What I Learned Pitching Marc Benioff My Startup at Dreamforce

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In the fall of 2014, my brother Jeremy and I had just started working together on our first "real" startup. We both had day jobs. Jeremy was working for a small start-up in , and I was selling for an analytics company in New York. What we both realized in our daily work was how difficult it was for our employees to share constructive feedback in a way that would help our company and our leaders grow and improve. We needed a safe space where employees could share feedback about their work experiences and the people they work with.

Jeremy and I became obsessed with this problem. Jeremy spent his evenings learning Ruby on Rails to code the first version of our application. The site was called Backdoor, but we didn't own backdoor.com. Unfortunately, we owned checkmybackdoor.com, which wasn't much better. The idea was simple and the interaction was basic: a public forum to provide anonymous feedback on your co-workers with the ability to 'thumbs up' or 'thumbs down' and add a comment on the profile of a work colleague. We validated the connection of an employee to his colleague based on data from . In September, we launched Backdoor for a small group of people going about our day-to-day business.

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As you can imagine with any anonymous commenting platform, especially a professional one, moderation was important. We saw a few bad apples on the site, but nearly 85% of Backdoor's content was constructive and positive. It was good enough for us. We had a working MVP. We had real users. We grew organically, as others brought their friends and co-workers into the network. I started seeding the network by sending emails to employees of companies where their co-workers had been rated on Backdoor. We grew to 500,000 profiles on the platform, and with that traction, I was confident we were ready to launch a seed round.

However, Jeremy and I didn't know how to raise capital. From my days in enterprise software, I always found success the more I sold in a business. With that in mind, I asked myself who was the most influential person in enterprise SaaS, who valued the company culture, and would understand the problem we were looking to solve. The answer: Marc Benioff, CEO of .

Benioff would be an ideal investment partner. But how the hell does one come into contact with "the Colossus of the Cloud"? In October, my good friend Victor had received from his company an extra pass to Salesforce's annual conference, Dreamforce, which they had no intention of using. He asked me if I wanted to attend, as it might be a good opportunity to learn how to develop and scale Backdoor. I knew it was my window.

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On the first day of Dreamforce, I hovered outside the Moscone Center in San Francisco to see if I could get a chance to introduce Benioff. We waited nearly two hours, and I had almost given up hope when I saw the cameras flashing and a giant security motorcade coming out of the theater. It was as if an American president had just left the building. Coincidentally, that was the end of Tony Robbins and Benioff's keynote. I looked at Victor and said, "I'm going in." Victor replied, "You're crazy."

Benioff was escorted by three bodyguards, so I decided to approach him head-on so I wouldn't get tasered or arrested. I walked past the chief security officer, held out my hand to Benioff, and said, "Marc, we haven't spoken yet, but I know you care about the culture at Salesforce. I'm building a better version of LinkedIn and we already have 500,000 users on our platform. Would you be willing to hear more?"

After Benioff realized I wasn't there to assassinate him, he waved to his bodyguards and pulled out his phone. He asked me the name of the site. I replied firmly, "backdoor.com." Benioff raised his eyebrows. I clarified, "Well, technically, we don't own the backdoor.com domain. It's actually, ch...