Salesforce's logo was the word "software" inside a red circle with a line through it. The company sold a tool for tracking customers and deals, and it ran entirely on the web. Customers paid by the month and never installed a thing. When it filed to go public in December 2003, the dot-com crash was still fresh, and most big companies still bought software on discs with large upfront licenses.

An Oracle Man's Apartment

Marc Benioff was a senior executive at Oracle when he started Salesforce in 1999 with Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez. They built the first version in a San Francisco apartment. The bet was that business software could work like a website. Salesforce would host everything, fix bugs once for every customer, and charge a subscription. Rivals sold the same kind of tool as a license, plus months of installation work.

Two Price Hikes, Then a Pop

Demand pushed Salesforce to raise its price range twice. It priced at $11 a share on June 22, 2004, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange as CRM. The stock closed its first day at $17.20, up 56 percent. Salesforce then grew into one of the largest software companies in the world. It bought Tableau in 2019 and Slack in 2021, and it still trades on the NYSE as CRM.

Cover: Solar Effect in the Clouds-Ocean, Gustave Le Gray. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for clouds over the sea (the cloud).