Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, and application development. Founded by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, Salesforce quickly grew into one of the largest companies in the world, making its IPO in 2004. Salesforce's continued growth makes it the first cloud computing company to reach US$1billion in annual revenue by fiscal year 2009, and the world's largest enterprise software firm by 2022. Today, Salesforce is one of the largest technology companies in the world, and as of September 19, 2022, is the 61st largest company in the world by market cap with a value of nearly US$153 billion. Salesforce ranked 136th on the most recent edition of the Fortune 500, making US$26.5billion in 2022. Since 2020, Salesforce has also been a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. History Salesforce was founded in 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, together with Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez as a software as a service (SaaS) company. Two of Salesforce's earliest investors were Larry Ellison, the co-founder and first CEO of Oracle, and Halsey Minor, the founder of CNET. Salesforce was severely affected by the dot-com bubble bursting at the beginning of the new millennium, with the company laying off 20% of its workforce. Despite its losses, Salesforce continued strong during the early 2000s. Salesforce also gained notability during this period for its "the end of software" tagline and marketing campaign, in which it also hired actors to hold up signs with its slogan outside a Siebel Systems conference. Salesforce's revenue continued to increase from 2000 to 2003, with 2003's revenue skyrocketing from $5.4 million in the fiscal year 2001 to over $100 million by December 2003. Also in 2003, Salesforce held its first annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. In June 2004, the company had its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock symbol CRM and raised US$110 million. In 2006, Salesforce launched IdeaExchange, a platform that allows customers to connect with company product managers. In 2009, Salesforce passed $1 billion in annual revenue. Also, in 2009, the company launched Service Cloud, an application that helps companies manage service conversations about their products and services. In 2014, the company released Trailhead, a free online learning platform. In October 2014,