Daave “3 and 30” Tepper
Institutional Endowment Investor
Owning Salesforce looks like a hope and a prayer because organizations can now design and build their own CRM. A self-built system can be fitted to a company's own users and uses, fully own its data and normalize it with the rest of its database. A post the author replies to recalls firms replacing CRM with Airtable; even that was still not custom enough. x.com
Salesforce's CRM stack is not AI-native and is heavy on sales and service, leaving it open to contract cancellations, a far more punishing blow than the slow burn of pricing and margin pressure. A friend in a top role at a top-five venture firm is doing final testing of an internally built CRM before canceling Salesforce. x.com x.com
Salesforce is exposed to AI-native rivals aiming to own the sale itself rather than build a better CRM. Upstarts such as Attio, Monaco and Rox can capture the decision traces behind closed deals, a learning loop Claude cannot rebuild from Salesforce's fields. Its schema is more tax than foundation: relationship-driven work like recruiting and VC does not fit it, and young startups cannot be served profitably. Its 150k customers won't churn soon, but new AI-native firms may never install it. … Show more
Salesforce looks vulnerable long term because users hate it and will happily switch to alternatives, while in the AI era users actually liking a product will be a key moat for SaaS stocks. Adobe showed this when users who hated it switched more easily to Figma. Present-day fundamentals look great across these companies, so the threat is still theoretical. x.com
Salesforce's poor M&A is literally half the reason its multiple stays low. Slack and Informatica are cited as examples, with Braze raised as a question; AI making Tableau obsolete in a few years would be a separate risk, not itself poor M&A. x.com
Salesforce might be dead as intelligence becomes an abundant commodity, though it can argue it has distribution. Claude, OpenAI and open-weight models such as Kimi, Qwen and DeepSeek are in a price fight to zero, so years of developer work no longer form a moat. The new moats are trust, distribution and data, especially data behind corporate firewalls, in hospitals or otherwise hard to get. x.com
Salesforce has one of the worst price-to-value, usability and ecosystem profiles of any CRM, reason enough alone to short it, judging from years of using it as a core work platform and attending Dreamforce. Its 20% one-day jump is a great day for longtime holders to get out. x.com
Salesforce will probably do OK because it is so deeply embedded with customers, but it may be a cigar butt whose returns come out acceptable without real organic growth. x.com
Salesforce is a company that cannot win on talent or product, making it one to avoid, though this view has been wrong before. x.com
Salesforce's execution has been abysmal, and the market will never trust Marc Benioff. Fifteen years ago, people hired from Salesforce helped companies scale; the Salesforce people encountered now are genuinely very bad. It might still work, but it is hard to back. x.com
Salesforce is accelerating because of AI, since AI agents need a CRM as their source of truth for data. Companies are not building their own CRMs, which is extremely hard; they build agents that plug into Salesforce, as human workers do. Q2 showed the lowest revenue churn ever, Agentforce and Data revenue growing over 200% year on year, and rising seat sales. Some SaaS is cooked, but gems like Salesforce were left for dead. x.com
Salesforce looks less attractive than ServiceNow at this point, making a rotation from Salesforce into ServiceNow worth considering. x.com
