SaaStr 020: What Do Salesforce Look For In Potential Investments with John Somorjai, Executive Vice President of Corporate Development & Salesforce Ventures

To Commemorate the 3 month anniversary of the best conference ever, SaaStr Annual 2016. We thought we would take a trip back to the conference with one of our favourite discussions featuring Jason Lemkin, Founder @ SaaStr and John Somorjai, Executive Vice President of Corporate Development & Salesforce Ventures. Salesforce Ventures invests in the next generation of enterprise technology. The Salesforce Ventures portfolio includes companies such as Box, DocuSign, Dropbox, Evernote, GainSight, MongoDB, MuleSoft, Stripe, SurveyMonkey, Twilio, and Xactly. Salesforce.com has invested in more than 150 enterprise cloud startups in 11 countries since 2009.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• What have been the fundamental determinants for the growth and acceleration of Salesforce in the last few years?

• What gave Salesforce the conviction to deploy $500m back into startup investing?

• With the success of Salesforce Ventures, how have John’s investing goals changed since 2009?

• Why should founders raise with Salesforce, what is the value add?

• What is John attitude to the recent pessimism in the valley? How does John approach the dichotomy of growth and reducing burn?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here:

• Jason Lemkin

• Harry Stebbings

• Saastr

• John Somorjai