Some early thoughts on the Braze x Salesforce announcement: First, it’s obviously a massive achievement for the founders, leadership team and investors. I’m impressed and, let’s face it, a bit jealous. Second, the deal values Braze at roughly 6x ARR. Certainly a premium to current market valuations, but still well below the 9x paid for Intercom/Fin, making it pretty clear that « AI for marketing » largely remains an unsolved problem, despite the OfferFit acquisition. Third, customer reactions are, unsurprisingly, shockingly bleak this morning, given that moving away from Salesforce Marketing Cloud has been Braze’s #1 selling point for over a decade (with ex-Salesforce employees now accounting for more than 10% of its total headcount). Existing Braze customers, who signed up on the promise of a better Salesforce, are now tied to the very ecosystem they worked so hard to leave behind. Not a good day for them. The deal also signals to Salesforce Marketing Cloud users that Salesforce has officially given up on the platform, since it’s buying the “better version.” It was always the least-loved product in the suite anyway, that never truly adapted to the real-time, mobile-first era. All in all, this is going to be very positive on all fronts: it will shake things up in the MarTech space, make a lot of good people insanely rich... and hopefully drive a lot of CMOs to @batch 👀