Garth’s World Gets Rocked

Image via CrunchBase

As you undoubtedly have heard, salesforce.com acquired Jigsaw. Its intention to purchase the company was announced April 21 (the most intense, surreal day of my life) and since then I have refrained from posting to Garth’s World as the two companies worked out what communications from the combined company need to look like while I undertook a search for the best beaches in the Carolinas ☺.

Now I intend to pick up where I left off, starting with an edited version of the post I that I wrote from a hotel room in Vegas where I was presenting at a Sales 2.0 Conference on April 19. Thanks for all the messages asking if the blog was going to continue on - you can be the judge as to whether or not I have been tamed by working for a public company…

In January, 2004 I was surveying what was to become the original flea infested Jigsaw ("RaptorVision" at the time) office in the Bay Shore Corporate Center in San Mateo, wondering what on earth I gave up a high paying sales job to undertake. Jim Fowler burst through the door to my empty office and declared that he couldn’t decide if our “company” would be bought out by an industry leader or if we would “go it alone” to become a public company. It was the first of many times that I assumed that his glue sniffing habit had finally become an open reality. Little did I know that the crazy bald guy would come through yet again--salesforce.com has agreed to purchase Jigsaw!
That’s right - this data company founded by two fed up sales people in the wake of the 2001 tech bust is now one of the most exciting purchases (to date) by the cloud computing pioneer. Holy freaking sh^t. I’d love to tell you that I have fully grokked the ramifications of the event, but I can’t even come close to tell you how I feel about it. Because we were dead dog broke in 2003, we gave away so much of the company to investors that I will still have to work (my Office Space dream of doing nothing will have to wait), but my kids’ education is paid for.  All the old timers that took a risk back then are in a similar situation. From what we can tell it will be business as usual for the 1.2 million members and 1300 enterprise customers of Jigsaw- it’s OK if you run Oracle CRM, MSFT Dynamics, SugarCRM or some funky homegrown system…. I truly believe that the technical and marketing expertise of salesforce.com will have an amazingly positive effect on Jigsaw. I am honestly thrilled that we are now about to be part of the salesforce.com juggernaut.

As for Garth’s World, I hope that my candid banter and dialog will remain intact but that is for you all to decide while reading. The salesforce.com commitment to Chatter leads me to believe that it appreciates the value of unfettered discussion- even from a reprobate like me. The Sales Jam is still on for spring of 2011- I hope that Fowler’s vision of a mini Dreamforce for the Jigsaw Community can rock like I have been planning. As to other details, you’ll have to wait and read the Safe Harbor statements that those guys (now us guys) are so famous for reciting at the start of every “Your Business is Now in the Cloud” PowerPoint.

For all of the top members of Jigsaw that saw us through the early years, please don’t look at this as selling out and stop entering the data that is the lifeblood of the Jigsaw Community- too many inside guys depend on us for their everyday grind of calling people they don’t know and asking for money. Our cloud data strategy is the real deal- just wait and see.

That’s it for now. I’m on the Disney ride to crazytown just like the rest of you – Hee haw!

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