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 483: The $26B SaaS SMB Leader, Bill.com with René Lacerte, CEO of Bill.com and SaaStr CEO, Jason Lemkin
SaaStr 482: A Deep Dive on Vimeo at $330M ARR in Enterprise and Self Service with Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud, and SaaStr CEO, Jason Lemkin
SaaStr 481: Cloud-first Clarity: Evolving Infrastructure for Enterprise with Asana's Head of Engineering, Prashant Pandey
SaaStr 480: The Non-Obvious things about the Future of Fintech with Plaid COO Eric Sager and Kate Rooney, Technology Reporter at CNBC
SaaStr 479: Enterprise, SMB and Everything In Between: How to Build a Business that Scales With Your Customers with Zendesk's CTO
SaaStr 478: How to Move Upmarket and Serve Multiple Customer Segments at the Same Time with Square's Global Head of Sales, Ashley Grech
SaaStr 477: The Top Interview Questions to Ask VP of Marketing Candidates with SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin
SaaStr 476: The Secrets to Aligning Marketing and Revenue Strategies with Marqeta's CMO, Vidya Peters and Amy Chang, Board Member @ Marqeta, Disney, & P&G
SaaStr 475: 3 CEO Lessons in Scaling Enterprise CX with HubSpot's CEO Yamini Rangan
SaaStr 474: 10 Ways to Build a Moat in SaaS with SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin
SaaStr 473: Ringing the Bell on Competition with Chime's CEO Chris Britt and Satya Patel, Partner @ Homebrew
SaaStr 472: 5 Tips to Reduce the Enterprise Sales Cycle with TripActions' General Manager, Michael Sindicich
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SaaStr 468: Kevin Dorsey, VP of Inside Sales at PatientPop Shares the Cutting Edge Techniques for Building Trust in Today's Competitive Market
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SaaStr 466: SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin Shares 11 Simple Tips to Drive Down Churn
SaaStr 465: The CIOs of SurveyMonkey and Okta Share Their Strategies for Embracing the Data Tsunami
SaaStr 464: From Developer to Founder to CEO: Engineering to Enterprise with Elastic CEO Shay Banon
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