Behind the Cloud

Why it is worth your time

Behind the Cloud is Marc Benioff's 2009 account of building Salesforce, written with Carlye Adler. It is organized as 9 playbooks covering startup, marketing, events, sales, technology, philanthropy, global expansion, finance and leadership, with 111 numbered plays. Benioff left Oracle in 1999 to start the company and the book covers its first decade. Sacks posted in Oct 2018 that every founder should read the marketing section. He ran Yammer through the same SaaS playbook, and he talks often about positioning, category creation and selling against an incumbent, which is what Benioff's early marketing against Siebel was about. It suits first-time B2B software founders who want tactics rather than theory. The caveat is that it is dated. Published in 2009, its tactics come from Salesforce's first decade, laid out as nine playbooks of numbered plays.