<article>In line with the growing trend of corporates deepening their engagement with startup ventures, Salesforce too is intent on treading this path.</article>

In line with the growing trend of corporates deepening their engagement with startup ventures, Salesforce too is intent on treading this path.
In an interview with DEALSTREETASIA, <a style="color: #000080;" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/ludoviculrich" target="_blank">Ludovic Ulrich</a>, Head of Startup Relations at Salesforce, provided some insights into the firm&#8217;s strategy and its plans to grow its involvement with startups in emerging and frontier markets across the Indo-Pacific as it moves to fill the <a style="color: #000080;" href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2015/12/07/the-one-thing-missing-in-salesforces-growth-plans/2/#6f96a4c82c41" target="_blank">gap in its growth strategy</a>.
He notes, &#8220;A lot of startups have great vision. But vision without execution is hallucination.” Ulrich discusses the agenda of Salesforce, how <a style="color: #000080;" href="http://yourstory.com/2015/04/tips-for-corporates-to-engage-startups/" target="_blank">corporates successfully engage with startups</a>, as well as his perspective on Southeast Asia&#8217;s ecosystem.
Edited excerpts: 
<h4 style="text-align: justify;">Tell us about Salesforce&#8217; engagement with local startups in Singapore and the region? </h4>
Salesforce wants to build an ecosystem of innovation, so our agenda is concise and simple. Right now, its about expanding ‘Salesforces for Startups’ in Singapore and the broader Asian region.
We have more than 5,000 members across 120 countries, making this a global community. It’s about how to build, how to grow and how to give back. Eventually, any founder needs to do this.
In terms of building, its about founders, technical leads and CTOs. For growth, it&#8217;s about engaging with customers, irrespective of market. We want to teach best practices, which translate to workshops and product access to startups.
And finally, it’s about giving back and creating a conversation about technology that elevates the debate to one revolving about building a culture. And, in this, the journey of Salesforce as a corporate culture can serve as a template.
It’s about helping a company keep a sense of purpose, while integrating philanthropy in our approach &#8211; the <a style="color: #000080;" href="http://www.salesforce.com/company/salesforceorg/" target="_blank">1-1-1 Model</a> &#8211; where entrepreneurs creating a company contribute 1 per cent of equity, 1 per cent of product, and 1 per cent of employees&#8217; time doing ‘good’ things.
We leave it up to the the founders to decide what is good, but bear in mind it’s increasingly difficult to recruit youth. So the question is how do you inspire Millennials by building a company that has a social mission?
How can we be actionable via the 1-1-1 Model? Our startup programme involves pledging 1 per cent to growing the community and we’re trying to promote these practices to the startup community through activities such as technical workshops in a school.
<h4 style="text-align: justify;">What is your experience in [structuring relationships] <a style="color: #000080;" href="https://hbr.org/2016/02/big-companies-should-collaborate-with-startups" target="_blank">between startups and corporations</a>?</h4>
I learnt a lot from my time at Microsoft. A lot of companies are trying to engage with startups. The agenda ranges from being a pipeline for M&amp;A and innovation, to infusing elements of startup culture into their own corporate culture and finding out how to serve their customers in a better fashion.
It’s about asking: “How do we leverage our platform and also adopt some best practices that have led to Salesforce success?”
We need to be very transparent and maintain a structure that’s intuitive, functional and simple to implement, with things like building a business in the cloud. What I learnt is that corporates need to remove friction in terms of engaging with startups.
The efforts aimed at building an ecosystem of innovation around Salesforce is about being intentional in equipping the startups with what they need to innovate.
Apart from my experience with Microsoft, I also learn from corporate startup engagement (CSE) that at the end of the day we need a programme that allows people to engage. And this often relies on the passion of colleague and employees, which we aim to maintain in the corporate culture of Salesforce.
We want to attract employees and partners that can work with and represent startup ventures and elements of the entrepreneurial community, while infusing that corporate cultural DNA into our ecosystem. We originated the 1-1-1 model because we saw that a lot of startups have great vision. But vision without execution is hallucination.
We’re in the middle of a <a style="color: #000080;" href="http://startup%20revolution" target="_blank">Startup Revolution</a>. It’s never easier than today to start a business globally. With cloud computing, you have all the ecosystems being structured in a similar manner.
The problem now is that its easier for everybody, so how to differentiate? Many startups fail because they lack customers, not because they lack funding or technology. Hopefully, by engaging and spreading a culture of execution that we have in Salesforce, which has made us successful, we also want to spread a customer-centric mentality.
Customers make their choice more on customer experience than price and product. So entrepreneurs have to be intentional about spreading best practices. It’s not the goal of Salesforce to have a pipeline of successful startup ventures for investment or acquisition, but to create an ecosystem around us, to be seen as a platform of choice.
For instance, we have AppExchange, functioning essentially as an Apple app store for enterprise apps with about 3000 apps right now. Of course, the needs in Asia are different. What we’re seeing is the emergence and evolution of a market that is highly mobile and social in nature. How do we build Salesforce into this? To achieve that, we’re growing our customer base in the region and looking out for the next big success stories.
<h4 style="text-align: justify;">How did your time with Microsoft shape your approach to relationships with startups? What are the crucial elements necessary for positive startup-corporate collaboration?</h4>
Microsoft, Salesforce and a few others are companies that care about the role of the developer. We do a lot with startups, and the key thing is when I design this programme, I want to go beyond technical dimension. For me, the customer story is critical. Technology is a means to an end, and the end is to please your customer and get them to come to you.
Successful founders are customer-centric. If you go after opportunities in your universe, you’ll see that the ones who win are those focusing on their customers all the time. I would argue in today’s world that a customer-oriented startup venture would tend to win out. So that’s the key element.
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<h4 style="text-align: justify;">Among the various ecosystems in Asia, where do you see Salesforce being the most active? Which specific areas of cloud computing in the Asia Pacific does Salesforce see as being a growth sector? </h4>
So my view is based on these facts; you’re seeing significant middle class growth and the emergence of a mobile-only, tech-savvy generation. You have to engage with these people in a very personalised way.
It comes back to the customer experience. If it doesn’t please me, I’ll skip it. At the same time, this is happening in a fragmented market, so you have to be extremely efficient in execution. This is a typical startup story.
You have to build infrastructure where you have a ‘single source of truth’ in relation to engaging with the customer and providing a positive service. As you’re growing, how to make sure everybody is on the same page and aligned with the corporate ethos.
<h4 style="text-align: justify;">With its [segmentation] into infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), in which specific field do you expect to see the most growth in Asia?</h4>
We live at a time where platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is a given. Founders don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so the discussion about PaaS is a higher level of abstraction. There’s a platform called Heroku, which is a Y Combinator startup, we acquired. The growth of Heroku saw the founders wanting to assemble tech and go to market.
Now the the last thing a founder wants is to build the plumbing. You can go higher in the stack and move from being a car manufacturer to assembling parts together to build a car. SaaS will grow automatically to replace legacy businesses and solution providers. The Internet-as-a-service (IaaS) is nothing much, as this is the way to build a company at the very minimum.
Salesforce believes PaaS is the way to go, so we focus on building the solution, versus taking care of the plumbing.
<h4 style="text-align: justify;">What are the sort of initiatives that you expect for Salesforce to launch for enterprises &amp; startups in Southeast Asia?</h4>
Southeast Asia is a crucial market for us. Specifically, Salesforce for Startups is what we want to expand in the region to enable startups and small and medium enterprises to expand and engage with customers. It is related to our market position which will see us doing more to improve brand awareness and engage more with the startup ecosystem.
The Bangkok ecosystem is very active right now, and we’re exploring an engagement model, in terms of the online and offline dimensions. We go where innovation is, whether it is Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur. Salesforce for Startups has 5,000 clients right now, and we want to get to a target client base of 10,000 ventures rapidly.
Many entrepreneurs here realise that this is not Silicon Valley and they want to be very intentional about the executing and engaging their customers.
<h4 style="text-align: justify;">Whats your experience with the European and Australian startup ecosystems, versus your experience with Silicon Valley? </h4>
Some folks have referred to this as the ‘rise of the rest’. This expression was coined by Steve Case ,the founder of America Online (AOL). What that means is that entrepreneurial activity has emerged everywhere, with differing levels of maturity among the ecosystems.
They try to leverage local assets and specialties to distinguish themselves. For instance, Helsinki has emerged as a place where mobile and gaming are sectoral specialities that are leveraged upon.
Singapore is a particular sweet spot for startups. What you have here are expertise, assets and industry competence that can be leveraged upon, using expertise and local knowledge to distinguish itself.
It’s not necessary to replicate a model like Silicon Valley. What I see in Europe is that companies are conscious of proving their product-market fit and relevance before going to other markets. These firms are really conscious of winning Europe before going to other markets.
Singapore might not be able to do that so they need to embrace the fragmented nature of the region, as it’s a very good filter in order to think big from the beginning. What could differentiate Asia is that the constraints and necessity to address multiple currencies, languages and cultures are a real challenge, and if you can make it in this market, then congratulations.
Matters like compliance, billing and support of currencies &#8211; all of these are possible friction points when building and scaling a business and Salesforce aims to be a platform that solves this. For Australia, it’s hard to make a general statement but founders understand their technology and the ecosystem is very mature.
Singapore has a good base and comparable maturity that has evolved significantly since 2012. I’ve met a lot of companies that want to go after the Asian market, with many Australian firms targeting the US market.
We’re partnering with <a style="color: #000080;" href="http://www.justcoglobal.com" target="_blank">JUSTCO</a>, as well as <a style="color: #000080;" href="http://dealstreetasia.com/tag/startupbootcamp" target="_blank">Startupbootcamp</a>, to build upon our current efforts. We want to identify relevant centres of gravity and work with those though the startup initiative to scale and let startups learn how to be customer-focused and community-focused.
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Ludo Ulrich of Salesforce discusses Salesforces' agenda for engaging more deeply with startups in Southeast Asia

Exclusive: For startups, vision without execution is hallucination, says Ludo Ulrich, Salesforce

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