My First Dreamforce Experience in San Francisco

by Cuc | Sep 18, 2021

As the countdown to Dreamforce 2021 continues, I decided to revisit the fantastic week I spent in San Francisco during DF19. Little did I know that it would be the last Dreamforce before the COVID-19 pandemic.

I had always heard about how spectacular Dreamforce was, but I didn’t get to see it for myself until 2019. At that time, I was the Salesforce Marketing Cloud lead at MARIS, an organization that provides real estate tech services to over 14,000 Realtors. My main objectives were to see what new knowledge I could gain about Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud, learn about other Salesforce products for our tech stack, and pass my first Salesforce certification exam.

Combing through the available sessions was a time-consuming process. There were too many that I wanted to attend, so it was difficult to narrow them down. Even though I couldn’t reserve my spot for everything I wanted, my schedule was still jam-packed. After the first couple of days, my director and I got to know the area well as we had to zip around downtown San Francisco from one conference site to the next. We definitely put a lot of steps in that week!

The streets and venues were flooded with a sea of attendees. Members of the Salesforce “Ohana” were easily identifiable by their Salesforce-provided backpacks—which was an ingenious idea. On my flight to San Francisco, I had no insight about the other passengers; on my flight home, I was able to identify who was among the 170,000+ trailblazers and attendees at DF19. I had never been to a conference of that magnitude, and I was quite impressed by how well-orchestrated it was. There was always a Ranger not too far away to guide attendees and answer questions.

During the conference, I embarked on my journey to become Salesforce certified. Waiting in the long bag-check and check-in lines for the exam was the least enjoyable part of my week; however, seeing my passing test results made it all worth it. It was great to start Day 1 by earning my Marketing Cloud Email Specialist certification. It set the path for me to pursue more certifications.

Below are photos from my week in San Francisco as I attended sessions, workshops, explored the city, and rocked out at Dreamfest to performances from Beck and Fleetwood Mac.