Peer Praise amidst Peer Pressure

I should have blogged about this when I wrote about the Workday session in August. The fact that co-founder Aneel Bhusri went out of his way to praise Marc Benioff of salesforce.com on several occasions during the day. Aneel is no slouch – he was a very competent lieutenant to founder Dave Duffield when PeopleSoft was doing its meteoric journey in the 90s. Over the last decade, as an investor at Greylock he has an enviable record even as other investors have lost interest in enterprise technology. He has led Workday through the tricky phases of early growth in an early SaaS market. He knows well in the next phase investors and analysts will use salesforce as a benchmark to measure Workday. Yet, he repeatedly praised Marc that day in front of the many influencers in that session. In our hyper-competitive tech world filled with petty jealousies, most peer executive praise is grudging, if at all.

To his own credit, while Marc can be bitterly critical of competitor companies, he is generally nice to executives there. So he mocks Oracle every chance he gets but is usually nice to Larry Ellison himself. And he is particularly nice to executives in consumer tech. Every speech praises a Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. He is quoted in my book

“ We stand on the shoulders of giants like Jerry Yang [founder of Yahoo!], Pierre Omidyar [of eBay], Jeff Bezos [of Amazon], and Biz Stone [of Twitter].”

I should have blogged about it again last week when I saw Aneel briefly at Dreamforce and he was again lavish in his praise of Marc. Again, there was no need to be, and it was genuine.

Well, Aneel has done it again and praises Marc and salesforce this time on his own blog.  The least I can do is point it out and hope we see more of such generosity from other tech executives in the new year.