to build the next-generation Salesforce Lightning, as well as Chatter, an enterprise social network.

He talked about AI way back at Dreamforce 2009, suggesting that the technology might one day help Chatter identify in-house experts on different topics. He admitted to his shortcomings.

“I don’t understand that area,” Harris told a group of journalists, regarding AI. “I understand we have to solve it. I have hired some people in that area that do understand it.”

Tough time in social

At the time, social was the big buzzword. Facebook was still private but taking off.

A startup called Yammer was being described as the Facebook for the workplace. A few Salesforce employees started discussing the potential for information to go viral among salespeople and customer-service agents. Benioff was intrigued. He insisted that it become the top priority.

After Harris allocated eight engineers to the new project, Benioff demanded he go bigger. Harris checked in with engineering leaders and secured a headcount of 75.

That wasn’t enough. At a briefing on the updated status, Benioff was dissatisfied, according to a meeting attendee who asked not to be named to speak candidly about the matter. Harris was silent. His face went pale. He told Benioff he’d redo the plan, the person said.

Marc Benioff, co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, sits in the audience ahead of the special address by U.S. President Donald Trump on the opening day of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 21, 2020.

Jason Alden | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Harris eventually got 80% of Salesforce’s engineers to start working on Chatter. But the product never took off.

“We didn’t take it far enough,” Harris said. Microsoft was also hot to get into the market, snapping up Yammer in 2012 for $1.2 billion, a huge multiple for a company with a small revenue base.

Salesforce wound up buying the big prize in the space, purchasing Slack in 2021 for $27.1 billion, by far the company’s priciest deal.

But perhaps Harris’ biggest swing in his decades at Salesforce was the push to the public cloud. It wasn’t an easy choice.

“Half the engineers, the brightest people, were like, ‘We’re going to run the company if we do this,'” Harris recalled. “The great fear was that we would ruin our cost model because the cost would be much more expensive on public cloud, and then we would be able to hire less salespeople or less engineers or whatever.”

The other half of the engineering staff, Harris said, was petrified that if Salesforce didn’t move to the cloud, everyone else will “innovate faster than us.'”

Benioff didn’t have much to contribute for a change.

“Marc was like, ‘This is crazy, that these are some of the smartest people I know, and you guys can’t agree,'” Harris said.

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, left, speaks as Parker Harris, co-founder of Salesforce, center, and Kara Swisher, executive editor of Re/Code, listen during a keynote address at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on Sept. 17, 2015. Salesforce.com Inc. aims to cut the time its customers spend plugging data into its systems by weaving machine-learning technology from acquisition RelateIQ into its software for managing sales accounts.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Harris saw the advantage that startups gained by outsourcing data center needs to Amazon Web Services. And he knew Salesforce had failed to build a viable platform for easily developing apps while partnering with VMware. Harris concluded that not pushing Salesforce to public cloud services like AWS would be an existential threat.

“That was a very lonely decision,” he said. But as it became a part of the V2MOM, it rippled out to thousands.

While Salesforce might have saved money when it ditched its Equinix colocation facilities, leaning more on the cloud hasn’t been cheap. Last year, after activist investors called for more profitability from Salesforce, the company signed up for longer-term cloud commitments. It agreed to spend at least $16.8 billion on infrastructure service providers as of January, up from $6.5 billion in January 2023, according to regulatory filings.

The biggest beneficiary of that spending is AWS, which is run by former Salesforce executive Adam Selipsky. Harris said Salesforce is looking at other providers as additional partners.

“Oracle has done a great job around their platform, so technically, it’s actually quite good,” he said.

‘Try to build something great’

Harris recently gave up the CTO title at Salesforce that he’d held for seven years. The company hasn’t yet named a successor.

Now he’s onto Slack.

In 2022, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield left the company he founded in 2009. He was replaced by Lidiane Jones. She departed a year later to run dating app developer Bumble. And in January of this year, Slack co-founder and CTO Cal Henderson said he was stepping down.

“I thought, ‘I can have an impact there,'” Harris said. ‘But I can also — I would love to do that job, I would love to go back and run some engineering teams and really try to build something great.'”

Harris visited Benioff’s home in the Sea Cliff neighborhood of San Francisco, and the two co-founders were in agreement that it was the right call.

“I’m excited for this next chapter with Parker as Slack’s CTO, continuing his legacy as one of our industry’s greats,” Benioff said in an email.

Harris flew to New York to hang out with Noah Weiss, Slack’s product chief. Harris moved his desk to the Slack floor in San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower, where he’s near new unit CEO Denise Dresser. He comes in two to four days a week, and attends Monday meetings to review Slack metrics.

“People, probably fairly, had a lot of apprehension,” Weiss said.

Some of Slack’s employees suspected Harris would try to apply the Salesforce approach to Slack. But instead, Harris sought to understand how Slack had become successful.

Weiss said that at Salesforce’s new fiscal year kickoff in Las Vegas last month, Harris talked at an executive meeting about one of Slack’s product principles called prototype the path. And Harris has started writing documents in Slack’s collaborative Canvas tool.

“He’s been showing up extremely well, definitely winning hearts and minds, for sure, including mine,” Weiss said.

Employees sometimes add flair to Slack chats with a Parker Harris emoji, he said.

When it comes to keeping up with Benioff, who spends a healthy amount of time at his palatial estate in Hawaii, Harris uses other services.

“Marc is all mobile and all text and FaceTime,” Harris said.

The men talk once every few weeks. They’ll be talking more frequently, as Harris said they’re about to kick off weekly meetings on Slack and Salesforce integrations.

Harris hopes that his presence can convince Slack employees to stay after the executive exodus.

“I don’t want to talk too much about myself, but I think it is helping,” Harris said.

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Microsoft layoffs hit 830 workers in home state of Washington

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Microsoft layoffs hit 830 workers in home state of Washington

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at the Axel Springer building in Berlin on Oct. 17, 2023. He received the annual Axel Springer Award.

Ben Kriemann | Getty Images

Among the thousands of Microsoft employees who lost their jobs in the cutbacks announced this week were 830 staffers in the company’s home state of Washington.

Nearly a dozen game design workers in the state were part of the layoffs, along with three audio designers, two mechanical engineers, one optical engineer and one lab technician, according to a document Microsoft submitted to Washington employment officials.

There were also five individual contributors and one manager at the Microsoft Research division in the cuts, as well as 10 lawyers and six hardware engineers, the document shows.

Microsoft announced plans on Wednesday to eliminate 9,000 jobs, as part of an effort to eliminate redundancy and to encourage employees to focus on more meaningful work by adopting new technologies, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC. The person asked not to be named while discussing private matters.

Scores of Microsoft salespeople and video game developers have since come forward on social media to announce their departure. In April, Microsoft said revenue from Xbox content and services grew 8%, trailing overall growth of 13%.

In sales, the company parted ways with 16 customer success account management staff members based in Washington, 28 in sales strategy enablement and another five in sales compensation. One Washington-based government affairs worker was also laid off.

Microsoft eliminated 17 jobs in cloud solution architecture in the state, according to the document. The company’s fastest revenue growth comes from Azure and other cloud services that customers buy based on usage.

CEO Satya Nadella has not publicly commented on the layoffs, and Microsoft didn’t immediately provide a comment about the cuts in Washington. On a conference call with analysts in April, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said the company had a “focus on cost efficiencies” during the March quarter.

WATCH: Microsoft layoffs not performance-based, largely targeting middle managers

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CoreWeave is the first cloud provider to deploy Nvidia’s latest AI chips

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CoreWeave is the first cloud provider to deploy Nvidia's latest AI chips

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in Taipei, Taiwan, on June 2, 2024.

Ann Wang | Reuters

Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra chips, the company’s next-generation graphics processor for artificial intelligence, have been commercially deployed at CoreWeave, the companies announced on Thursday.

CoreWeave has received shipments of Dell-built shipments based around Nvidia’s GB300 NVL72 AI systems, Dell said on Thursday. It’s the first cloud provider to install systems based around Blackwell Ultra.

The Blackwell Ultra is Nvidia’s latest chip, expected to ship in volume during the rest of the year. The systems that CoreWeave is installing are liquid-cooled and include 72 Blackwell Ultra GPUs and 36 Nvidia Grace CPUs. The systems are assembled and tested in the U.S., Dell said.

CoreWeave shares rose 6% during trading on Thursday, Dell shares were up about 2% and Nvidia rose less than 2%.

The announcement is a milestone for Nvidia.

Read more CNBC tech news

AI developers still clamor for the latest Nvidia chips, which have improvements that make them better for training and deploying models.

Nvidia said Blackwell Ultra can produce 50 times more AI content than its predecessor, Blackwell.

Investors closely watch how Nvidia manages the transition when it announces new AI chips to see if there are production issues or delays. Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said in May that Blackwell Ultra shipments would start in the current quarter.

It’s also a win for CoreWeave, a cloud provider that rents access to Nvidia GPUs to other clouds and AI developers. Although CoreWeave is smaller than the cloud services operated by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, its ability to offer Nvidia’s latest chips first give it a way to differentiate itself.

CoreWeave historically has a close relationship with Nvidia, which owns a stake in the cloud provider. CoreWeave went public earlier this year, and the stock price has quadrupled since its IPO.

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IPO market gets boost from Circle’s 500% surge, sparking optimism that drought may be ending

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IPO market gets boost from Circle's 500% surge, sparking optimism that drought may be ending

Jeremy Allaire, CEO and co-founder of Circle Internet Group, the issuer of one of the world’s biggest stablecoins, and Circle Internet Group co-founder Sean Neville react as they ring the opening bell, on the day of the company’s IPO, in New York City, U.S., June 5, 2025.

NYSE

For over three years, venture capital firms have been waiting for this moment.

Tech IPOs came to a virtual standstill in early 2022 due to soaring inflation and rising interest rates, while big acquisitions were mostly off the table as increased regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe turned away potential buyers.

Though it’s too soon to say those days are entirely in the past, the first half of 2025 showed signs of momentum, with June in particular producing much-needed returns for Silicon Valley’s startup financiers. In all, there were five tech IPOs last month, accelerating from a monthly average of two since January, according to data from CB Insights.

Highlighting that group was crypto company Circle, which more than doubled in its New York Stock Exchange debut on June 5, and is now up sixfold from its IPO price for a market cap of $42 billion. The stock got a big boost in mid-June after the Senate passed the GENIUS Act, which would establish a federal framework for U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins.

Venture firms General Catalyst, Breyer Capital and Accel now own a combined $8 billion worth of Circle stock even after selling a fraction of their holdings in the offering. Silicon Valley stalwarts Greylock, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital are set to soon profit from Figma’s IPO, after the design software vendor filed its public prospectus on Tuesday. Since its $20 billion acquisition agreement with Adobe was scrapped in late 2023, Figma has been one of the most hotly anticipated IPOs in startup land.

It’s “refreshing and something that we’ve been waiting for for a long time,” said Eric Hippeau, managing partner at early-stage venture firm Lerer Hippeau, regarding the exit environment. “I’m not sure that we are confident that this can be a sustained trend yet, but it’s been very encouraging.”

Another positive sign for the industry the past couple months was the performance of artificial infrastructure provider CoreWeave, which went public in late March. The stock was relatively stagnant for its first month on the market but shot up 170% in May and another 47% in June.

The IPO market is coming back, but it won't be linear, says Lazard CEO Peter Orszag

For venture firms, long considered the lifeblood of risky tech startups, IPOs are essential in order to generate profits for the university endowments, foundations and pension funds that allocate a portion of their capital to the asset class. Without handsome returns, there’s little incentive for limited partners to put money into future funds.

After a record year in 2021, which saw 155 U.S. venture-backed IPOs raise $60.4 billion, according to data from University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter, every year since has been relatively dismal. There were 13 such offerings in 2022, followed by 18 in 2023 and 30 last year, collectively raising $13.3 billion, Ritter’s data shows.

The slowdown followed the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate-hiking campaign in 2022, meant to slow crippling inflation. As the lower-growth environment extended into years two and three, venture firms faced increasing pressure to return cash to investors.

‘Backlog of liquidity’

In its 2024 yearbook, the National Venture Capital Association said that even with a 34% increase in U.S. VC exit value last year to $98 billion, that number is 87% below the 2021 peak and less than half the average for the four years from 2017 through 2020. It’s a troubling dynamic for the 58,000 venture-backed companies that have raised a total of $947 billion from investors, according to the annual report, which is produced by the NVCA and PitchBook.

“This backlog of liquidity drought risks creating a ‘zombie company’ cohort — businesses generating operational cash flow but lacking credible exit prospects,” the report said.

Other than Circle, the latest crop of IPOs mostly consists of smaller and lesser-known brands. Health-tech companies Hinge Health and Omada Health are valued at about $3.5 billion and $1 billion, respectively. Etoro, an online trading platform, has a market cap of just over $5 billion. Online banking provider Chime Financial has a higher profile due largely to a years-long marketing blitz and is valued at close to $11.5 billion.

Meanwhile, the highest valued private companies like SpaceX, Stripe and Databricks remain on the sidelines, and AI highfliers OpenAI and Anthropic continue to raise massive amounts of cash with no intention of going public anytime soon.

Still, venture capitalists told CNBC that there are plenty of companies with the financial metrics to be public, and that more of them are readying for the process.

“The IPO market is starting to open and the VC world is cautiously optimistic,” said Rick Heitzmann, a partner at venture firm FirstMark in New York. “We are preparing companies for the next wave of public offerings.”

There are other ways to make money in the meantime. Secondary sales, a process that involves selling private shares to new investors, are on the rise, allowing early employees and investors to get some liquidity.

And then there’s what Mark Zuckerberg is doing, as he tries to position his company at the center of AI innovation and development.

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Last month, Meta announced a $14 billion bet on Scale AI, taking a 49% stake in the AI startup in exchange for poaching founder Alexandr Wang and a small group of his top engineers. The deal effectively bought out half of the stock owned by investors, leaving them with the opportunity to make money on the rest of their holdings, should a future acquisition or IPO take place.

The deal is a big win for Accel, which led Scale AI’s Series A round in 2017, and is poised to earn more than $2.5 billion in the transaction. Index Ventures led the Series B in 2018, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led the Series C the following year at a valuation of over $1 billion.

Investors now hope the Federal Reserve will move toward a rate-cutting campaign, though the central bank hasn’t committed to one. There’s also ongoing optimism that regulators will make going public less burdensome. Last week, Reuters reported, citing sources familiar with the matter, that U.S. stock exchanges and the SEC have discussed loosening regulations to make IPOs more enticing.

Mike Bellin, who heads consulting firm PwC’s U.S. IPO practice, said he anticipates a diversity of IPOs across sectors in the second half of the year. According to data from PwC, pharma and fintech were among the most active sectors for deals through the end of May.

While the recent trend in IPO activity is an encouraging sign for investors, potential roadblocks remain.

Tariffs and geopolitical uncertainty delayed IPO plans from companies including Klarna and StubHub in April. Neither has provided an update on when they plan to debut.

FirstMark’s Heitzmann said the path forward is “not at all clear,” adding that he wants to see a strong quarter of economic stability and growth before confidently saying that the market is wide open.

Additionally, other than CoreWeave and Circle, recent tech IPOs haven’t had big pops. Hinge Health, Chime and eToro have seen relatively modest gains from their offer price, while Omada Health is down.

But virtually any activity beats what VCs were experiencing the last few years. Overall, Hippeau said recent IPO trends are generally encouraging.

“There’s starting to be kind of light at the end of the tunnel,” Hippeau said.

WATCH: Uptick in VC-backed startup deals

Uptick in VC-backed startup deals

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