Tobi Lütke, Shopify
If Parker Harris built the engine for enterprise sales, Tobi Lütke built the engine for modern commerce. The Shopify founder’s story is legendary: frustrated by the lack of good e-commerce software to sell snowboards online, he simply built his own. That
impulse—to solve a problem by creating a superior tool—is the core of the builder ethos. Like Harris, Lütke is a programmer at heart who obsessed over the product first. He didn't just build a store; he built a platform that allows hundreds of thousands of other entrepreneurs to build their own businesses. This focus on creating enabling technology, rather than just a single product, is a direct parallel to the Salesforce Platform that Harris was instrumental in developing. For Lütke, the best product is one that empowers others to create, a philosophy Harris has championed throughout his career.
Werner Vogels, Amazon Web Services
While not a founder in the traditional sense, Werner Vogels is the technical architect and philosophical guide behind the most significant platform of the modern internet: Amazon Web Services. As Amazon's CTO, his role mirrors that of Harris at Salesforce—translating a massive business vision into concrete, reliable, and scalable technology. Vogels, a distributed systems researcher before joining Amazon, brought academic rigor to the chaotic challenge of building a global cloud. He is a public-facing CTO, evangelizing principles like “you build it, you run it” and ensuring developers understand the 'why' behind AWS architecture. This is a role Harris has also embraced, becoming the trusted face of Salesforce's technology for customers and partners. Studying Vogels offers a masterclass in how a technical leader can shape not just a company's infrastructure, but its entire culture of innovation.
Melanie Perkins, Canva
Melanie Perkins embodies the tenet of solving a real-world frustration through sheer force of will and elegant design. Her initial idea for Canva came from seeing students struggle with complex design software like Adobe Photoshop. The vision wasn't just to make a new tool, but to democratize the entire field of design. This relentless focus on simplifying the complex for the end-user is a hallmark of great platform builders. Like Harris, who helped Salesforce pioneer the 'no software' mantra, Perkins has made professional-grade design accessible to millions without requiring them to become technical experts. Her journey involved facing over 100 rejections from investors, a testament to a long-term vision that others couldn't immediately see. Admiring Harris means appreciating the patience and persistence required to build something so intuitive it becomes indispensable, and Perkins is a perfect case study in that conviction.
Shantanu Narayen, Adobe
It’s one thing to build a great company from scratch; it’s another to steer a legacy giant through a wrenching, existential transformation. As CEO of Adobe, Shantanu Narayen did just that. He inherited a company built on selling expensive, boxed software and made the painful but prescient decision to shift its entire business to the cloud with the Creative Cloud subscription model. This was a move fraught with risk, alienating some longtime users but ultimately securing Adobe’s future and making its revenue predictable. This echoes the strategic foresight required by Harris to continuously evolve Salesforce's architecture for new eras, from mobile to AI. Narayen's leadership demonstrates that sometimes the most important act of building is having the courage to tear down an old, profitable structure to make way for a new, more durable one. His transition plan to step down after a long and successful tenure further highlights his focus on the company's long-term health.
Jensen Huang, NVIDIA
Jensen Huang represents the ultimate long-game founder. He co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 with a singular, almost stubborn vision: that specialized processors for graphics would be essential. For years, NVIDIA was primarily known in the gaming world. But Huang and his team were building a platform for accelerated computing, convinced that one day, the world would find problems that only their specialized hardware could solve. That day came with the AI revolution. The same GPUs built for rendering video games turned out to be the perfect engines for training deep learning models. This is the builder's mindset in its purest form: not just meeting the market where it is, but building the foundational technology for where it’s going. Like Harris, who built a platform capable of handling future demands, Huang invested decades in a technical architecture that is now fundamental to the entire tech industry.
