Trailblazer

by Marc Benioff

  I’m a big believer in the enlightening, civilizing powers of higher education, full stop. But I’m not convinced that attending college makes you a superior entrepreneur. The courses I took at the University of Southern California made me a more well-rounded and curious person, but the toughest business challenges I’ve faced, especially lately, are those that my professors in the 1980s simply couldn’t have anticipated.

  There’s one way in which I do fit the profile of the archetypal tech entrepreneur, however. My first, most formative business classroom wasn’t a classroom at all.

  It wasn’t my basement computer lab, or my first job, or the boardrooms where I made those early, tentative pitches to potential Salesforce investors. My classroom sat on four radial tires and ran on leaded gas. It was my father’s 1970 Buick station wagon.

  The Benioff family Buick was a whale of an automobile nearly 19 feet long with simulated wood paneling. Driving around with my dad on hot summer afternoons, my bare legs stuck to the vinyl seats. Most of the time our trusty wagon was just a means of getting my parents, my two sisters, and me from point A to point B. Sundays were different, though. On Sundays it became a delivery vehicle.

  My father, Russell, owned a chain of dress shops called Stuart’s Apparel. On weekends, he’d run a circuit around the San Francisco Bay Area transferring merchandise between his six locations, and he often brought me along to help. We’d park the Buick near the stockroom door, lower the tailgate, and march in and out with bolts of wool, linen, rayon, cotton, poplin, and polyester draped in our arms.

  His shops were scattered all over the Bay Area, sometimes up to an hour’s drive from San Francisco; so our Sunday ritual often consumed the better part of a day. When I wasn’t staring out the window lost in my interior world, I passed the time thinking about how my father worked.

  During the week, Dad would gather all the data on what items were selling and transfer the most popular merchandise to the best-performing stores. I’d overhear him say things like “We need pink angora sweaters at Valley Fair” and off he’d dash, leaving his half-eaten dinner behind. At one point in the 1970s, fox and rabbit coats took off, and for more evenings in a row than I could count, so did Dad. He’d get the call from one of his managers, hang his merchandise on a metal bar he’d installed in the Buick’s cargo space, and roar off.

  It’s fair to say that my dad wasn’t bursting with personality. He was a giant at six foot seven, not unlike myself, but a decidedly gentle one: affable, down-to-earth, impeccably polite, and always caring, but like many men of his generation, emotionally restrained. Having lived through the Great Depression, he was frugal throughout his life. He shopped for clothes mostly on sale racks at big-and-tall stores, and every car he bought—including the Buick—was used.

  Dad’s father, Fred Benioff, was one of three Benioff brothers who immigrated with their father to San Francisco from Kiev (then part of the Russian Empire) in the late nineteenth century to enter the fur trade. Beyond that, I know very little about Fred; he left his wife and kids when my dad was young and they never spoke again. Dad’s mother, Helen, eventually managed to wrestle away control of the Benioff fur business from her ex-husband and ran it herself. The business had outlets all over the West, which forced her to work grueling hours, so my dad and his brother were raised with the help of family friends.

  In 1966, the year I turned two, Dad decided to quit the family business to strike out on his own—and before long he was not only the CEO of Stuart’s Apparel, but also the CFO, chief buyer, director of marketing, and head of sales. This meant that most nights, when he wasn’t traveling to Los Angeles or New York—as he often did to scour their garment districts for new styles—he sat at the kitchen table until eleven o’clock, doing the books by hand. Because he managed the inventory for all six stores himself, his weekends were mostly consumed by shuttling dresses and sportswear from one location to another. His only indulgences were playing dominoes and occasionally going fishing or hunting.

  I never liked the idea of killing anything, but I spent many days as a boy with a 12-gauge shotgun over my shoulder. Hunting ducks, doves, deer, and even wild pigs with my father in the orange groves of California’s San Joaquin Valley, and fishing in the Truckee River near Lake Tahoe, were as much a part of my childhood as hauling around women’s slacks and blouses. I didn’t particularly enjoy these activities—or like them at all, really—but these were the activities I could do with my dad.

  Those Sundays in the car shuttling merchandise from store to store were long and tedious. But they did help me realize early on that I was not a fan of the retail business, one of several glaring differences between my father and me. Russell Benioff was an outdoorsman and a wizard with tools and lumber, but he wasn’t technically-minded. I, on the other hand, was so fascinated by electronic equipment that, according to my mother, Joelle, I took the family telephone apart and put it back together at the age of four. Every time my maternal grandmother visited, I begged her to take me to Radio Shack.

  As far back as I can remember, I was the shy kid who rarely had play dates, avoided group activities, and preferred the company of my golden retriever, Brandy, to that of just about any human being. My dad wasn’t the type to express concern over my social development, but my behavior worried my mother. She couldn’t get me to play baseball or even come out to say hello to her friends when they visited. I wasn’t particularly motivated by school, either: Once, when a kindergarten teacher asked me to draw a circle, I looked her straight in the eye and defiantly drew a line. Even though Mom left countless teacher meetings in tears, she continued to give me a long leash to pursue my passions, which certainly weren’t in the classroom.

  When I was twelve, I packed up my second-floor bedroom and moved down to the basement, where I could pursue my singular passion free of interruption. I bought my first computer, a TRS-80 from Radio Shack, two years later and immediately withdrew from the analog world. After learning the basics of coding at fifteen, I wrote a simple program called “How to Juggle.” I sent it to a computer magazine and they paid me $75 for it. Suffice it to say that by that point, I was hooked.

  On my sixteenth birthday, I traded my TRS-80 in for an Atari 800 with a freestanding disc drive and a printer. That summer, I started working part time at ComputerLand and in my off hours founded my first company, which I christened with an outrageously sexy name: Basic Computers, after the BASIC programming language with which I had fallen in love.

  I began writing reviews of computer games; when I noticed some games had software bugs, I wrote to the developers and offered to fix them for free. Soon I started programming games of my own. My first creation, Quest for Power, had a convoluted plot involving King Arthur and Sir Galahad and required players to vanquish a series of foes in pursuit of the Scroll of Truth.

  This game, and many more that I created, helped me earn more than $5,000 in six months, which was a fortune for someone my age. I used the money to buy my first car, a black Toyota Supra, and vanity plates that read MRB 82. The money I earned from those games over the years eventually paid for college.

  Looking back, I continue to marvel at the fact that my parents not only tolerated my eccentric behavior, but gave me enough independence to fully indulge it. When I tell people about how I was allowed to turn our basement into my own private residence at age twelve, they are always (justifiably) astonished. In retrospect, I imagine my mother was less than thrilled when I announced, on the very day I got my driver’s license, that I needed to make a business trip to a computer company in Mountain View, much farther than I had ever driven on my own. But she let me go. And that summer, when I asked if I could fly to England, alone, to research castles for my games, Mom gave me her blessing, so long as I stayed with friends of hers in Leeds and promised to call home every night.

  My mother claims that she indulged me because she knew I was stubborn and wouldn’t take no for an answe
r. The truth, I know, is that she saw something in me that others didn’t and allowed me to pursue it, even if doing so made it nearly impossible for her to get a good night’s sleep. Neither she nor my father fully understood what I found so fascinating about computers, but they respected my drive, my strong will, and my unwavering commitment to things I cared about, and sensed that these values would serve me well when I got older. They turned out to be right.

  A Different Kind of Legacy

  In the hospital after I was born, my mother was handed a form to assign a legal name to her one-day-old child. The name Marc had been previously decided in honor of my grandfather Marvin, but for my middle name, she wrote down her maiden name, Lewis. Shortly thereafter, in a rare fit of enthusiasm, my dad decided to scratch off Lewis and write his first name, Russell, in its place. My mother approved. “Well, gee,” she thought, “that’s wonderful that he is so excited to have a son!”

  I’m not sure I ever became the son my father imagined that day. I’m thankful he lived long enough to see Salesforce blossom and I know he was proud of me. We’d always been very different people, and it was clear, very early on, that someday taking over his business was never in the cards for me. Yet there’s no doubt that my father’s career as a businessman had a profound influence on mine.

  During those endless Sundays in the station wagon, I was struck by my father’s work ethic and unwavering integrity. There was no funny business whatsoever with the financials or inventory. Everything was done strictly by the book. To him, all business decisions were black or white, right or wrong. As a father, he could be distant at times, but he built deep, genuine relationships at work and would do whatever it took to keep his employees and customers happy—as if that were the entire point of a business.

  Even as a teenager, when I would think about how much time my dad spent traveling to meet with suppliers, ferrying inventory around, and minding the company ledgers, I was astounded by how difficult it was to run a business in the analog age. To me, he seemed enslaved by the rudimentary tasks of commerce; he got so buried in the weeds that he rarely had time to focus on the big picture.

  I know that my father didn’t like to talk about computers and couldn’t really comprehend their increasing power, but sometimes, as we unpacked merchandise, I would implore him to let me build him a customer database to streamline the tedious work of sending out promotional flyers. Eventually, he grudgingly agreed, but it’s fair to say he never quite embraced the notion that software had the potential to make his day-to-day operations demonstrably easier and more efficient.

  In 1999, when I told my father I was quitting my lucrative executive job at Oracle to found a company of my own, he warned against it. He told me I had a good thing going at Oracle, and he wasn’t wrong; I was lucky enough to be earning a great salary, and I had a terrific boss in Larry Ellison. But I’d already made up my mind. Looking back, I can’t help but wonder if he might have responded differently had he known that his experiences had been the kindling for the idea that was now smoldering inside me.

  The big idea behind Salesforce was to make it easy for any business to access all of the software it needed to manage its operations and customer relationships from the cloud (which in those days was simply known as the Internet). Rather than having to buy an acre of costly servers, license software from Oracle or Microsoft, and hire an army of IT specialists to install it—and then upgrade to a new version every few years—I wanted small-business owners like Dad to be able to pay one flat subscription fee to access the latest software instantly in their Web browser with no more effort than it takes to buy a book on Amazon.

  In business terms, Salesforce is engaged in customer relationship management, or CRM, but the service we provide is a lot broader, more essential, and more intimate than it sounds. Our software may be invisible to consumers, but inside a company, Salesforce is a vital piece of infrastructure. After all, the most valued asset of any company is its relationship with its customers, and our vision was to offer businesses of all sizes smarter, more intuitive ways to connect with those customers across sales, marketing, customer service, and e-commerce. Eventually, we began providing tools to help those companies create new processes, customize apps, analyze data, and create predictive models.

  Though it seems obvious now, it took a while for me to link the evolution of this big idea back to its source: my father’s struggles as the owner of Stuart’s Apparel. If I hadn’t seen, up close, the many hats he had to wear while running a small business, and how many countless hours were required just to keep the operation functioning, I wouldn’t have understood what the kind of services Salesforce offers would mean to people just like him.

  From a young age, I’d always thought of myself as my own man, distinct from my father in so many ways. But founding Salesforce was, to some extent, the act of a dutiful son. It’s as if I was trying to reach back in time and lighten my father’s burdens. I may not have followed in his footsteps by taking the helm of the company he owned, but in the end, his business problems were the ones I devoted my career to solving.

  Even beyond that, I’ve come to see that in some sense, everything about Salesforce’s business model, and my approach to leadership, reflects my father’s guidance. His genuine concern for customers and employees clearly rubbed off on me: That explains why “customer success” is one of Salesforce’s core values. He also drilled into me the importance of pristine accounting practices, which probably explains why trust and transparency have always been so important to me.

  Without my mother’s selfless love and faith in me, I’m not sure how I would have turned out. But it’s also clear that my career is inextricably tied to the lessons I learned from my father, which is a testament to how powerful mentors can be. But he wasn’t my only teacher.

  When we founded Salesforce, I wasn’t interested in building a viable little business. I wanted it to have global magnitude, and become the leader in its industry, while also serving the greater good.

  This is a goal that was unquestionably inspired by another member of the Benioff clan.

  A Passion for Progress

  During my summer breaks, starting when I was about seven, the Benioffs’ Buick started making cargo runs of another kind. These deliveries were made exclusively to my maternal grandfather, Marvin Lewis. The merchandise under transfer was me.

  My grandfather ran a prominent legal practice out of the de Young Building, a venerable eleven-story temple of commerce at the north corner of Kearny and Market streets in downtown San Francisco. As a kid, I thought most tall buildings looked the same, but Grandpa made sure I understood that this one was special. Every time my parents dropped me off for a visit, he’d remind me that when the de Young Building first opened in the roaring 1890s, it was the tallest tower on the West Coast.

  Within seconds of my arrival, my grandfather would grab his coat and hat and steer me out the door. Down the elevator we’d go, into the marbled lobby, through the stately brass doors, and onto the teeming sidewalk. Grandpa would set off at a brisk pace and I’d do my best to keep up, eager to play my part in these parades of two.

  I call these walks parades because that’s how they felt. With his regal thatch of silver hair and impeccably tailored suits, Marvin Lewis was larger than life. To the same degree that my father was modest and reserved, my mom’s dad was a blustery showman. He felt most alive when all eyes were on him, and it’s safe to say they usually were.

  As an attorney, Grandpa made a name for himself by taking on spectacular, difficult cases. He pioneered the legal concept of psychic injury. In a 1959 case, he won a then-astounding sum of $101,000 for a woman who sued her landlord after falling through a wooden stairway at her apartment. The woman, June Daimare, sued her landlord for damages, and was awarded $101,000 by the judge. He was the founder and first president of the California Trial Lawyers Association and later became president
of the American Trial Lawyers Association. Whether he was arguing a case or just taking an afternoon stroll with his shy, chubby, mop-haired grandson, everything he did felt like an event.

  These journeys of ours had no set route or destination, but they absolutely served a purpose. They were educational tours for my benefit, loosely organized around Grandpa’s favorite theme: progress.

  Marvin Lewis had a passion for big, ambitious civic projects, which explains his reverence for the de Young Building. Once, when our path took us to the construction site for the Transamerica Pyramid, he turned to me and said: “Here’s how the city will grow.”

  Another time, during a stop at Mission Bay—then a desolate area that was once home to shipyards, foundries, warehouses, and factories—he boldly (and correctly) proclaimed that one day, “this will be the future of San Francisco.”

  I was convinced he had the power to see the future.

  Grandpa also dabbled in politics, and at the close of the Second World War he began an eleven-year stint as a San Francisco city supervisor. In that role, he focused his considerable powers of persuasion on one civic priority: building a new, thoroughly modern mass transit system.

  In 1954, Marvin Lewis unveiled a plan for a space-age, fifteen-mile monorail that would run through the heart of downtown. The federal bond issue he led to finance this new entity, which came to be known as Bay Area Rapid Transit, was the largest local bond ever approved in the United States. BART finally opened in 1972 to much acclaim. It was, as described by Fortune, “the finest rapid transit line in the world.” Its space-age automated cars were light, aerodynamic, and controlled entirely by computers.