Former VP Claims Salesforce Lied About Software Capabilities: 'It Was All a Lie'
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In this case, nobody was actually being sold a defective product. Salesforce is very careful to “safe harbour” their statements about future products and their actual customers know that.
While I was there after having sold my company to them, I launched several products and features for others. Every time we developed a concept, shopped it to early adopters and found design partners to test it.
Incidentally, salesforce customers often pay handsomely for some of that engagement. That is because they know that if Salesforce is serious about the product, this is their best chance to get the functionality as a customer.
Also, if you go in to a meeting with Parker Harris and you end up getting fired, I would place a bet any day of the week that YOU are the asshole. Parker is just a fantastic human being based on my experience.
Parker just felt like a smart regular guy. He showed up at our small office (15 or so people) with his Starbucks cup, grabbed an open desk and got to work. I wasn't even sure it was him until I saw "Parker" as the name on the cup. We ended up chatting a bit and grabbing a conference room and doing both a product and technical deep dive. He grokked things quickly, asked good questions, and was super chill. I can't imagine him firing anyone.
Regardless, Salesforce is large enough that if they're not encountering your hypothetical rare scenario every now and then then it seems unlikely that many companies on planet earth meet your criteria for good hiring processes.
This is why I say that often times the worst people to hire are those that are "just below average mediocre". Reason being that, as you point out, it is not hard to fire people who are blatantly incompetent. And of course many/most people can be coached to improve, but I've seen cases where, despite lots of coaching, people chronically underperform.
I consider it a mark of bad management when these subpar performers are only let go during layoffs. Conversations should be open, ongoing and constant, and people should be given lots of coaching, time, and plenty of heads up, but it does nobody any good to essentially string people along when folks aren't cutting it.
In the previous 3 months there hadn’t been a peep about my productivity despite weekly 1:1s and my frequent solicitations for feedback of where I could improve.
In the exit interview, I strongly suggested they may want to look into some professional leadership training programs. The founders were both 26. I was 42.
Since their founding 8 months earlier they had hired 4 and fired 2. I told them that probably would be a bit of a red flag to their investors.
Unjustified firings, absolutely. I’ve seen plenty of horrible, vindictive managers fire talented folks simply because it wasn’t “one of their guys”. I can’t say I’ve ever seen a good manager let a good person go unless it was due to company mandated force reduction.
I personally don’t consider someone who makes the workplace toxic “good”.I am not a lawyer, but isn’t doing this (including landing pages which promise a product that doesn’t exist) technically “false advertising”, and a large company can be sued (and theoretically a small one too) for punitive damages rather than actual ones? Any lawyers in the house can chime in.
PS: I recently was reminded of this when a 24-hours gas station store was closed with a note on the door saying it’s closed at night, but with the giant 24 hour signs still on the building, and on Google it had said 24 hours. The store isn’t selling essential things. But what if it had been the actual gas station and the people ran out of gas?
One thing I’m curious about—some states have a law that stores must accept cash. It is pretty common for a gas station to require manual intervention to take cash. I wonder if this 24 hour gas, but the store isn’t always opened, gas station would fall afoul of that sort of law.
But the key is reasonable reliance, or actual deception. If a company says "coming soon!" for a new kind of bandage, and someone bleeds to death because they thought "soon" meant in the next 60 seconds, that's unreasonable, and nothing is actionable. Or if someone's actual damages were that they don't like when companies like Salesforce engage in test marketing before developing products, but they couldn't demonstrate that it hurt them other than annoying them, that isn't a cause of action because there's no deception.
For the 24-hour gas case, the store owner is clearly struggling, and can't afford to stay open during slow hours. They apparently can't afford to buy new signage, either, or are hoping business improves soon so they can go back to 24/7 operation. There might be a technical violation, but enforcing it would likely be the owner's last straw, meaning one fewer gas station in the community. What good would enforcement be?
“Look, never confuse the sales cycle with the install cycle…”
Several years later, I was enlightened.
It seems the advertising in question was creative in its language at least. I am sure it is legally all watertight though.
It makes one wonder why this VP complained about this? It is not uncommon in larger organisations to oversell certain product features.
I worked for Tableau before the acquisition and left a year or two after. It was pretty clear to insiders that there was never a good path to a smooth integration of Tableau into the SF platform. The teams have wasted years on that and are still struggling.
There is a massive amount of actual tech debt on the Tableau monolith side that just can't be overcome without huge investment. Tableau spent years trying to fix that and couldn't make a dent, SF brought an even more short-sighted planning process in and only made it worse.
Granted that Tableau could never fully commit to the efforts and the highest level of executives were only interested in making Tableau an attractive acquisition target. Exception being Francois, who still seems to care about Tableau the product.
Salesforce success is reliant on lack of serious competition. Beyond that it is decades behind modern software engineering practices.
Do you seriously need a third party tool to back up the data in a SaaS application? Astonishing!
My guess is he was trying to call out another team for doing this, to bring headcount/priorities back to himself.
I have on more than one occasion quipped that 'Salesforce' actually refers to their own marketing team rather than the software.
> It seems the advertising in question was creative in its language at least. I am sure it is legally all watertight though.
> It makes one wonder why this VP complained about this? It is not uncommon in larger organisations to oversell certain product features.
I'll bite; if any of this 'data' not being processed immediately is related to E-mail or SMS message consent (the article mentions Marketing Cloud, which can do texting,) there is a risk of messages getting sent out when a user has opted out. IF (big if) that is the case, there is a risk of hurting end-customer goodwill, or in the case of SMS messages, end-customer filing a lawsuit against Salesforce's customer.
I don't see any of that in the linked blog post by salesforce describing genie. Can you provide quotes of where they do that?
What I see is a blog post describing current capabilities of their product. They even make a point of sayong how all their customers benefit from "Genie".
The crucial difference is being honest to your customers that this is your process, versus trying to hide it so that only your most savvy long-term customers know it's a mirage.
Yeah, I don't think opting-out is the morally superior option if you know that the competition is lying through their teeth too.
At a point, the only way to improve the world is to make things better than they otherwise would have been. Complaining feels good but at the end of the day doesn't deliver more value to customers, hospital patients, or anyone in-between.
If you compromise every ethical principle (because everyone else does), I vontend you are in no better ethical standing than anyone else. Some has to maintain the height of the bar as the "unreasonable person in the room".
Remember, the only thing keeping us from an ideal world is all those filthy pragmatists out there.
For all intents and purposes what they tried to do was retaliation, but I think they were legally absolutely in the clear to (try to) terminate my employment. The same seems to be true of the Salesforce guy. The company had the right to fire him, and, outside of any at-employment NDAs he has the right to tell everyone what he saw. That he is suing them makes you wonder if he's doing it for the money rather than the principle.
Given Karl’s background as a co-founder of Evergage, a CDP company acquired by Salesforce, it’s implausible he wasn’t familiar with lean development.
I suspect there were other reasons for his firing, with Parker perhaps being the messenger.
My experience is that people who do Show HN’s like this are universally hated.
> Salesforce uses the same lean product development concepts that we espouse here.
Right, so they deliberately lie, mislead, conceal and exaggerate claims about their offerings and that’s okay because it’s in the YC guidelines?
Whatever helps you sleep at night I guess.
I've encountered people making surprised Pikachu faces when called on problems with their systems while they roll out a new version that fixes it and claim incidents never occurred. Appearances are everything in tech today.
My favourite example is how ARM ended up in Nokia phones. They had a 32 bit RISC CPU core which met the performance requirements but Nokia turned them down due to the memory density of the instructions meaning it required more expensive storage than their existing solutions. On the way back from the meeting they came up with the idea of Thumb, worked out how to do it, did it, and Nokia bought it. It then took over the industry.
That conversation in SV today would involve Nokia going "We love what you folks are doing" but just keeping the existing system without ever saying why, and nothing would improve.
The one that mystified me was why anyone thought MIPS was viable in this space, other than the fact that it existed. Ultimately MIPS utterly failed to take advantage of their very big wins.
This sounds very much to me like a story of a power-tripping ex-CEO whose technical knowledge is not as strong as he'd like to think.
It doesn’t make it “right”, but (nearly?) everyone who is involved in these conversations on both the buyer and seller sides of it knows that at best it’s aspirational capabilities that are being pitched and purchased. Usually it’s pretty far from that.
I've lost count of the times I've had sales people outright lie to me about how audience data or targeting signals work, particularly about the nuances of privacy aspects which I care a great deal about and have done a lot of work with.
These days if I'm serious about something I ensure there's a competent engineer (even a sales engineer) and product person on the call and largely ignore the sales person. I'm even really upfront about it by saying something like "I'm the decision maker, I have very specific technical and product questions and I want to avoid wasting time for either party by moving quickly or getting to a quick 'no', please confirm you can have XYZ people on our first call."
Usually it's been great that way. If they try to jerk me around with those people being unavailable at the last minute, I tell them I'm rescheduling until they can get their calendars in order.
This all comes with a responsibility though to make sure I'm not wasting their people's time. So I make sure I've done my homework and have likely sent an agenda/list of questions in advance to discuss. Depending on the relative sizes of my and their company, this can also be an express path to getting executive leadership who can cut through the noise of the process and get some good terms for me.
In the end most people just want to get paid and go home to their family. If they think you're making work things harder for them, they will get rid of you if they can.
The lawsuit also claimed that the CDP team "wanted to redefine the meaning of 'real-time,' so that it could falsely claim that the CDP operated in real-time."
He works at Salesforce, what did he expect exactly.
We had a customer go with a competitor who is partnered with Salesforce and the only thought I could summon was "I can't wait to read the postmortem".
Even if you can make it work, the user experience is a big factor and will ultimately become a system requirement at some level. Latency is hell and requires mastery to overcome in any system of meaningful complexity. Focused, targeted engineering vs broad-spectrum tool spam is the difference between 10 and 1000 milliseconds.
When marketroids come up to you talking about real-time this or real-time that, it's best to not quibble about definitions. They live in their bubble and consider it rude to disturb them with technical realities.
Only in Silicon Valley fraudulent wild claims and deceptive advertising is perfectly fine to get away with in order to inflate company valuations and to over-hype and grift to the general public.
AI is going to certainly be the next 'fake-it-until-you-make-it' grift for so-called repackaged LLM startups seeking funding from gullible VCs.
I’ve always enjoyed the fact that SEPA Instant, the small-volume low-latency version of the eurozone bank transfer system, defines ‘instant’ as, in practice, 20 seconds.
The UK went with slightly more conservative naming for their one, Faster Payments (in fairness, it also has much looser tail latency requirements).
There was, however, one rather spectacular disaster where the client bought really underpowered hardware for their needs. The vendor promised a more powerful machine "real soon now", but the one they had just wasn't cutting the mustard. They ended buying something much more capable from a different vendor, and then the lawsuits started happening about who said what where. We got dragged into that, but were exonerated.
Like anyone else in software, we were cocky developers, and we could do pretty much anything they threw at us. And I'm certainly not going to suggest we never missed a deadline, we all know better than that. But we knew our software and knew whatever it couldn't do, we could make it do satisfactorily for the client. I was both developer and pre-sale tech that helped keep the sales guy in line.
We had one client back out because we gave them, like, a 3 week schedule for a feature. "We talked to our guy and he said that's impossible." "Impossible? Really?" From some fellow who legitimately had no idea what he was talking about. We ended up demonstrating that we could do the feature, in their office, in a couple of hours to rough out the fundamentals, and they were rather impressed.
Unfortunately, we got them as a client. Very toxic personalities, not fun to work with. But, we were hungry, them's the breaks. The others at the office enjoyed my manifestations of the assorted horrible tragedies I wished upon these people and their families when I returned from a visit. Really awful.
Salesforce: It's not fraud if we redefine 'real-time'. Also, you're fired.
I worked at a company recently who made claims about products having AI, and then I spoke with a data scientist who confirmed that the products do not have AI capabilities-- even basic statistical modeling or prediction.
I suspect an astonishing proportion of businesses lie to a certain degree, on the sales, marketing, and management side of things.
They didn't have what the industry calls AI, e.g. any machine based decisions being executed on the basis of data analysis and tuned machine learning models.
What they do have is a very fast, very smart and sophisticated decision tree and rule based engine, albeit one that gives excellent results.
When they actually tried hiring ML experts for "Real AI", the results from the Data Scientists were so much worse than the original engine, they ditched the Research team.
I always wondered, since the product actually gave excellent value to the customer, and the customer did actually get what he was promised from the system, is this still unethical because it ultimately was rule based as opposed to ML based decisions?
Off topic: in many industry’s, like CPG, puffery is a very common marketing practice. Eg “Best Cookies in America”
It seems puffery in tech is way less common.
Is there a reason why?
For one thing, there is often not a clear distinction between so called "real time" analytics processing and batch processing. For example, it doesn't seem unethical to me to develop a system that processes in smaller batches and call it "real time." Even if the batch processing took hours. For some customers, that might very well feel like real time.
Second, it is standard practice (especially with enterprise software companies) to fudge the use of certain terminology for the sake of marketing. Again, I think this is because the meaning of those terms is often subjective as I think it is in this case.
Just doesn't feel like there's a real scandal here.
I'm not a huge fan of SFDC, but this is enterprise software buying 101.
Is it still around?
Guess how many VPs Salesforce has.