Larry Ellison doesn't much care if you know he sleeps with employees, fabricates advertisements, or taunts people with his wealth. But what the Oracle CEO doesn't want you to hear is a presentation from a guy he invests in and who worked for him for 13 years. Especially if Ellison has the power to cancel that guy's speaking gig, humiliating him in the process.
Salesforce.com spent $31.5 million on August 4 to acquire San Francisco-based call center software company InStranet. It's Salesforce.com's largest acquisition ever. Careful with the champagne, though.InStranet went through its third round of funding way back in 2001, when it raised $14.7 million at a $50 million valuation in a round joined by Benchmark Capital. So it's not a huge exit. Then again, at least it's an exit. Salesforce.com will also report its second quarter earnings today. Analysts expect $260.56 million in revenues for a 47.6 percent year over year growth.
Here's to the screaming ones. The chair-throwers. The death-threat makers. The imperious gazers. The ones who see things differently — and will stare you down until you do, too. They're not fond of rules, especially those outlined by the human-resources department on "treating your employees with respect." And they have no respect for conversational decibel levels. You can cower before them, hide from them, quote them behind their backs, or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they're so damn loud. They've worked at Google. Apple. Microsoft. AOL. They've ruled the industry — or they've failed, loudly. Below, we present you tech's 10 most tempestuous bosses — the ones who scream different. While some see them as sociopaths, Valleywag sees genius.
Marc Benioff: Flowers ... and handcuffs Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff is a charmer, which is also a nice way of saying he's a smarmy manipulator. Blowing off call after call with a Time contributor, he might send flowers and leave a long voicemail explaining himself. But when the Wall Street Journal wanted to write a story about Benioff's Hawaiian vacation home, the Salesforce.com CEO went off the handle, writing the wife of Dow Jones's CEO a letter, flying to New York to berate a Journal editor, and then, finally ordering ordering construction workers and local police to detain a Journal reporter checking out the property. So a warning to Salesforce.com employees: better hope the boss's smile keeps working. Next: VMware cofounder Diane Greene: Her only mistake was working for another tyrant (Photo by AP/Margot)
When I met him at a book-signing party earlier this week, BrightIdea.com CEO Matt Greeley was all smiles. Now I know why: He'd just hit "Send" on a scathing missive denouncing Salesforce.com for trampling on his company's turf. (The territory in question, thoroughly obscure, involves something called "innovation management," or, as Greeley puts it, tracking ideas like FedEx packages.) Greeley's rant is worth studying for its overwrought language. He calls the enemy "Salesfarce," says it has "gotten fat and happy," and is a "rotted shell of a business" which will fall apart with a "nudge." The full email, sent by a BrightIdea employee who writes that he'd "like to pee in [Salesforce.com's] coffee pot, and I'm not speaking metaphorically":
"@#$% Salesforce.com — it's easy!" reads a new ad from Serena Software. What does that mean, exactly? Serena isn't exactly a competitor to Salesforce.com; it makes enterprise software tools that help companies manage their enterprise software. Boring upon boring — until you realize who signed off on the ad. That would be René Bonvanie, left. He's now Serena's head of marketing, formerly a top executive at Salesforce.com. Is Bonvanie funding a dig at ex-boss Marc Benioff through his advertising budget? Bad marketing, excellent theater.
When a partnership like Google and Salesforce.com's gets announced so publicly, it's a safe bet that the message is meant for investors and rivals, not customers. Look at the substance of their new partnership: Salesforce.com for Google Apps amounts to adding a tab to link the two Web-based services. Salesforce.com helps companies organize their customer leads and sales; Google Apps offers simplified and hence limited Web versions of familiar office-productivity apps like Microsoft Word and Excel. Add 2 + 2, and you get 4, not 5, as Google and Salesforce would have you believe.
Having turned down Microsoft's $50 million offer, live video site Ustream.tv today announced $11.1 million in venture capital. Yesterday, mobile video startup Qik announced it raised another $3 million from Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff, VC Arjun Gupta and entrepreneur George Garrick. If a recession is going to take your jobs, close the doors to rich payoffs, and kill your deals, the least it could do is knock live Robert Scoble andLoren Feldman broadcasts off the Internet.
When a magazine profile opens by informing me I've never heard of some guy, I usually assume it's for good reason, and stop reading there. Not so with Forbes writeup of Zoho's Sridhar Vembu, however. Vembu's company makes Zoho, a suite of online software. I had dismissed Zoho as yet another Web-based Microsoft Office clone. No one's going to pay for online word processing, when Word is cheap to begin with, and Google Docs is free. But Vembu has figured this much out.
Salesforce.com representatives have quietly approached Oracle to see if it would buy the company for $75 a share, Tom Foremski reports. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison already owns a piece of Salesforce, but he's also an early investor in NetSuite, a rival service for online customer-relationship management. The offer, if true, would be a 47 percent premium over Salesforce.com's share price before this morning market opening.
Hey, nothing against the eleven corporate leaders profiled in Business 2.0 Magazine's latest feature, "The Disruptors." (Except you, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. Nobody likes you.) It's just that "glory stories" like this make us giggle, because by definition they have to play down the arguments against their subjects. And B2 added Wired-worthy hero shots like the one shown here. So here's a guide to the most egregious idolatry:
