Salesforce Alumni Coming Together To Introduce The Next Big Idea in Relationship Management

It takes a network to launch a network. 

I’m proud to be a part of one of the best professional networks out there, the “Salesforce Mafia.”

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my experience at Salesforce after I joined as employee number 36 in 1999 transformed my career and sewed the seeds for Connect The Dots.

But there’s another layer to the story that’s really important.

The connections I made at Salesforce include many of my favorite people, quite a few of whom I now have as colleagues here at Connect The Dots. 

Just for grins, the team and I pulled together a run-down of all of our Salesforce alumni into this post. In case you’re curious, here it is:

Drew Sechrist, Co-Founder, CEO (and, ahem…the author of this post) spent ten years on Salesforce’s sales team, becoming the #1 sales manager and #1 account executive, globally, during Salesforce’s run from $0 to $1 billion in revenue.

Ian Swinson, Co-Founder, Head of Research and Design spent ten years in the product organization managing teams of designers and researchers, and went on to lead design teams at Facebook and Anaplan.

Jamie Grenney, Head of GTM, spent 11 years at Salesforce in sales, marketing, and product roles, where he played a key role developing sales best practices, the IdeaExchange, and the Salesforce MVP program. Jamie ran Global Enablement at Okta and went on to be CMO at PlanGrid and OwnBackup. 

Michael Joy, Chief Architect, spent four-plus years at Salesforce, where he built, scaled, and improved apps and engineering teams as a Cloud Platform Architect. Among a very long list of career accomplishments, Michael was the architect behind Quickoffice, a technology we know today as Google Docs.

Jonathan Pappas, VP of Product, Growth, is an eight-year Salesforce vet from the product management team, where he was a Sr. Director and helped create and launch Salesforce Essentials and an easy-to-buy strategy for Sales and Service Cloud. Jonathan most recently headed up product growth at Pendo where he created and scaled Pendo’s Freemium strategy, doubling the number of companies using Pendo in less than a year.

Matt Cameron, Connect The Dots Advisor, was Salesforce employee #6 in APAC, where he spent five years building and managing the ANZ Enterprise Sales Team. Today, Matt runs SaaSy Sales Leadership, one of the largest communities of SaaS sellers in the world. 

Scott Beechuk, Connect The Dots Investor at Norwest Ventures, spent six years at Salesforce, where he was Senior Vice President of Product Management for Salesforce Service Cloud. While at Salesforce, he also served as Head of Engineering, Product, UX, and Documentation for Desk.com.

Matt Holleran, Connect The Dots Investor at Cloud Apps Capital, spent two years as a VP leading Salesforce's AppExchange and Force.com Partner Team.

Michael Lazerow, Connect The Dots Investor at Velvet Sea Ventures, spent more than three years on the Salesforce leadership team as Chief Strategy Officer, after the $689 million acquisition of Buddy Media, which he co-founded.

That’s the full list, for now.

And, needless to say, I’m incredibly proud of the entire team we’re building here at Connect The Dots.

If you’re interested in joining us, take a look at our careers page. We’re hiring.