Author: David Gelles / Source: New York Times
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Salesforce may not be a household name like Facebook or Twitter, but the software company and its chief executive, Marc Benioff, are hugely influential forces in the technology industry.
Salesforce is a cloud computing pioneer that helped popularize the software-as-a-service business model. And Mr. Benioff has fashioned himself as a benevolent chieftain who can make the world a better place while making hefty profits, too.
An entrepreneur at an early age, Mr. Benioff became a star executive at Oracle before leaving to co-found Salesforce nearly 20 years ago. Today, Salesforce is worth roughly $100 billion, and Mr. Benioff is a billionaire many times over.
Success has emboldened him. A fan of Buddhism, Mr. Benioff has installed meditation rooms throughout Salesforce offices and emerged as an outspoken voice on social issues including L.G.B.T.Q. rights, the gender pay gap and the deleterious effects of social media.
In January, Mr. Benioff made his mark on the San Francisco skyline, moving Salesforce into the tallest office building west of the Mississippi.
This interview, which was condensed and edited for clarity, was conducted at Salesforce headquarters in San Francisco.
What was your childhood like?
Do you want me to lie down?
Yeah. Close your eyes and count backward from 100.
O.K., great. I’m happy to.
I was born an entrepreneur. When I was about 12 years old, I would go around to people’s homes and repair their antennas and their CB radios. Then I got a regular job at a jewelry store, cleaning the cases after school, which I did not really enjoy. But across the street there was a Radio Shack and that’s where I found a computer for the first time. I wrote my first piece of software, and sold it when I was about 15 years old.
In 1984, you interned at Apple. What was that like?
I was at the University of Southern California, putting myself through school with royalties of my software company. And I was writing a bunch of adventure games for the Atari 800, the Apple II, the Commodore 64. Then when the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, I sold my other computers and bought the Macintoshes.
The summer before my junior year, I worked for Apple. There was a pirate flag on the roof. There was a motorcycle in the lobby. Steve Jobs was running between the two Macintosh buildings. It was a big scene.
What did you do there?
No one was really paying attention exactly to what I was doing. I wrote this piece of software which was a game called “Raid on Armonk,” which was where IBM’s headquarters were at the time. And my manager said to me, “No, no. You cannot do this.”
What did you do after college?
I wrote a business plan for a network-type company based on something that Apple was working on called AppleLink. But U.S.C. was like, “No, no. You’re not going to create a company when you graduate from school. We want you to go get a real job in a real company, and we want you to go into sales.” So I asked around, and this person who I was working with at Apple mentioned this company called Oracle.
What did you learn while you were at Oracle?
The professors at U.S.C. said, “When you play with better tennis players, you’re going to get better. You need to go find the best salespeople possible.” And these were phenomenal salespeople at Oracle. They started to work with me and helped me understand how to be a better communicator.
Then Larry [Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder] took notice of me, and I started working directly for him. That was a very powerful moment, when he started to shape how I thought about business. Larry took the long view. He was like, “I want to think about this company…
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