Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company—and Revolutionized an Industry

4.9. Play #45: Leverage Times of Change

Because of our mandate to target small business, and in what was probably a reflection of the times, a large proportion of our customers in the early days were Internet start-ups. They shared our appreciation of the Internet, they were early adopters of technology, and they were growing at a wild pace. It seemed that our dot-com customers were calling every day to add new subscriptions. Online search site LookSmart went from five subscriptions to fifty in one month. Our business was booming, and it was largely fueled by the dot-com fury.

Then, suddenly, everything started to unravel. Many dot-coms, once flush with venture capital money, began to run out of cash. As many of these companies struggled to ...