Leyla Seka is the executive vice president of the Salesforce Mobile platform experience. Over Leyla’s incredible 11 year journey with Salesforce she has seen the team scale from 1,800 to over 40,000 and revenue scale from $500m to over $16Bn. In Leyla’s role today, she leads the charge on extending the power of Salesforce with a full portfolio of mobile apps, and is responsible for driving product, go-to-market and other key programs around Salesforce’s mobile offerings. Prior to her current role, Leyla was executive vice president of the Salesforce AppExchange, where she launched a refreshed AppExchange storefront, a new partner program, and built an entire AppExchange-focused team, resulting in more than 4,000 solutions, installed nearly 6 million times. Beyond her day-to-day role, Leyla is also the executive sponsor of BOLDforce, Salesforce’s organization for expanding and empowering the black community at Salesforce.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
How Leyla made her way into the world of SaaS with Salesforce when it had 1,800 people and $500m in revenue? What were Leyla’s biggest learnings on people and business model through seeing the first hand hyper-scaling of Salesforce from $500m to $16Bn? How did Leyla evolve and scale as a leader herself in those 11 years? What advice does Leyla give to young people considering whether to found a startup, join a startup or join a hyper-growth company? Where do things start to break in the scaling of SaaS companies? What needs to be put in place to prepare for hyper-scale? What are the commonalities of where many founders go wrong in the scaling process? What does Leyla mean when she says, “growing up in product, you have to lead through influence”? How does Leyla think this influence can be created and maintained? How does Leyla think about the balance between effective influence and excessive influence? Why does Leyla believe that, “you can teach skills but you cannot teach empathy”? What have been her learnings from scaling teams when it comes to hiring and detecting candidates with true empathy? What can one do to nurture that empathy in the culture of the company?60 Second SaaStr:
What does Leyla know now that she wishes she had known at the beginning? What is the hardest element of Leyla’s role at Salesforce today? What does Leyla believe in SaaS that most around her disbelieve?If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:
Jason Lemkin
Harry Stebbings
SaaStr
Leyla Seka
SaaStr 542: 5 Rules to Win When Competition is Everywhere With Atlassian COO Anu Bharadwaj and Boast.AI Co-Founder Lloyed Lobo
SaaStr 541: How to Set and Hit Revenue Targets with Sam Blond, CRO at BREX
SaaStr 540: 15 Ways to Help the Sales Team with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
SaaStr 539: The Journey to Building a Successful Customer Advisory Board in the Enterprise with Mapistry VP of Customer Experience Maya Colato
SaaStr 538: Product-Led Growth: Panacea or Boondoggle? with AgentSync Co-Founder & CTO Jenn Knight and OpenPhone Co-Founder Daryna Kulya
SaaStr 537: How Hybrid is Working in Practice....What the Data Shows with Raise Commercial Real Estate CEO Justin Bedecarre and Felipe Gomez, President @ Raise
SaaStr 536: The Path to a Billion Dollars: How to Create Multi-Revenue Streams with Bill.com CRO Tom Clayton
SaaStr 535: From SendGrid to DigitalOcean: Hacks for Founders of High-Growth Startups with DigitalOcean CEO Yancey Spruill
SaaStr 534: Marketing Secrets to Hypergrowth from Building Elastic, Zuora, and Segment
SaaStr 533: The Cutting Edge Techniques for Motivating and Organizing your Sales Team in Q1 with Marilee Bear, SVP North America Enterprise Sales at Zendesk, and Bryan Elsesser, SaaStr VP of Sales
SaaStr 532: The Secrets to Scaling a Public Company with a 75% Freelancer Workforce with Upwork CEO Hayden Brown
SaaStr 531: 4 Ways to Get to $10 Billion by Working Async (Without Burning Out) with Loom CEO Joe Thomas
SaaStr 530: The Top 20 Learnings in Product-Led Growth with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
SaaStr 529: Ten Things to Avoid Being Blindsided By In Your Pursuit Of Customer Success Nick Mehta, CEO @ Gainsight
SaaStr 528: Building a $5.6B company with a Product-led Flywheel with Abhinav Asthana, CEO @ Postman
SaaStr 527: Acquiring 10,000 SMB Customers Solely from Data with Gorgias CEO Romain Lapeyre
SaaStr 526: Lessons Learned Building a $2 billion Company from Scratch with Neo4j CEO & Co-Founder Emil Eifrem
SaaStr 525: Marketing Hyper-Growth at Scale with Klaviyo Head of Marketing Kady Srinivasan
SaaStr 524: From New Relic to Salesforce to Calendly: What's Changed in Product-led Growth with Calendly CMO Patrick Moran
SaaStr 523: How to Succeed as a First-Time VP of Sales or First-Time SaaS VP with SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Insight Story: Tech Trends Unpacked
Zero-Shot
Fast Forward by Tomorrow Unlocked: Tech past, tech future
The Unbelivable Truth - Series 1 - 26 including specials and pilot
Lex Fridman Podcast