At 8:30 p.m. inside San Francisco’s Chase Center, a man in a Patagonia vest pumped his fist to Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” In the row ahead of me, a woman in a pencil skirt and a conference badge flashed metal hand signs. A few seats down, an old man in a blazer balanced a glass of white wine while trying to headbang.
That’s when the sheer absurdity of it all hit me: Salesforce, a company that sells customer relationship management software, had hired Metallica to play at what was essentially a giant office party.
I was at Dreamfest, a stadium-sized after-party last Wednesday at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual multi-day spectacle of enterprise software, salesmanship, and celebrity cameos. Salesforce said its conference last week drew more than 50,000 people to downtown San Francisco and bills itself as “the world’s largest AI event.” In practice, it feels like a corporate Comic-Con with better catering.
To me, the whole thing is gloriously incongruous. Salesforce’s core business is deeply unglamorous. It’s B2B SaaS, the kind of thing that normally requires a 47-slide deck to explain.
And yet, CEO Marc Benioff insists on wrapping it in spectacle: will.i.am musing about the future of education, Jesse Eisenberg giving a talk on storytelling, and Matthew McConaughey talking about “agentic enterprise” in a baritone usually reserved for movie trailers.
Dreamfest doesn’t close out the week — it lands midway through — but it’s the moment Benioff throws an outrageously over-the-top concert (for charity!) for thousands of his favorite enterprise-software enthusiasts. Past headliners have included U2, Foo Fighters, P!nk, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Fleetwood Mac.
This year’s lineup spanned both extremes of the musical spectrum: Metallica, whose drummer Benioff has long been friendly with, inside the Chase Center, and pop singer Benson Boone, whom I had to Google, performing across the street in a park. It was a choice between a CRM-powered mosh pit and whatever it is Gen Z does at concerts.
Dreamfest was my first concert
Somewhere between the free beer and the smoke machines, it hit me that this was my first concert ever.
I grew up in 1990s India, where Western bands almost never toured. Live shows were something you read about in magazines or caught clips of on MTV.
Still, Metallica was everywhere among a certain kind of Indian teenager: passed around on bootleg cassettes, scribbled across school notebooks, and treated like a shared secret.
I remember watching the “Turn the Page” music video on TV, mesmerized by lead singer James Hetfield’s voice and the idea of music that was raw and, well, foreign. Standing in the same room as him decades later felt surreal.
“This is kind of a big moment for me,” I texted some colleagues, trying not to sound like I was having an existential crisis in the middle of a corporate metal show.
Metallica, McConaughey, and mosh pits
The doors opened at 6, though Metallica didn’t take the stage until nearly two and a half hours later. In the meantime, Dreamfest felt like a trade show trying on a leather jacket. People milled around with free beers and wine; Salesforce mascots danced in the mosh pit; and the smell of pizza and fries filled the air. I spotted one guy in a “Ride the Lightning” T-shirt, surrounded by a sea of business casual attire.
A few minutes before Metallica came onstage, McConaughey appeared wearing a long coat and a cap that looked like it had wandered in from another movie set. He announced that Dreamfest had raised $9 million for UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals and told us, earnestly, to “rock.”
The crowd, a mix of sales reps, engineers, and consultants who probably hadn’t rocked since college, roared on cue. Then, as the smoke machines and blinding lights kicked in, Metallica launched into “Creeping Death,” and the world’s most professionally networked rock concert got underway.
Over the next 90 minutes, the band ripped through a greatest-hits set that spanned four decades: “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” “The Unforgiven,” “Sad but True,” “Master of Puppets,” “Enter Sandman,” and others.
Hetfield, equal parts metal god and stand-up comic, seemed amused by the crowd.
“How many tech guys does it take to screw in a light bulb?” he asked. “None. They call a tradesman.”
When someone booed pop singer Benson Boone’s simultaneous show across the street, Hetfield grinned. “Hey now, no booing! I wanna see those backflips!” (again, this is a Benson Boone reference. I had to Google this).
It was a surreal sight: thousands of Salesforce employees and people buying, using, and selling Salesforce software, headbanging under strobe lights and trading high-fives between songs. Somehow, it all made sense.
The truth is that I’ve never thought much about Salesforce beyond the letters “C,” “R,” and “M,” and giant glass towers looming over San Francisco. And yet, here I was at their party, beer in hand, shouting along to “Nothing Else Matters.”
I can’t shake the feeling that Benioff knows his software is too boring to celebrate on its own. Throwing a giant party seems like some kind of compensation. If you can’t make B2B exciting, you can at least make it loud.
By the time the final song, “Enter Sandman,” began, the crowd had fully surrendered. Phones were out, drinks were raised, and thousands of conference lanyards glowed under the stadium lights.
Teenage me, with the bootleg tapes, would never have believed his first concert would be courtesy of a company that makes sales dashboards. But stranger things have happened in Silicon Valley.
