The Cloud Meets Mardi Gras
The origin story of Dreamforce started when Larry Ellison booked Marc Benioff to speak at Oracle OpenWorld, but snubbed him at the last minute. As legend has it, Marc immediately booked the largest event space he could find across the street from OpenWorld to hold his own conference…and thus Dreamforce was born. I started a few years later, but the legend and gravity of Dreamforce was on an astronomical trajectory. In fact, when I started at Salesforce the entire creative department was less than 30 people. When I left, five years later, just the events team was 30+ people. And, registration grew from 90,000 to 170,000.