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

4.10. Play #46: Your Seeds Are Sown, so Grow, Grow, Grow

Like all new companies, salesforce.com was focused on survival in its earliest years. We had to educate the masses about the SaaS model and demonstrate that it worked. Once we finally proved that, we needed to devise a strategy to take our company to the next level. We needed to improve cash flow—and we needed to grow, and grow fast.

In the very beginning, we cast a big net, fishing for any customer who bit. For the most part, we caught a lot of minnows, and then, as we became more established, we attracted some tuna. Many of our minnows got washed away in the dot-com crash, but the bigger fish, such as American Medical Response and Analog Devices, found our elastic service fitting for ...