This is the enterprise equivalent of putting up a landing page and collecting email addresses. Salesforce uses the same lean product development concepts that we espouse here. They test messages and products and then make R&D investment based on real customer demand. It just all happens with a massive marketing budget.
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.
I was an exec at a smaller company acquired by Salesforce and met a few of the C-level and President level people a few times (not Marc). All impressed me with their intelligence and humility.
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.
Do you think of firing someone as something mean or unintelligent? He sounds like someone I’d love to meet but your comment interests me because I’ve never really thought of these characteristics as relevant to that kind of decision.
> Do you think of firing someone as something mean or unintelligent?
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.
Yes. Firing someone should always be a last resort; generally it means either that the person is hopelessly, irredeemably unfit for the job, or that you are incompetent at leading people. If your hiring processes are worth anything, the former is exceedingly rare.
I agree firing should be the last resort, but I very much disagree that "it means either that the person is hopelessly, irredeemably unfit for the job, or that you are incompetent at leading people."
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.
Yes I am struggling with this exact situation. A person on my team fits this profile. They can do the work. It's just that their output is below average except for the times when we've had serious discussions about their performance. They will improve for maybe a month or two before regressing back to their previous level.
Fire them. They are wasting your time. Their yo-yo output will be something that is noticed by the rest of the team which is demotivating for them. You gave them a chance.
I find this a very naive view point. Hiring is exceedingly difficult, and the reality is that no matter how well intentioned your process you never know whether the person you've hired fits with your organization, or isn't an outright liar. If you hire people, you will fire people (or be stuck with people who for whatever reason don't work well).
I got fired from a startup for “not learning rust fast enough.” I had more professional experience than the rest of the team combined, had built a very similar product to theirs over the previous 5 years, and the part of the product I did work on had the most complete functionality, most test cases, and most complete customer facing documentation of all the features being worked on.
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.
Never hiring anyone who isn't a good fit or will become a poor fit is a very high bar to set.
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.
Or just that the market is down, or you over hired, or your strategy has changed, or a million other reasons that you may have employees you no longer need.
There is a recognized difference between firing someone (which in common parlance means someone's employment was terminated for underperformance or other cause) vs. having a layoff, which is what you've described.
The article implies that the VP was fired for disagreeing with the company, and Parker didn't really give off a "my way or the highway" kind of vibe. You never know, though.
So I guess "Whistle-blower" is appropriate here, but marketing a "batch" processing system as "real-time" seems to be a bit of a nothing-burger in my mind. I think the more telling thing is he seems to have raised this multiple times to various superiors and not gotten the hint that they weren't concerned. Someone at a VP level (especially at Salesforce) should have enough corporate etiquette to get the hint. Unless he believed this would literally be hurting/killing people (and I find the hospital/care marketing laughable) it doesn't seem appropriate to not accept "I heard your concerns but we will still be launching on X." He is certainly not financially liable for an overzealous marketing department. I've certainly raised concerns from a technical perspective to be shot down in launch meetings, particularly around marketing claims. However, at a certain point you do your best and start supporting the team effort.
> However, at a certain point you do your best and start supporting the team effort.
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.
I was in a similar situation at a startup I worked for, except they are trying to get their software into the control systems in industrial refrigeration facilities. I have brought up repeatedly that their Netflix-style cloud model for control systems had caused multiple incidents and have called for an architecture discussion which other engineers supported but which the management shut down. Soon after they moved to terminate me but they failed to execute on it so I sent them a resignation notice instead and notified the investors and one customer of the issues and let them work out the whole thing.
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.
The Salesforce-arati are out in force, I see. I don't know the context of this story, but I also know you don't make it to CTO of Salesforce by burning a few bridges. Generally, Salesforce has excellent marketing, but technically it has fallen behind in a few areas.
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'm a veteran of terrible enterprise software and Salesforce is mostly not terrible. It's overweight, complex and expensive, but it's also powerful, customizable and interoperable in all the ways you need it to be. The main value to me is that if you look at any remotely related software like automation, data integration, billing, reporting they all have a native Salesforce integration as their first listed feature. That's incumbency and clout moreso than a technical vote of confidence, but it still matters to CTOs. I'll say that nearly all their acquired products I've worked with kinda suck and barely integrate in any meaningful way (I'm thinking Tableau and Marketing Cloud especially).
> I'll say that nearly all their acquired products I've worked with kinda suck and barely integrate in any meaningful way (I'm thinking Tableau and Marketing Cloud especially).
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.
Storage cost is nuts. They announced a migration to AWS that is going to start rolling out. I'm not sure if that's going to let us utilize cloud native storage.
Probably a power struggle with another VP. VP's could care less about if a product works or not, but a common thing in FAANG is to propose a big change, do nothing, but convince everyone the project has been launched.
My guess is he was trying to call out another team for doing this, to bring headcount/priorities back to himself.
> Generally, Salesforce has excellent marketing, but technically it has fallen behind in a few areas.
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 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?
I don't have any experience with FCC false-advertising actions, but most deception laws require proof of actual deception, or at least damages based on reasonable reliance on a statement. If someone read a landing page, reasonably thought the product was available now, and then took reasonable action (maybe hiring someone to use the product and paying a salary), then there might be a valid complaint.
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?
I’m also not a lawyer, but that would clearly be false advertising, right?
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.
I got rid of 9 or 12 domain names because they had "Speedy" in the name. I believe some company was sued because a customer thought the company wasn't we'll speedy.
Being on Heroku and dealing with the lack transparency of the security breach by Salesforce speaks to opposite of them being truthful. How long did it take them to admit to being breached? We had to get our information from 3rd parties about the breach and that we needed to rotate secrets.
> Salesforce uses the same lean product development concepts that we espouse here. They test messages and products and then make R&D investment based on real customer demand.
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.
more likely driven by their sales team (which also influences marketing), sales people love to overpromise because most of their job is done after the sale - often the idea is that they’ll sell enough to warrant building it
When I was younger and worried about how we were going to execute on some project a veteran (ex-DEC) salesperson had sold, he pulled me aside and laid some gnomic-to-a-young-engineer sales wisdom on me…
“Look, never confuse the sales cycle with the install cycle…”
> 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.
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".
You will be surprised execs will go to the extent to put up a fake front end. I would put more weight on the fired employee disclosing unternal details than to based on your impressions. After all, there are way more precedence of "nice people" with Bernie Madoff as a very good poster boy for that category.
This is an inevitable aspect of the MVP fake-it-until-you-make-it culture that infects even established companies. They are telling themselves that if enough people come to depend on it doing what they claim it does then they'll make it do that, but not before.
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.
This is pushed from the smallest startup upwards as a way to make sure you’re building something people want. There are pros and cons of course, but I can understand why companies do this and why software folks think they need to. It’s related to the shipping early, fast, and iterating which is the currently taught best practice by places that have a lot of experience getting new things off the ground like YC.
But there's a world of difference about lying about capability today and working with customers to deliver what they need.
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.
Interesting to think about that. I remember the SuperH had 16 bit instructions (well, SH-5 was variable length,) I wonder whether that would have become 'our future' if ARM hadn't done Thumb back then.
IIRC ARM did end up licensing the SuperH patents about that. I tend to think SuperH could have been much more of a contender had Hitachi been more willing to license it for integration by others.
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.
It's about to be multiplied several times over with AI startups promising the moon and the stars and handwaving away criticisms with anthropomorphized terms like "hallucinations".
Honestly, after reading his complaint (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.259...), I'm not at all sympathetic. He got acquihired into a senior role after 10 years as CEO of his startup, ended up overseeing another team's real-time efforts, and by his own account went absolutely nuclear when they didn't agree with him about what "real-time" meant. If he made any efforts whatsoever to resolve the disagreement before going around and complaining to other executives about his team, he doesn't mention it.
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.
The same could be said for nearly every sales call that I’ve been on the receiving end of.
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 was talking with a colleague once about this and they mentioned that as long as everyone being pitched was wearing a suit then they wouldn't worry about the wild claims the sales people made about our software. But if there was an engineer in the room they'd feel obligated to nudge everyone back to reality.
I'm a technical marketer who had owned a lot of the associated infra over my career. I've historically been a major target for sales people from companies in the space.
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.
I'd sort of split this up a bit. The engineers seem to know that the promises from sales are lie. The managers and executives sort of claim to know that salesmen exaggerate claims, but the reality of it never really seems to land. Time and time again I'm working for a company who has purchased a product which they're barely making use or, or are flat out using incorrectly because they were charmed by the promises from sales, but not so charmed as to actually staff the software properly to ensure it is well configured, and maintained correctly.
IMO the main problem is the ecosystem around Salesforce. If you are the end user it is (not) ok to have latency lies, but you'll be the only one who feel it. If you aim to other developers build services on top of your product, your latency issues has exponential effect for them.
It won’t move back. These issues exist for reasons, and avoiding lawsuits is already a consideration taken. At the end of the day, they embellish to an extreme because management in the customer companies are usually buying “we used X” prestige and there’s very little accountability in management for such mistakes.
Often people are fired because the higher-ups simply just don't want to deal with them anymore. Although the guy's claims could be credible, his firing could come down to other factors. Maybe he communicated his concerns the wrong way. Maybe he misread the politics of the situation.
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.
I can't tell from far article and comments if this is a case of the company lying or the executive taking aspirational statements too literally. Though I'd expect if he's at that level he would understand the difference, ie only make a big deal out of it if it really was lying.
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."
This sounds credible though. Not anything Salesforce specific, just seems to be the new industry playbook, redefine already popular terms to suit what you want *cough* open source *cough*
Especially with terms like "real-time" that aren't tremendously well-defined in the first place. 100% of real-time systems I've seen in production defer some amount of work to out-of-band batches. In payments even parts of the critical path are reconciled once a day!
But many banks' transactions do run/are realized in the end of the day. This is why (in vast majority, if not all banks) money that is deposited "today" are available "tomorrow".
I’d bet money this VP hoped he’d get retaliated against so he could file a lawsuit and get some easy cash from a company with enough of it to pay him off.
He works at Salesforce, what did he expect exactly.
In their defense, "real-time" has never been a precise term of art, even in the embedded computing space. Hence modifiers like "soft real-time" vs. "hard real-time" etc. IMHO, outside of embedded computing, it's effectively puffery, and should be treated as such.
Now, consider all of those companies that are building their solutions on top of salesforce's products.
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.
Doesn't surprise me given Salesforce is all about squeezing their (generally) non-technical customers with arbitrary licensing restrictions and "best practices" that lead to paying for more and more.
I've long observed that there's actual real-time and there's marketroid real-time. Actual real-time has hard, typically small (milliseconds or smaller) timing windows that must be hit. Marketroid real-time generally means "faster and more responsive than previous batch-based processes" and can mean a response within seconds or a response within days.
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.
At two companies I’ve been the CTO at we brought Salesforce in to pitch us. They couldn’t actually tell us what their use case was given our sales and customer base. We had ecom platforms with some customer data embedded in the sales platform and Salesforce couldn’t pitch a benefit to using their system.
If you are looking for them to tell you what the use case is, that isn't a great sign of need or commitment, and they likely aren't going to take you very seriously.
Ah yes. The Silicon Valley fake-it-until-you-make-it scam which is borderline fraud that has been taken to the extreme to the point where it is fine until a whistleblower calls it out and gets kicked out of the company.
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.
> The lawsuit also claimed that the CDP team "wanted to redefine the meaning of 'real-time’
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).
I am still waiting to find a software or hardware vendor that does not lie about their capabilities, that seems to be normal industry standard and not news worthy
Well, we didn't. We sold accounting and distribution systems. The base software was functional, but basic and pretty much always needed customization. So, we sold a lot of "we can do that" features that we didn't already have, confident that we could, indeed, "do that". And we did.
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.
Diagrams.net has been my diamond in the ruff. Small software dev who makes one of the best diagramming softwares I have ever used. It's very intuitive for tech and science people, makes handsome diagrams/workflow/etc., And it's not trying to be a billion dollar company, just a sustainable one.
I worked at a consulting firm (dot com era) with a sales person who told me his job was to lie to customers, and that my job (programmer) was to make him look good. At least he was truthful...
All industry has a degree of foul play, including government corruption, fraud, bribery & money laundering. It varies by industry and geography.
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.
I worked at a company that has AI and Machine Learning in the marketing materials.
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?
I really have no idea why this story is getting so much traction.
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.
Because it's Salesforce and people love schadenfreude, especially when it's inflicted on a villain. And Salesforce isn't exactly well loved in the industry.
This just reads like a disgruntled former employee grasping at straws. The advertised capabilities of enterprise software (just like every other product) should be assumed to be under best case circumstances, and there's typically a period of due diligence where both sides work to understand whether or not the vendor can match the customers' expectations in the context of the use cases they have planned.
I'm not a huge fan of SFDC, but this is enterprise software buying 101.
Standard practice in tech, especially enterprise. I've had to create all kinds of vaporware over the years that was passed off as real. Not something I've ever felt good about, but I would like to be able to pay rent. I hate it.
This is basic product-market fit. Don't sell the product unless you have a market to sell it to. That means marketing something you don't have, but can build.
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.