Alex Wiltschko

Eventually, after college, applied to YC with my first company, which was basically, it was called E-Tax, like contacts with an E. It was like a personal CRM product.

I mean, yeah, I think it's a very unique target audience for whom it's a very high pain point.

So I think there's a market there, but it's a very power user, prosumer audience.

And the punchline of it, though, was that after a year of work, we worked on this thing, raised some money, hired a couple people.

And then we kind of realized, I sort of realized, I think it's a more niche market than we set out to go after.

And we had some different acquirers come knocking.

Salesforce was one of them, but also big consumer internet companies who wanted to just buy us for talent.

And to me, it was like, we were winner 2010, that batch, and the acquisition talks were like 2011, basically, late 2011.

And, you know, we kind of got to this point where I realized, like, I want to work on a really big problem, like a meta problem, not like here's one small niche for, like, some people.

But instead, like, what's, like, the underlying problem, which is, you know, you could actually build this whole CRM with, like, an app platform, right?

Like, you really want something that's a lot more just configurable and customizable.

And so we took an acquisition by Salesforce, worked there.

And like for me, the big light bulb moment was, you know, Salesforce is one big database.

I mean, I would say.

He's an electric on the job.

Well, there weren't that many, like all hands were quite infrequent at Salesforce at the time.

But like, I went to like their big sales kickoff that year.

I mean, Mark is a very smart guy and also a very commanding presence.

He's a physically, if you met him on the street and you didn't know who he was, you'd probably think he was a linebacker in the NFL.

He's massive.