Guest: Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI

In 2020, Clara Shih quit Hearsay, the company she founded and ran for 11 years; in hindsight, she says “I probably should have quit a little bit sooner.” But at the time, she cared a lot — too much — about what everyone else thought. “There's a lot of guilt around leaving initially and feeling bad for feeling bad,” Clara says. But her worries subsided when her replacement and former COO, Mike Boese, guided the company with “class and grace” to an exit: A $125 million+ acquisition just this week by Yext.

In this episode, Clara meets Joubin on the top level of Salesforce Tower to discuss Sarah Friar, AI “frenemies,” practice and discipline, quantifying hard work, burnout, turning off, Intercom, elite operators, “Serviceforce,” ChatGPT, hiring for hunger, kids and achivement, Thomas “TK” Kurian, Slack, David Schmeier, Juan Perez, Nvidia GPUs, Silvio Savarese and Frontier AI, Starbucks, and Sheryl Sandberg.

Chapters:

(01:04) - Apple’s OpenAI partnership
(03:18) - Organizing your life
(04:45) - Working smarter
(07:49) - Hindsight
(08:58) - Hearsay’s acquisition by Yext
(11:23) - What everyone else thinks
(14:25) - Productive worry
(17:27) - Coming (back) to Salesforce
(20:47) - Paranoia and immigrant hustle
(25:42) - Quitting
(26:39) - Meetings and infusing AI
(29:38) - Internal time savings
(31:48) - The Matthew McConaughey ads
(33:48) - Different horizons
(37:35) - France and sovereign AI
(38:46) - How Clara uses AI to keep up
(40:33) - Dis-intermediating Netflix
(41:27) - Who Salesforce AI is hiring
(42:05) - Advice from Howard Schultz and Marc Benioff

Links:

#195 CEO Salesforce AI, Clara Shih: Above the Clouds

Grit