Scott Beechuk, Norwest Partner on Agentic AI, Enterprise Software & CX

Grace Gong (0:01)

We're live. Hi, Scott. Welcome to Venture with Grace.

Scott Beechuk (0:04)

Thank you for having me.

Grace Gong (0:06)

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Scott, I feel like, you know what? When I was listening to your past podcast and we also made a notebook about you, I think I said this before we came on, I feel like you look super dumb, but on the other hand, your experience is super, there's so many experiences there. Especially you were the SVP of Salesforce at one point. I feel like we had so many Salesforce alum recently came on, George Hu from-

Scott Beechuk (1:05)

Yeah, he's the best.

Grace Gong (1:06)

Yeah, he was telling here and then also I went to Dreamforce, so I met so many of the Salesforce exact there as well. I want to start with what were some early experience that kind of like shape you into who you are today since like, you have worked on like so many different things before the Founder Investor Journey.

Scott Beechuk (1:28)

Yeah, thanks for the kind words. And I think everyone in the tech industry right now that's experiencing what we're going through right now got here via their own path and I, my path was certainly not the traditional path. I, as you can tell by my background, spent a lot of time in music along the way. And, you know, that was part of my way of, of balancing the, the side of being a founder. I was a three time founder. And I also, you know, on the side made a lot of music. We had a chance to tour the world and, you know, see 20 countries over 10 years. And that was just an amazing experience. But, you know, back in 2005, when we were in, you know, 2005, 2010 era, working remote wasn't exactly the same. We didn't have Zoom and we didn't have, you know, you know, the ability to be connected every single place that we were. So it was a little bit more challenging. But my path was, you know, I started out as a electrical engineer out of Michigan. So Midwestern guy. And, you know, tried to work in the auto industry because that's what you do when you're in Detroit. And just found, I mean, in the mid-90s, when I graduated, I mean, there was nothing innovative happening in Detroit. I mean, I love my home state. I love the people. I love just like, you know, the culture of family focus and all the good things that come from being from the Midwest. But technology innovation was not one of them. And so I had to get out of there and I moved to the Bay Area in 97 and did some software development. But the.com bubble was an exciting time to be in the Bay Area. It was super fun. I mean, there were company launches every single night. You could just walk up and down the streets of Soma and you could walk into any one of the.com of the day launch parties, you know, raising all kinds of VentureCapital, launching products. And sometimes you even got a chance to see some super cool bands that you knew the names of, that they would hire for ungodly sums of money for, you know, probably not all the right reasons. Hence the.com bubble burst. Most of those companies, we don't know the names of today, but some of them survived, but it was a fun time to be there. We got funded to build a search agent company. In hindsight, we called it a search agent.

It makes us look smarter than we were, I think, because it would, you know, run custom search queries and search the web 24 hours a day to try to find everything. Because most of the search engines back in that time, they were getting a small sliver of what was actually out there on the internet. So our goal was to try to find it all. And we ended up selling a few businesses along the way. And I found my way to Salesforce at a very, I think, serendipitous time. It was a lucky moment to join them because it was mostly a one-product company in 2010 And I think we were building the second product in the company. And it was very different from CRM. It was a CX product. And we called it the Service Cloud. And I was there for almost seven years. And boy, what a ride. I mean, learning from the best of the best over there. I mean, you mentioned George Hu. He was one of the best of the best. I mean, I learned so much from George and from Mark Benioff and from Parker Harris and just an innumerable number of other leaders over there, many of whom I stay in touch with today. And so we grew that business to almost two and a half billion of ARR during that period. Very proud of that. And I think the Salesforce reports this, that it's the largest business in the company now. So again, very serendipitous. I didn't plan it that way.