George Hu, Fireworks AI President on AI Inference and Enterprise

Grace Gong (0:02)

Hi, George. Welcome to Venture with Grace.

George Hu (0:05)

Hi, Grace. Good to see you again.

Grace Gong (0:08)

I feel like you're such an icon, so I'm just about to cry because I was reading your resume. And also, I think Stevie from Vanta was working for you, and then she said great things about you on a podcast. I was listening to that podcast clip. So you entered Salesforce as an intern, and then in the course of 10 to 14 years or so, and then you became the COO.

So maybe we could talk about what were some core, I guess how do you, well, over the course of 12 year and five months, technically, but maybe we could talk about how does someone go from an intern to COO ever?

George Hu (0:51)

That's a great question, and I have to admit there's probably a part of it that's luck or something that's not just about me in there. But I can remember my early days of how I got first noticed by Mark, because I think it might be an interesting story.

First of all, there's just part of it, there's just hard work. And I remember probably the first time I met Mark live actually was, I was in the office very late or at that time, not in AI time, but back then in Sassland. I was pretty late, 8 or 9 p.m., whatever it was. I was the last one on the floor and he left his office and he walked around the floor and I was the only one there. He's like, oh, who are you? And I was like, oh, I'm George Hu. And he's like, oh, and he got to know me and he just noticed that I was working. And that's kind of probably the first time he paid attention to me.

But then I remember that we had a quarter where our sales in one of our regions was not good. And I sent a note out to the management team saying, hey, sales in EMEA suck this quarter, what's going on? And a lot of people in those moments, they kind of heads down, career preservation, kind of crickets. And I had had training as a management consultant, that was kind of my background. And so I was like, well, I can answer this question. So I just went into the data, basically it wasn't even my job. I had no responsibility for EMEA sales whatsoever.

But I wrote a presentation, I sent it to him. And then he's like, I want you to come to my office in a week. And I want you to prepare another presentation. And I want you to tell me everything that's broken in the company that I'm not aware of. I was like, oh, that sounds like either really fun or kind of career suicide. I don't know, one or the other. So I did the presentation and I showed up in front of EMEA, I spent 15 minutes, I walked in through it. He goes, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

And he goes, George, okay, this is great. I don't really even care about the presentation. I just want to learn how you think. Now I know how your mind works. And now I'm going to take charge of your career from now on. Out of the blue, he said this. He's like, I'm going to take charge of your career from now on. And I'm going to personally move you through this company. And you're not always going to move straight up. There's going to be times you're going to move this way and that way. But I don't want you to freak out. Because my goal is not just to move you up as fast as possible. My goal is to move you up so that by the time you get to the highest levels of the company, you've seen everything in the company and you could be ready to someday be a CEO. And that was kind of crazy because I was like, however old I was, 27 years old, CEO and nice man. And I still to this day don't really totally understand. I don't think my EMEA presentation was that good. But it was some combination of something clicked, he liked me or whatever it was. And that was really the beginning of my time at Salesforce. And honestly, that was really true. What he said to me was really true. I never had to ask for a job or focus on a job there or try to get promoted. I just did what I thought was best for the company as best I could.

And he really moved me around quite a bit and gave me opportunities that I think were just quite extraordinary. And yeah, that was a lot of just an amazing journey. I'm still close to Mark. And I saw him at Dreamforce actually backstage during between two of his sessions. I got a text from one of his assistants saying, hey, Mark wants to speak with you. So I'm backstage. We spoke for maybe 15 minutes.