Kevin Warnock

Partial list of DreamForce '11 speakers (image from DreamForce.com)

This morning I received an email reminder to watch the DreamForce ’11 keynote this morning by Salesforce.com, Inc. CEO Marc Benioff.

I decided to watch, and I am excited about Salesforce for the first time in years.

I’m so excited that I just applied for a press credential to attend the 2011 DreamForce conference at Moscone, which is happening this week.

I have a solid connection to Salesforce.com that I don’t believe I’ve written about on my blog before.

Back in 1999 I was CEO of Hotpaper.com, Inc., the first online document creation company. LegalZoom and RocketLawyer are now the leaders in that category in the United States.

I sold Hotpaper for USD $10,000,000 in 2000. Since the sale was to a public company, the sale is documented online at the website of the Security Exchange Commission.

At the time of sale, Hotpaper had just one large scale customer — Salesforce.com.

Purple Communications, Inc. bought Hotpaper. Back then Purple was known as GoAmerica Communications, Inc., when it traded on NASDAQ under the symbol GOAM.

I lost touch with the project after I left Hotpaper shortly after the aquisition papers were finalized, so I never became closely familiar with the work Hotpaper later did for Salesforce. That means I never saw my software in action live on Salesforce.com. I am sad about that.

I do know that Salesforce was a happy customer for years after 2000, and last I heard stats from then current employees, Hotpaper’s solution was being used frequently by thousands of Salesforce customers. The story I heard as to why Salesforce eventually abandoned Hotpaper was two fold: Hotpaper was shut down by the company that bought it and Salesforce needed a multilingual version for their expanding customer base.

Salesforce approached my current company Silveroffice, Inc., in about 2005. Silveroffice is the maker of gOffice.com, the first true online office suite. gOffice has long ago been surpassed by the capable Google Docs and Zoho products, but is still kicking.

Salesforce wanted to know if I was interested in making an App Exchange version of gOffice. I didn’t want to distract my fledgling company on what I saw then as a side project, so I declined, despite being pestered by their very enthusiastic evangelists for months.

After watching the DreamForce keynote by Benioff this morning, I deeply regret not putting my full energy into the App Exchange version back then.

I am a blogger and journalist now, as evidenced by my hundreds of posts to this blog.

May the powers that be at Salesforce quickly approve my blogger credentials so I can receive a press pass for DreamForce so I can attend this week and blog about the show. This blog received over 7,400 WordPress views last month, and our Alexa ranking has shot from over 12,000,000 in December 2010 to 2,500,458 today (489,476 in the United States).

Hotpaper was funded by BlueRun Ventures. Silveroffice, Inc. (gOffice.com) is an Intel Capital Portfolo Company.

[Author’s note: I recognize that this post sounds like an ad, but I am trying to quickly catch the attention of people at Salesforce who are right now reviewing my application to give me a pass to the DreamForce event that would otherwise cost me USD $1,299. At that price, I will not attend, so this post is my primary vehicle to get into the show. If I am granted a pass, I promise to write at least five lengthy posts over the next week about the show. These posts will have the same quality as the other posts on this site.]

[Additional note: Sadly I wasn’t approved for a full pass, but I attended the expo and Eric Schmidt keynote with a free pass the show offered. I got to talk for about an hour one on one with three Salesforce employees, and I learned remarkable things I’ll write about in a different post. I was able to speak on the phone with DreamForce staff about the press pass. I was told that it was already too late for a pass when I applied, and that the web application was not programmed to stop accepting applications after the deadline.]