Selling your Company to Salesforce - with Mike Micucci, former Salesforce Commerce Cloud, CEO

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Mike Micucci, former CEO and Executive Vice President of the Commerce and Community Clouds at Salesforce. Today, we will be covering three main areas. One, the factors driving Mike's decision to sell his SaaS startup to Salesforce and then staying for 11 years. Secondly, how did community, collaboration and commerce become part of the same cloud at Salesforce? And number three, metrics that matter to the CEO of a large company, specifically of a billion dollar plus business unit that he used to manage and report performance. Mike, please take a moment to give a brief background and overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast.

**Mike Micucci** (1:22)
Well, thank you, Ray, for inviting me. What an honor and it's great to spend some time chatting about all this. I think, Ray, you and I, we first met, it's been more years than I want to count back in our days at Actra and Netscape and it's been quite a run. I sold my company GroupSwim to Salesforce in 2009 and over the last 11 years, have built a variety of products at Salesforce and the last three years was managing our Commerce Cloud and Community Cloud business, which I'm sure you've all used it. If you ever went shopping at places like Adidas or New Balance or any of those, you've used Commerce Cloud. And if you've got online help from anywhere from Sonos to Google Nest, you've used Community Cloud. These products touch a lot of people and it's been super fun. Very rewarding. I've been super lucky.

**Ray Rike** (2:08)
It's amazing when you become a $20 billion plus company, right? Being famous for your Sales Cloud and then the Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud. I'm not even sure a lot of people know how big your Commerce Cloud was. So that's great to hear. But let's go back to the beginning of your story. So as you said, we met at Netscape, where you were running kind of platform product management for our e-commerce group. And then you became a VP of Product Management at great companies like Commerce One and a VP of Marketing. Really an amazing career kind of success. And then in 2005, you started your own startup. What was behind the decision to be going to the Entrepreneurals Journey?

**Mike Micucci** (2:46)
You know, I looked back on 2005 and I think we were coming out still in the.com like hangover. And I was super lucky Netscape and then Commerce One. It was like you're in a complete vortex of craziness. Like everybody wanted your products. You were like the bell at the ball, right? Super shiny object and just got a massive exposure globally to what software can do and how to transform businesses.
And then the.com thing hit and I went to a few startups. And I also got to see the struggle that smaller companies had and what good looks like and what good does not look like. And in 2005, I'm like, look, I always want to do my own company. There was a couple of guys that I knew from Netscape and Commerce One that wanted to do it. So we like, hey, we know what we're doing. We see good, we see bad and let's do this. So I wouldn't say it was any more sophisticated than that. I always had a desire and I felt like over the last whatever years, I really got a view of all angles of businesses and it worked out really well. If you haven't done, anybody hasn't done it at their own company, it's the best and worst job all combined in one. It's awesome.

**Ray Rike** (3:57)
Well, you kind of jumped into the deep end and that is a metaphor for a company that you created called GroupSwim. And I believe it was a collaboration platform. Kind of what was your vision of what the collaboration platform in 2005 could become?

**Mike Micucci** (4:11)
Well, it was before Facebook and the others really evolved. And what the initial thesis of the company was, how could we mine conversations to extract the best information, answers and recommendations and things like that. And so we were really looking at how we connected groups of people that was shared common interest and share those best thoughts. And that was the initial vision. My co-founder, Yari, he's Swedish. He came from, so our engineering team was in Stockholm, and he had his PhD from the Royal Institute in Stockholm, and specializing in machine learning and AI. So this was a very early attempt at that, and how to connect communities and use AI to extract knowledge.