50 free Salesforce trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Whether you are a Trailblazer prepping for a Dreamforce team night, an admin who wants to test the sales floor, or just curious how a 1999 apartment startup became the world's biggest enterprise applications company, this quiz has you covered. It runs through Salesforce's founding by ex-Oracle executive Marc Benioff, the 'End of Software' guerrilla marketing against Siebel, the 2004 IPO under the ticker CRM, and the company's rise into the Dow Jones Industrial Average. There are questions on the big acquisitions (Slack, Tableau, MuleSoft, Heroku, Informatica), the products (Trailhead, AppExchange, Apex, Einstein and Agentforce), the buildings (Salesforce Tower's LED crown, the Transit Center's rooftop park, the tallest tower in Indiana) and the culture, from Ohana and the 1-1-1 model to the year Matthew McConaughey's pay became a story. Difficulty ranges from easy questions any customer could answer to hard ones about early investors, executive turnover and a security tool called MEATPISTOL. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia and company sources, so you can run it as an internal quiz, an onboarding icebreaker or a tech-history round without a wrong answer slipping through.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which former Oracle executive founded Salesforce in March 1999?
Marc Benioff
He co-founded it with Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez, and the first prototype was running by that November.
Q 02How many years did Salesforce's founder work at Oracle before starting his own company?
13
He was named Oracle's Rookie of the Year at 23 and became the youngest vice president in its history.
Q 03At which company did Salesforce's founder intern as a USC student, writing Macintosh assembly code?
Apple
He graduated with a business administration degree in 1986 and went straight into a customer-service role at Oracle.
Q 04Salesforce's early guerrilla slogan, aimed at rival Siebel, declared the end of what?
Software
The company even hired actors to wave 'End of Software' signs outside a Siebel conference, and its logo still carries a red 'no' slash through the word.
Q 05Under what ticker symbol did Salesforce list on the New York Stock Exchange in June 2004?
CRM
The IPO raised $110 million; the ticker is the acronym for customer relationship management, the category the company dominates.
Q 06What is Salesforce's annual conference, first held in San Francisco in 2003, called?
Dreamforce
It now takes over downtown San Francisco each autumn with well over 100,000 registrants and headline concerts.
Q 07Which two tech figures were among Salesforce's earliest investors?
Larry Ellison and Halsey Minor
Ellison co-founded Oracle, the founder's former employer, and Minor founded CNET.
Q 08What share of its workforce did Salesforce lay off when the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s?
20%
Revenue still climbed from $5.4 million in 2000 to $22.4 million in 2001, and passed $1 billion in 2009.
Q 09Salesforce's largest-ever acquisition, announced in December 2020 for $27.7 billion, was which company?
Slack
The price was a 54% premium over the target's market value, justified by plans to weld its messaging into the CRM.
Q 10The name of the messaging app Salesforce bought in 2021 is an acronym for what?
Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge
The company only renamed itself after the app in August 2014, having started life as game studio Tiny Speck.
Q 11Before pivoting to messaging, Stewart Butterfield's startup Tiny Speck built which failed online game?
Glitch
Butterfield had earlier co-founded Flickr, which likewise emerged from the wreckage of a game project.
Q 12Which visual analytics company did Salesforce buy in August 2019 for $15.7 billion?
Tableau
It was the company's biggest deal until Slack, and its CEO Mark Nelson left in the November 2022 executive exodus.
Q 13Tableau, bought by Salesforce in 2019, was founded by researchers from which university?
Stanford
Its predecessor, Polaris, was built with US Department of Energy defence funding, and the company later moved to Seattle.
Q 21What is the name of Salesforce's free online learning platform, released in 2014?
Trailhead
Its badge-collecting learners call themselves Trailblazers, and a Japan Trailblazer Fund for startups followed in 2018.
Q 22What is Salesforce's online marketplace for third-party apps, launched in 2005?
AppExchange
It predates Apple's App Store by three years; a Drift integration was pulled from it in 2025 after an OAuth token breach.
Q 23What is the proprietary Java-like language used to build apps on the Salesforce Platform?
Apex
The language and compiler were designed by Craig Weissman; Lightning is the newer components framework, not the language.
Q 14Which integration and API-management company did Salesforce acquire in 2018 for $6.5 billion?
MuleSoft
It grew out of Ross Mason's open-source Mule project of 2003 and was originally called MuleSource.
Q 15Which Ruby-only cloud platform did Salesforce buy in December 2010 for $212 million?
Heroku
It went on to support Java, Node.js, Python, PHP, Go and more, and suffered a GitHub OAuth token theft in 2022.
Q 16Salesforce completed the roughly $8 billion purchase of which data management company in November 2025?
Informatica
Talks had collapsed in 2024 over valuation, and the target was already contributing nearly $400 million a quarter within months of closing.
Q 17Which email-marketing firm, bought for $2.5 billion in 2013, became Marketing Cloud?
ExactTarget
It was founded in Indianapolis in 2000, which is why the tallest building in Indiana took the Salesforce name in 2017.
Q 18Salesforce's 2016 e-commerce acquisition, for $2.8 billion, was which company?
Demandware
It became Commerce Cloud; the same year the company paid $750 million for word-processing app Quip.
Q 19Salesforce's 2016 AI platform is named after which scientist, whose likeness it licensed for $20 million over 20 years?
Albert Einstein
The licence from the estate is restricted to business software applications, so no Einstein-branded toys.
Q 20In late 2024 Salesforce rolled out which agentic AI product, succeeding its earlier AI platform?
Agentforce
By September 2025 the CEO said AI agents handled about half of customer support interactions and had let him cut 4,000 support roles.
Q 24By what name was the Salesforce Platform, its platform-as-a-service, formerly known?
Force.com
By 2014 it claimed 1.5 million registered developers.
Q 25Which company did Salesforce replace in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 2020?
ExxonMobil
Amgen and Honeywell joined the same day; because the Dow is price-weighted, Salesforce entered as its largest tech component.
Q 26Salesforce's culture is built around which Hawaiian concept of family and community?
Ohana
The 61st floor of Salesforce Tower, an observation lounge for employees and guests, is called the Ohana Floor.
Q 27Salesforce's '1-1-1' model gives one percent of equity, one percent of product, and one percent of what?
Employee time
The model has been copied by thousands of companies through the Pledge 1% movement.
Q 28Which magazine did Salesforce's founder and his wife Lynne buy for $190 million in September 2018?
Time
He bought it from Meredith Corporation and publishes it through Time USA, LLC, separately from Salesforce.
Q 29How tall is Salesforce Tower, the tallest building in San Francisco?
1,070 feet
Only the Wilshire Grand Center in Los Angeles is taller west of the Mississippi; the top 150 feet are largely ornamental.
Q 30Salesforce Tower in San Francisco was the last completed building designed by which architect?
César Pelli
He said the aim was something 'very tall, very big, but still polite and appropriate'; he died in 2019, a year after it opened.