Dan Loewenherz
Building at Opendoor, Former CTO at Coffee Meets Bagel
Salesforce looks less attractive than ServiceNow at this point, making a rotation from Salesforce into ServiceNow worth considering. x.comÂ
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.comÂ
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.comÂ
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.comÂ
Salesforce faces real AI threats: more competition, margin headwinds from compute costs and disruption risk for businesses like Tableau and Service Cloud. Agentforce is showing some momentum, and the stock felt oversold earlier, but it is not attractive at current levels. x.comÂ
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.comÂ
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.comÂ
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 owns the customer data AI needs to be valuable, so the death-of-software trade is aging badly. Hardware and software climb together, and this quarter showed the AI benefit cannot be captured on the chip side alone. Per @qualtrim, Salesforce now earns $10.96 a share at 18x earnings, versus $5.56 at 39x two years ago. x.comÂ
Salesforce is no longer cheap enough given how much wallet share core CRM is losing. Organic growth only matches nominal GDP despite a massive increase in agentic spending, and large enterprises increasingly see Salesforce as a data pipe for their own custom agents, an ex-growth business that deserves a low multiple. The Informatica acquisition doubles down on that weak model. Salesforce was too cheap at 12x non-GAAP earnings, but near high-teens it is fair, and terminal risks have not abated. … Show more