5 things I learned from the Salesforce MVP Summit (and more)!

I didn’t know this was possible, but last week’s MVP Summit was better than Dreamforce!

Me looking like a fool, genius Dan Appleman + ice cream, Harshit Pandey SHARP, Adam Purkiss gun show!

Background: Salesforce flew all ~100 MVPs for an all expenses paid trip, where we spent the entire time collaborating with Salesforce executives on the future of the platform!

SO – without giving away too much and breaking my NDA, here’s what I learned!

1. There are MASSIVE changes coming up within the next few releases!
   Holy cow. Every Dreamforce I walk away shocked at the industry-changing announcements. Chatter and Salesforce1 are perfect examples. But what Salesforce has in the pipeline is much bigger than anything we’ve seen before! Incredible!
2. It’s more important than ever to code in Salesforce.
   This platform is growing at an unimaginable rate. The use case for Salesforce is nothing like it was 3 years ago and it’s going to grow even more in the next 3 years as well. I never thought I’d say this but a master of everything in Salesforce is going to be even more valuable than they are today!
3. Salesforce really listens to the community.
   It was almost scary seeing executive after executive refer to specific members of the community and their ideas on the IdeaExchange and Twitter. Salesforce employees are literally the busiest people I’ve seen working at any company and I have no idea where they find the time to listen to us whine all day!
4. The people running Salesforce are geniuses.
   Their plans for the company exceeded my wildest expectations and their vision is incredible. I feel like I’m thinking 1000 steps behind them and they’ve teleported into the future to see what the landscape is before making their decisions today. These guys are truly taking over the world. Safe Harbor!
5. Everyone is hanging out on the official Salesforce IRC channel!
   This is where all the superstars spend their time! There’s a group of 30 – 50 people on this channel at any time of the day ranging from Salesforce employees to business owners to some of the best programmers in the industry. I’m going to be joining this community too – stop by and say “hi” some time!

How I did on my goals:

1. Meet Marc Benioff and tell him how I fulfilled the promise we made years ago!
   FAIL. He wasn’t there unfortunately!
2. Meet some of my Salesforce heroes, like Jason Venable and Steven Herod, among others!
   SUCCESS! Gonna dedicate an entire post to what they taught me!
3. Influence the future of Salesforce and tell them how hungry Sfdc99 readers are!
   SUCCESS! Didn’t even need to do this, they’re making it a top priority!
4. Recruit some MVP(s) to work with me at Google!
   FAIL. Sometimes I think I scare people away.
5. Bring home lots of free t-shirts and stuff!
   SUCCESS! Free shoes! Need I say more?!
   

More pictures:

Partially drunk!

Hanging out with a Success community legend!

So much dev talent in one spot!!!

Nicest MVP award goes to the Wobster!

There was even a baby! Youngest MVP of the bunch!

Fun fact: An embarrassingly large percentage of MVPs memorize everything about Frozen.
Just a staggering number of references!

And guess how they ended the Summit??!?! Blasting THIS!