Salesforce, Inc. (CRM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everybody. Thrilled to continue with the discussion this afternoon, and now we're thrilled to welcome Marc Benioff. And you and I have sat up here before here in this room. And so appreciate you always...

Yes, we did. I love this hotel.

Well, appreciate you being here.

Thank you.

And thanks for doing it. So let's dig right in. Talk a little bit about Salesforce. $32 billion, growing at -- run rate, growing at 20%, which is really remarkable. It's quite a journey from a single product company to a much broader customer platform. Kind of give us your insight into kind of the next 5 years, and how do you think Salesforce continues to evolve and grow.

Well, I mean, it's been the right of a lifetime and very exciting, and it all started a few blocks away from here at 1499 Montgomery Street on March 8, 1999. We basically just walked into a little apartment that I rented. I've been working at Oracle for 13 years, and we said, maybe we can kind of come up with a new way to do enterprise software. We knew that we wanted to craft a new technology model. We knew we wanted to craft a new business model. And we also knew we wanted to craft a new philanthropic model, right? We really kind of said, at Oracle, it was great experience, but there was a gap in our kind of fulfillment in our experience every day, and we wanted to close that. And you've heard some of those stories. We can go back and hear some of those stories again. And then we kind of are today where we're -- like you said, we're going to do $31 billion. We have about 80,000 employees. We just had a quarter that we did about $7.7 billion in revenue. Why that was important to me is I have a lot of respect for SAP. A lot of respect for what they've built, is the largest enterprise apps company in the world. I grew up with that company. I always reviewed them, their management team. And in that quarter, we did more revenue than they did. And there was a moment. And it had to kind of take it back. But it wasn't just that. It was also -- we're getting ready next week to do Dreamforce. We're just talking about that. We'll be here in San Francisco, probably, hopefully, all of you are with us. And Dreamforce will have a very -- our largest Dreamforce ever, totally paid...

40,000 people.

It will be incredible. That's just physical, then online. And as I put together the slides, of course, I have one slide that says here's our revenue growth from zero to $31 billion and so forth. And then also on the 1-1-1 model, the slide says more than $0.5 billion in grants. We have done more than 7 million hours of volunteerism. We have done more than 50,000 nonprofits running on our system for free, which is kind of amazing. Almost $150 million in grants to our local public schools here in San Francisco and Oakland through this model. And it just takes you back a little bit that you make these subtle changes and then things can happen in the future. And also, there's a fourth column now, which was not as important 25 years ago, which is we're a net zero company. We're fully renewable. We're also introducing new environmental technology to our customers next week, a new Net Zero Cloud that we've built. Every company has this on their mind that I talk to today. So it's all the things kind of together, which is the size and scale and the momentum and growth of the business, which is incredible, the level of customer success, the depth of the product line and the values, and somehow, we got it all together. And now it's a moment as we kind of became the largest enterprise apps company, where we're always cultivating our beginner's mind. We're always kind of thinking about now where we're going. Again, we're saying, okay, now how are we going forward? What adjustments are we making in our models? How are we looking at the right ratios? We've, obviously, also delivering record margins this year. I think more than 20%, heading to 21%. This is where it's like, okay, now let's just show everyone what this model can do. And that is what is very exciting to me, and I think we did it the right way. I wouldn't say we have any regrets looking backwards over a couple of decades.

Do you think the next 5 years, lots of room to run, lots of room to continue to grow?

Well, I think next week, this is what I'm super excited about. I've been on the -- I'm on the road constantly, you know that. We just had dinner in New York. You saw we were with -- we had 25 customers or 40 customers together in some New York restaurant, it was very nice. And I have done dozens of those kinds of programs constantly. And I'm looking at customers and looking in customers' eyes, but it's nothing like next week where I can look at tens of thousands of customers at once. And also, we haven't -- we didn't do this in 2020 or 2021. So if I don't get COVID here with all of you today, I'll be doing it next week, I'll be there. And we will really be seeing where are we because you'll see the market, you'll see the demand level. I think the demand levels are kind of evidenced by how fast it sold out, the fever of people coming in. And of course, we're looking at all the other things that are going on in the world just like you are, just like everybody here who's a professional, but there's nothing better than looking and talking to these customers. You have a fantastic analyst here at Kash Rangan as an institution in our industry. And I'm sure he will be there polling and sending out his surveys, and trying to get, are you buying more of this, are you buying? Are you doing more Slack? Are you doing more Tableau? Or are you doing more MuleSoft? Are you doing more Customer 360? And we'll be doing that, too. And then by the end of next week, by Thursday or something, the 22nd, I think we'll have a really good handle on, well, what does this look like? I, for one, have really missed this high-quality, scaled experience of the customers. We just did one in New York where we had 5,000 people at Javits. It's not the same kind of experience where it's the biggest tech experience. I just tweeted the map of the conference. I showed you that it looks like we basically take over the whole city...

Like you built a city in a city.

Every hotel is sold out from here to San Jose. We couldn't really go any bigger here than we are going, but we have demand to go bigger. So this is just an -- this is an opportunity, and I think it reflects a little bit where we are in the market. We still think of ourselves, I think, as a start-up in many ways. I'm still an entrepreneur. I'm still creating this company. I'm still trying to think about where this company is going, but it's a moment. And I think that, look, we're in September 2022, this is very different than the last time we were on stage here together.

Very, very different. I mean the digital -- the continued kind of digital transformation of the world has continued, and obviously, COVID was an accelerant. Talk a little bit about where you think we are in kind of the digital transformation that's going on in every business, in every industry, everywhere. Talk a little bit about how that's been accelerated.

Well, there's a couple of different things going on, but I think you said that actually quite well, which is that there's COVID and then there's digital transformation, and these things are separate. And I think that, that's probably best represented by looking at some of these e-commerce charts. You look at these e-commerce companies and they have these tremendous surges, then they're coming back down to a slightly different level. But if you look at it on a normalized level over a decade or 2 decades...

Grown massively.

Okay. And I think that this is how we have to think about this in our mind. Sometimes when you're doing data sets and for those of you who do data modeling, like I do, I always throw out the top number. And then I throw out the bottom number. And then I'm looking for what the real kind of -- what is the real flow of the data. And I kind of take the COVID numbers with a grain of salt, where I'm like that -- these are 2 years where it was just a growth rate and a velocity of digital transformation that was breathtaking. But still, the last 2 decades have been breathtaking as well. And we just have to look at this as an upward into the right chart. And for us, every digital transformation begins and ends with the customer. We just talked about your own business in the green room where there's still opportunities at Goldman Sachs. There's still opportunities at Salesforce for this next level of capability. And I'll be talking about this next week, but I think that Salesforce has a huge opportunity to become more real-time, to be more automated, to be more intelligent. We're going to lay out next-generation platforms, next-generation capabilities, new products, new approaches because the world has changed so much. And then our products, product line, technology, it's all very different than it was 2 decades ago, of course. And this is what's really exciting, and I can't wait to show that to the customers.

Yes. Very exciting. Yes, the macro environment has gotten a lot more complicated. I'd be curious just kind of your view, how does this more complicated macro environment affect customer demand? Or does customer demand in the area you're focused on really not affected by this macro environment?

I think it's another really good question. I think complicated is a really good word. And I do travel extensively and in one of my travels this year, I was in Japan. I got back into Japan in April. I don't know if you've been back to Japan yet.

I have. I was back in Japan a couple of months ago. May, end of May.

Fantastic. All right. So we're there about the same time, and I'm meeting with some government folks who are responsible for their economy and so forth and so on. And then I'm just looking at the chart on the yen. And then we're very successful in Japan. I mean...

Not a great chart if you're Japanese, pretty good chart if you're an American.

This is, I think, a very critical micro moment to look at that, that we are very successful in Japan. Maybe we're the second largest software company in Japan. I'd like to think we're on our way to being the largest software company in Japan. We have a tremendous relationship with all the key Japanese companies. We've done a -- it's been a beautiful relationship for Salesforce. We have a great management team. We have a brand-new headquarters at the Imperial Palace. It's kind of an incredible thing for an American company. And then I called our CFO, and I'm over there and an incredible new CFO, and I say, "Hey, Amy, what's your forecast for revenue this year, and how is it built into guidance and tell me what's going on." And she's like, "Oh, here's the number, this is I am at." I think that this may be a little bit of a problem. Because while we're having a great first quarter, I think the dollar is having a better first quarter than we are. And the yen is not having a great first quarter, and I don't think anybody here really cares because it's working for their economy. They're able to sell more internationally and attract more international investment and also roll up international revenue into the yen. It makes their companies bigger. So then when we roll it back the other way, it's a whole different situation. And I've never seen -- I've done business in Japan for over 3 or 4 decades. I've never seen this kind of a sudden dislocation. And it was just the level of velocity of the yen downwards was breathtaking, I mean shocking, and it's continued. And that's why I'm like, "No, Amy, I think you need to look at not only the yen and how well -- because the Japanese business is great." We have the #1 software executive in Japan. He's done an amazing job. It doesn't matter because all of a sudden, yes, they're doing great, that's all fine, but eventually, it's going to have to get translated in the dollars. So you're going to have to look at that opportunity and the math in that. I think in foreign exchange, for a lot of executives, it's complicated. They don't understand exactly how that is going to -- and if there is a severe dislocation like that, it will impact you. And I don't have any critique of my Japanese business. I was excited about the demand levels, just like you were saying. I was meeting with the customers, just like we did.

If you're local Japanese, if you're a local Japanese company and you do business...

They're thrilled. They don't care one bit. They're thrilled. They're like, let's go for a walk in zen garden. Great. Let's do that. Let's go have some sushi. Fantastic. But well, then we're like, okay, well, it's a different economy over there. I'm like if you're an American, you're going over, well, this house is very nice. It's 1/3 off. Fantastic. Maybe it's a great investment opportunity. This condo is 1/3 off. This company is a 1/3 off. But you just have to realize you're dealing in a slightly different place. And not just in Japan, also in Europe and in other places in the world as well. So that is a complicated part.

We were talking about the macro. You've lived through lots of economic cycles. If this economic cycle got tougher, what does your experience tell you about your playbook going forward in a tougher economic environment?

It's a great question because when you're in a tough economic environment, there's several things you can really do. One is, if you execute well, you're going to increase your market share. The second thing is it gives you an opportunity to reset all your metrics and to reevaluate your investment position with the company because sometimes you're in a situation where you're managers, I'm sure you have this experience, getting very entitled, on growth rates and all these capabilities, and it gives you an opportunity without getting everybody emotionally altered to say, "Hey, we're going to increase our margins. We're going to do these things. We're going to grow our revenues." But this is one of the powerful things about our model is a tremendous amount of our revenue for next year and for the next couple of years is already booked. So we're a company that's much larger than $31 billion. And that's the beauty of our cloud model and how we've signed contracts with customers. So then it gives us the opportunity to kind of say, what some adjustments we would like to make. We listen very carefully to our investors. What kind of some adjustments you -- we listen to some of our customers, what some adjustments you like? And then we can tune and make things a little bit better across the board so that as we exit the economic cycle, which maybe it's 2024. I don't know what your economists say. Then we're just stronger as a company, and we're kind of -- we know where we're going. We know that we're -- we know that we still have a tremendous opportunity in revenue, in margin, in market share and customer connectivity and capability. We're very fortunate in the last 5 years to have acquired the 3 companies that you mentioned, Tableau, MuleSoft and Slack. I think that when we roll into Dreamforce next week, one of the reasons that we sold out so fast is we also had to ingest all of those communities as well. And they're all coming to see how those products are now integrated, how it's one complete Customer 360, how it's a new day for Customer 360 and they can take these solutions forward.

So since you raised the acquisitions, let's just talk about a little bit. Let's start with Slack. Talk about the success of that acquisition and what your aspirations are for that platform?

Well, when I start my keynote next week, I'll go through some of the things we're talking about. I'll talk also like the expansion of it. I took a couple of notes to kind of tell you like some of the crazy things that we get to talk about in terms of our ecosystem where we're forecasting a $1.6 trillion in our ecosystem by 2026 and 9.3 million new jobs created by our ecosystem. And a lot of those people are there. Their careers have been made with Salesforce. We call them Trailblazers. You've seen them in your own company, and they're wearing these hoodies and so forth. And that is kind of how the opening -- the keynote will open talking about some of the business metrics and the new day and the values and so forth. And the public schools commitment and ask everyone to adopt a public school and then the keynote basically starts to move into, it's a new day for work. And you and I have had a few screaming matches over what this means. And...

No screaming.

No screaming, but good, solid discussion. And we -- as part of that analysis, we think there is a new work, a new work, a new way to work, and that there is a combination of things. And when we talk to our employees, when we talk to the market, even in a CNBC poll last week, that's on Twitter, I think like 85% of people who have experienced work from office and work from home want to be working more from home. Maybe it's not exactly the balance. We're not sure what that balance is. But it really means that we're going to have to have new technology to kind of bridge these things. And that's really why we bought Slack because we have to rebuild all of our products with that envelope where all of a sudden, you have this collaboration environment and what you really see next week for the first time is the integration, a video and audio directly into the collaboration environment. So now when you're on a Slack channel and you're talking to all of these, your customers may be over here, your partners over here, or your employees here and then boom, everything just appears and now I've got everyone in an audio-video environment. And I've created maybe I'm working on a deal, and that's now a deal desk. I'm working on a customer service case situation. I'm swarming in this case, to resolve this issue. I have a customer over here who has a crisis. I'm now -- created a channel, and I'm going to resolve that. And it's all dynamic with the video and audio at home and everything working together. And that with the things that we do, which are all of the customer functionality as well as the analytics with Tableau and the integration of MuleSoft, I think, will be demonstrations of technology that customers haven't seen. And we'll profile 2 incredible companies in the keynote. We're going to profile our work with Ford, which has been very pioneering and our work with L'Oreal, two very different companies. And I think in both cases, these customers are more connected to their customers than ever before, but what they really need is this kind of next level of customer connectivity that's real-time, that's automated, that's intelligent, and they're going to -- we're going to be able to demonstrate that. And it's really the acquisitions that really bring it together in such a compelling and meaningful way.

Yes. It's a compelling platform when you put it all together. Shifting gears a little bit. You recently promoted Brian Millham, long-form executive -- long-term Salesforce executive to be your COO and President. Talk a little bit about how you see his mandate in helping you drive this all forward.

Brian has been with me since the beginning, came with me from Oracle. And at the beginning of the pandemic, we went through a transition with my Co-CEO, Keith Block, who had done an amazing job. He wanted to retire, move on. He has had a very happy retirement during COVID. And I asked Brian to step into the sales drop and to be the CRO and so forth, and he wasn't ready. He had family situations and everything going on. He said, "No, I can be to help support whoever that is." And I had a very -- I have a very good relationship with Gavin Patterson, who is the CEO of British Telephone, who you know very well, who have left BT and had started to becoming the Chairman of our international business and working with us, and I said, "Hey, would you step up and really run sales and really do this through the pandemic with us?" And now as we've kind of crested that, it was really -- Gavin was ready to kind of step back into what he was doing and to let Brian be more dominant. So Gavin is still with us, Brian is still with us. I think when one went forward, one went into a slight adjustment in their role so that they could both get what they wanted. And I'm -- I couldn't be happier with the quality of the management team.

That's great. That's great. You run a big company. It's a complicated company. It's growing. Talk a little bit about just personally. There's a lot going on in the market. There's a lot going on in the world. There are a lot of growth opportunities. How do you sort through it all? How do you kind of keep abreast of what's going on? How do you kind of sort through opportunities? Talk a little bit about your process of kind of looking for opportunities for the company broadly.

We use a process that is really this kind of -- I kind of talked about this a little bit, but this concept of Shoshin, beginner's mind. And keep thinking about the beginner's mind, has every possibility of the express mind, there's a few. And at the beginning of every year within the first day or 2, I take out a blank sheet of paper on a table with nothing on it, and I sit there and I force myself to ask 5 questions. The first thing I say is what do I really want? No, here's this company, 80,000 people. You have all these customers, you have all these products. You have all these things that have happened, all these commitments you've made, don't you have to take that? No, what am I really trying to achieve? What is my goal? What is my dream? And I try to write it in 10 to 20 words and just write it down. And it's kind of begin with the end of mind. It's a vision. Here's where I'm going. Then I really ask myself a second question, which is now what's really important about that? What are my values? And this is like everyone who's worked with me knows, this is like really important where -- all right. And this has changed so much over 25 years. But today, our values are trust, customer success, innovation, quality and now sustainability. And these are the 5 values that we align with. And then I really ask, are we in the right priority? Is trust more important than customer success? Is customer success more important than innovation? Is innovation more important than quality? Is it quality more important than sustainability? How is it prioritized? And then I ask myself, how do I operationalize that into the business? So for each value, I'm now asking the question, number one, on trust, how do I get trust? And what is it going to cost this year? It turns into my operational budget. So how am I going to achieve customer success? How do I achieve innovation? How do I achieve quality? How do I achieve sustainability? And what is it going to cost? And then obstacles, what is preventing me from achieving these values? What are the problems that I'm dealing with? We went through a lot of them. There's even more. What's preventing me from having trust? And then finally, five is kind of came out of the work of [indiscernible] in Japan in the '50s. My measures, how will I know that I'm successful? How will I know that I have trust the metrics? It used to be that's where I started. If you can measure it, you can achieve it. This kind of -- you went to business school the same years that I went to. I would say this is a tilt on that, where I'm more focused on the values and operationalizing the values into the business. Then starting with the metrics and then figuring out how do I achieve them. And it's been more successful for me to start as a values first, and then I can articulate the core values of the company. When I'm done, I ask my management team then to write theirs, answer the same 5 questions. And every person in the company has to publish at the Slack, and then it all has to alien back up to the top. This is the process I use. Then within the first couple of weeks of year, we're done, and then we execute that. All of our wood has to be behind one arrow, and we have to be fully aligned around this vision, values, methods, obstacles, measures. And if we can achieve that, we can go to the next level. But the hard part is, when you have so much that's happened to you, and we've all been through so much, especially in the last 2 years, to be able to clear your mind, and to realize you've got to start with a fresh slate to really be able to say, now this is where we go. So a good example is next week, when I walk out on stage, it really started for me, I call this presentation a new day for customer success. And there's a slight tweak to that. But when I've been on the road now for the last 3 weeks, doing focus groups on the keynote, customers stop me and said, "No, no. No, no, no. Sorry, that doesn't resonate with us." "Okay, what is important to you?" It's evidenced in this room. We're all back together. This is the great reunion. That's what we want you to acknowledge the importance of us all being back together that this is the great reunion and that were Trailblazers together. And now it's a new day for customer success. And now it's a new day for business. And now it's a new day for work. This is right out of the customers' mouths. And now I've met with hundreds of customers in the last few weeks. My job is to dial into them. I'm writing this keynote with my co-CEO, Bret Taylor, we're traveling together. And it's like, now this is a reunion. People need to feel like we can come back together and celebrate. And that's exciting. One of your executives was in one of the programs in New York, and I listened very carefully to what he said and what everyone is saying. And I found I had a slight -- had to make a slight shift in terms of what was important to me was the product, the platform, how excited it is. It's real time. It's intelligent. It's automated. It's this. It's that. All these things are working together. Customer is "No, no. let me tell you what's important to us." We're all back together. We're United, we're Trailblazers together. Yes, we're using these products in this platform. We're helping each other. We got through the pandemic together. We operated in a way that helped others through the pandemic. We executed with our values and now we're going for it. And I'm like, wow, yes, I have to rewrite, and that's how I do it.

Yes. Shift gears a little bit, capital allocation. Even that's the big share buyback plan. How do you -- was there a change in your capital allocation? You were trying to signal with the buyback plan? We talked a little bit about some of the acquisitions you've made. Any messages on that? How are you thinking about capital allocation broadly?

Well, I don't want to preview my whole Investor Day presentation. But what I'll tell you is, and I kind of said it already, which is that, when we became the largest enterprise apps company, then what I sent to my co-CEO and to our management team is, the same thing I've actually said 3 times now in the presentation, put it all aside. Now what do we want to do? And I said this to the Board as well, and I'm like, now I want to put it all aside, what do we want to do? The cash flow of the company is incredible. You've seen the numbers. The capability of the company is incredible. So now how do we go forward? And the one piece of it, but only one piece is when we look at our new business model and kind of, yes, we're going to have great revenue growth. We're going to have great margin growth. We've exceeded -- we're now in the 20s, and we're going to have -- we're going to buy back stock for the first time, and we're going to do other things because we have crested when we kind of crested over SAP in that quarter, it's a moment where we can step back and say, we can go forward, and we can start making these adjustments and changes. We listen very carefully to our investors, but I have to say this. Investors are amazing stakeholders in the company. I value them greatly. But if I did exactly what they said over the last 25 years, we would not be the #1 today because some of the recommendations that they have, they want too much margin expansion too early in the company, it would have curtailed our ability to achieve market share and to win the war in the cloud and enterprise software being #1 in CRM, and I'm sure you've seen our market share returns. So that was very important. But I think now that we're getting to the next level, we can now reprioritize what's important to us, and we have, and that's an example. There's many examples. People I don't think fully appreciate, actually, our deep commitment to operating margin expansion, what we've even achieved already this year and where we're going.

You've talked about it.

We've talked about it. And I think now when we kind of -- we've delivered some great numbers in the last couple of quarters. But when I look out over the next 5 years, for example, in our short-term plan, it's amazing where we can go. And so that's a goal, but there's many goals. Capital allocation is a goal. By the way, revenue is still a goal. It's still a goal.

How do you balance growth and profitability? How do you think about that balance?

It's a dance. And it all is about kind of -- to us, it was all about getting to this moment. We wanted to be able to have command and control over our market. Just like every CEO wants of every great company. They want to have -- but then do it with the right values. Now we're there. Now what's the next level for us?

I think back to 2009, and you started hiring pretty aggressively in that period of time, which was a period where there was a lot of macro uncertainty. We're coming out of the financial crisis, et cetera. What should we be watching as we run through a cycle here in the next couple of years to kind of get an indication as to how you think about the forward?

Yes. Well, I think that for Salesforce, it's very aligned with the world. I mean, for us, it's a new day for Salesforce. So that gives us the ability to look at everything new. I think the world is a new day for the world as we kind of get through the pandemic, but there's things that we all realize we're bringing things from the pandemic into our economic reality today. And your economists have detailed that very well. Everybody understands that in this room that we're dealing with some things now that are based on what we went through in the last couple of years.

It's going to take a while to unwind, you know what we did [indiscernible] for sure. It's going to take some time. Yes.

Yes. And I'm sure there's probably a presentation on that at this conference, so -- or 2 or 3, and everybody is going to bring it back to present. But for us, it's different. And I think it has a lot to do with the durability of our model. Our model is based on these incredible agreements that we have with our customers. Like you. When we sign an agreement with a customer, it's generally a multiyear agreement. It's generally a cash and advance agreement. It's an agreement that really commits the customer to working with us in a deep and meaningful way. People ask me all the time, where did that come from? We started our business in '99. That's kind of how I opened up the presentation. In 2001, there was something similar than what's going on now. It's a little different for us because we have like 50 or 100 employees, but all of a sudden, I was raising money to grow the company, and I had a very bad experience. Nobody would give us money. Even though the metrics were looking okay, and then as this kind of -- the recession in 2001 kind of hit, the tech community, there are a lot of layoffs, you don't really see now. So we're not really in that same zone.

No, that's the same.

And that hit us very hard for -- with attrition. So our attrition has remained very relatively low. It's been amazing. And -- but not then, it wasn't. So man, it was brutal. And so I basically changed my model in 2001. And what I said was I changed my model in 2 ways. First, with my salespeople. The salespeople, I said, let me tell you how you're now going to get paid. One, you're going to get paid on what your first year revenue is on the agreement. Two, you're going to get paid a 1/3, second 1/3 is on the total contract value, to think multiyear; and three, on the cash that you bring in because we were not a cash flow positive company and no one would give us cash. The investors, we went to [ St. Honore ], they didn't give us any money. We don't have any -- we didn't have a single professional venture capitalist in the company. Nobody would give us money. It was all individuals. It was all high net worth individuals that funded Salesforce for $62 million. And then when I hit that, I could not raise any more. So I had to find the funding in the company through the actual agreement with the customer. And when we made that change, everything changed for the company. Well, it turned out that it's the same model basically that we have now. And that gives us a lot of durability of our business. And when you look at the kind of metrics we have, I don't think there's ever been a software company that's had these kinds of metrics, where now we used to call it deferred revenue. Now it's a whole different kind of terms, and we talk about RPO and all these things. And -- but these metrics are exactly what we always wanted, so that when you are going through an environment like this, you want your business to be as solid as possible, which is your cash flow is strong, your growth is strong. You don't have to -- you may have 1 quarter that's a little bit less than another. And yes, your foreign exchange may be a little crazy here. And then eventually, everything kind of resolves and then you want to be thinking about where do you want your company to end up and then you can go forward. That's what then played out in 2009 and 2010. We were public at that point, and we were able to kind of sail through that period, not without a lot of the same issues that we see now. So if you will go back and look at our performance in 2009 and 2010, it's not that we didn't have the same kind of measured customer buying, and this kind of thing or dislocation in currencies and all that. But all of a sudden, the company is stronger as it exits in 2011, for example. It's a good case study looking backwards. When we look at wherever we want to be in 2024, let's say, or 2025, we want to be very strong and stronger than we even are now. And I think that that's the way to think about it as a CEO.

That's great. I think that's a good place to end. Appreciate your perspective. Appreciate your time.

Great. Thank you for inviting me again.

Quite a journey and always great to be with you.

It's been a lot of fun to be here. Thanks. And I hope you come to Dreamforce.

Well, I can't next week, but maybe next year.

Thank you.

All good. Thank you. Appreciate it.