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
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SaaStr 432: 5 Interesting Learnings from Wix at $1B in ARR with SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin
SaaStr 431: The Playbook to Boosting Net Retention Quickly with Tim Kopp, CEO and Executive Chairman @ Terminus
SaaStr 430: The Secrets to $1B ARR and 100,000 Happy Customers with Brian Halligan, CEO and Co-Founder @ HubSpot, and Jason Lemkin, CEO and Founder @ SaaStr
SaaStr 429: The Current State of SaaS Companies, Subscriptions, and Retention in 2021 with Patrick Campbell, Founder & CEO @ ProfitWell
SaaStr 428: How to Execute a Winning Self-Service Strategy with Naomi Rozenfeld, VP of Revenue @ Wix Answers, and Amelia Ibarra, SVP & GM @ SaaStr
SaaStr 427: How to Build a Great Intern Program with Farhan Thawar, VP Engineering @ Shopify
SaaStr 426: How to Market at Mass Scale, with Harry Stebbings and Ryan Bonnici, CMO @ Whereby
SaaStr 425: 5 Interesting Learnings from Atlassian at $2B in ARR with SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin
SaaStr 424: How To Raise Your Next Round. What It Takes to Really Raise Capital in 2021 with Christoph Janz, Co-Founder and Partner @ Point Nine Capital
SaaStr 423: The Misunderstanding of Enterprise Marketing and What it Really Takes to Scale with Menaka Shroff, Director of Marketing @ Google
SaaStr 422: The Twists and Turns Along the Way to Building a Unicorn with SalesLoft CEO, Kyle Porter, and SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin
SaaStr 421: 11 tips to Build Stronger Relationships with Customers with Jason Lemkin, CEO @ SaaStr
SaaStr 420: Mastering the Art and Science of Product-Led Growth with Mickey Alon, Founder, and CTO @ Gainsight PX and Ciara Peter, VP, Product @ Gainsight
SaaStr 419: How To Collaborate, Manage & Work with Developers with Jeff Lawson, CEO and Co-Founder @ Twilio and Jason Lemkin, CEO @ SaaStr
SaaStr 418: 10 Rules for Defining Churn with Andrea Webb, SVP of Customer Success & Retention @ Solarwinds, and Tim Willey, the SVP of Commercial Strategy & Operations @ ForgeRock
SaaStr 417: How Sales and Product Really Should Work Together with Javier Molina, VP, Corporate Sales, Americas @ MongoDB and Sahir Azam, Chief Product Officer @ MongoDB
SaaStr 416: The Secret Sauce for Scaling to $1B with Sharon Prosser, VP, Global SMB GTM and Business Development @ Zendesk, and Astha Malik, VP, GTM Strategy, Planning and Enablement @ Zendesk
SaaStr 415: Fighting Churn with Data featuring, Carl Gold, Chief Data Scientist @ Zuora
SaaStr 414: How to Leverage the Cloud Giants to Scale to 100 Million ARR and Beyond with Snowflake, CrowdStrike, Sumo Logic, and Sapphire Ventures
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