Quotes from Parker Harris

Our output and continued success is all about our culture. Ours has to be highly collaborative, and we have company-wide events and processes to make sure everyone stays aligned.

I've used the term 'Facebook for the enterprise,' and everyone goes, 'We don't want Facebook in the enterprise,' because it conjures up that it's not secure, and it's going to be a waste of time. All these things are true, which is why Facebook is not in the enterprise.

We do a lot of outbound work where we're talking about the future. As we get involved with these new products, it helps us have a platform to talk about where the future is going.

If you want a database, you don't go out and say you're going to write it. I see platforms as going in that direction.

I grew up loving computers and math, actually. I also loved English literature and French, but I became obsessed with computers when the Apple II was coming out.

My favourite moments at Dreamforce are when people come up and thank me randomly. It's a selfish time for me, as I get lots of positive feedback.

We're paying a lot of attention to the iPad. But we're expanding that to a tablet focus.

Phones are a big deal, but tablets are an even bigger deal. So we're doing a lot of design work and experimentation around the tablet experience.

I remember my school had some of the first Apple IIs in North Carolina. I remember, when I first started using them, we were using a cassette tape to store programs because we didn't have floppy disk drives.

We're a very iterative company, so we jump on basically all new technology.

After the dotcom boom blew up, it increased the focus on questions like, 'Why should I trust you to help run my business? How do I know you're not going to go away like every other company?' That was hard. We had to keep proving ourselves.

When you come to San Francisco, we want you to know where Salesforce is.

What I see now is the consumerisation of IT. I don't want my company to tell me that I have to use a BlackBerry or I have to use a Windows phone. I just want to use the phone I want and have it all work.

Where I'm focused now is how I get more women leaders. We decided not to just look outside the company for great women to hire, but to help women rise up through the ranks internally.

Businesses can't afford to react to what their customers want; they need to anticipate their needs.

We actually went public partly because we wanted companies to realise we were not going away.

Diving into data has never been more critical for businesses in order to make fast, accurate decisions about customer behaviors and needs and drive holistic business knowledge.

I still believe heavily that we have to be careful about having this ego and hubris as a successful corporation, that we should do it all. Because then I think we start to fail our customers and we're too focused on taking over the world.

I think the legacy is really the company that we built. That's what makes me happy. I'm a very simple person, so that's all I really need.

We are building technology to keep up with what's happening in the world. It's transforming the way people are working. We're bringing the enterprise to the world.

I have employees that are, you know, other types of diversity, coming to me and saying 'Well, why aren't we focused on these other areas as well?' and I said yes, we should focus them, but, you know, the phrase we use internally is, 'If everything is important, then nothing is important.'

Wearable technology is not just for consumers. It creates a tremendous opportunity for businesses, too.

Looking at the trends that we have gone through as a company, where we started the company, it's all about cloud computing, and we're still cloud computing. And then we went through this space on social. When Facebook came out, that was amazing.

One of our first jobs was at Saba Software. We were helping them build their products for the cloud. We wanted to build our own product and move away from consulting. We were looking for a change. The CEO of Saba introduced me to Marc Benioff.