Trailblazer

by Marc Benioff

  The second point is this: We’ve never had a better set of tools to help meet every possible standard of success, whether it’s finding a better way to match investment opportunities with interested clients, or making customers feel thrilled about the experience of renovating their home.

  The third point is that customer success depends on every stakeholder. By that I mean employees who feel engaged and responsible and are growing their careers in an environment that allows them to do their best work—and this applies to all employees, from the interns to the CEO. The same goes for partners working to design and implement customer solutions, as well as our communities, which provide the schools, hospitals, parks, and other facilities to support us all.

  The fourth and most important point is this: The gap between what customers really want from businesses and what’s actually possible is vanishing rapidly. And that’s going to change everything. The future isn’t about learning to be better at doing what we already do, it’s about how far we can stretch the boundaries of our imagination.

  The ability to produce success stories that weren’t possible a few years ago, to help customers thrive in dramatic new ways—that is going to become a driver of growth for any successful company. I believe we’re entering a new age in which customers will increasingly expect miracles from you. If you don’t value putting the customer at the center of everything you do, then you are going to fall behind.

  Whether you make cars, solar panels, television programs, or anything else, untold opportunities exist. Every company should invest in helping its customers find new destinations, and in blazing new trails to reach them.

  To do so, we have to resist the urge to make quick, marginal improvements and spend more time listening deeply to what customers really want, even if they’re not fully aware of it yet. In the end, it’s a matter of accepting that your success is inextricably linked to theirs.

  FIVE

  INNOVATION

  Artificial Intelligence and the Power of Ecosystems

  In the summer of 2015, a dozen rock-star engineers at Salesforce received a meeting invitation from me. The subject line consisted of just two capital letters: AI.

  As the engineers arrived and took their seats around the conference table, I could tell they already had a pretty good idea of what was about to happen. I had called them together to announce that we were launching a companywide project to infuse AI into every product in our portfolio. And their job was to figure out how to harness all the talent in the company to do it.

  No pressure or anything.

  If the microprocessor was the defining technology of the late twentieth century, artificial intelligence and machine learning were, by every conceivable measure, poised to become the signature advancements of the twenty-first. Soon the most important functions of our lives, not to mention the future success of Salesforce and its customers, would depend on our ability to swim with these invisible currents. We didn’t want to be late to the revolution.

  When I gathered our engineers that day, AI was still in its embryonic phase, yet it had already been adapted to perform a host of specialized tasks, like predictive searches on Google, fraud detection at financial institutions, real-time language translation, and surfacing the most adorable cat videos. First-generation AI-powered devices like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa were up and running; answering questions like “What’s the weather?” or “What’s on my calendar this morning?” activating home appliances on-command, storing information like shopping and to-do lists, and continuously correlating between thousands of variables to help make future interactions “smarter.”

  As cutting-edge as these applications seemed, we all knew they held vast potential that we hadn’t even begun to imagine. Whether in the cloud or in our pockets, computers had become so powerful—and generated such massive amounts of data—that breakthroughs in machine learning wouldn’t just alter the playing field; they would change the game entirely. And it would happen fast. Soon our customers would be pleading with us to lead them into this new frontier. As my co-founder Parker Harris put it, “AI will have more impact than the Internet. We are still in the first inning of this game.”

  The great promise of AI was that for the first time companies could turn the troves of data they’d acquired on consumer behavior, industry trends, demographic shifts, and more to start uncovering patterns that human brains couldn’t detect. These capabilities would only become more sophisticated as machines became smarter and smarter, and they could soon be used to tailor communications with exacting precision: everything from the best time to contact a customer, to the right subject line to use in an email, to what features or qualities to emphasize when describing products on social media. In other words, AI could take everything it “understood” about the past and use it to make astonishingly accurate predictions about the future. If we tapped its full potential, we knew it could generate intelligence and insights that would help our customers succeed in ways they never thought possible.

  The most exciting promise of AI wasn’t the ability to do any one thing more efficiently; it was the tantalizing possibility of doing almost everything better. This vast potential was also what made AI so daunting. We didn’t have anything even resembling a blueprint, let alone a plan of action. We knew we wanted to build an AI tool for business: one that each individual customer could easily customize using clicks, not code, and one that could handle billions of customer interactions on desktops and smartphones. But given that no one had built such a tool before, we had no idea how we would go about it.

  All of the time we’d invested in leveraging the quantum leaps in computing power and developing more sophisticated algorithms to collect and make sense of customer data had been a prelude to this. If AI could be applied effectively and ethically, we knew it could do incredible things. We also knew our livelihood as a company depended on it.

  * * *

  For many, the term “innovation” has become almost synonymous with Silicon Valley, and not without reason. After all, so many iconic technology companies—Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Apple, Oracle, Cisco, Intuit, and Google, to name a few—were born there. It’s where thousands of start-ups still plant their roots each year in hopes of becoming part of the legend, and its spirit has been imported to scores of enterprising cities around the world. Not everyone who dreams of building “the next big thing” makes it. But some do.

  Growing up in close proximity to this storied place, I’ve watched technology change the landscape; both literally, as farmland and apricot orchards gave way to microchip plants, and virtually, as the region became the hub of vast invisible networks connecting billions of far-flung people around the world.

  As I’ve watched the region evolve over time—witnessing so many once-promising companies run out of cash and disappear, so many talented entrepreneurs burn out, and the company logo atop so many office buildings get swapped out as its occupants change—I’ve also learned how easy it is to become a footnote to history. To weather the winds of change constantly blowing through Silicon Valley—and anywhere else big things are happening—it’s not enough to just talk about innovation. If you don’t value innovation as a foundational principle, you will never achieve it.

  I don’t think it’s possible to estimate the total amount of time we’ve spent discussing innovation inside Salesforce. Of all our core values, it’s the one that seems to correlate most quantifiably to traditional measures of business success. That’s why we’d hired the brightest talent, and then nurtured it by harnessing creativity inside our walls. Because for any business, and certainly any technology business, the line between innovation and metrics like stock price, revenue, and profit is a pretty straight one.

  Successful companies continuously innovate, period.

  That day in 2015, as I sat around the table with my top engineers, I knew I was tasking them with an ambitious challenge—perhaps t
he most ambitious in our company’s history. I also knew the stakes were high. It wasn’t just the question of whether Salesforce would have a future in AI that was on the line. It was whether we would have a future.

  I was confident that our team could deliver. After all, they’d already weathered so many challenges, somehow figuring out how to weave together the cloud, social networks, and mobile into our CRM apps. At the same time, I also knew that AI was the tallest mountain we’d ever tried to scale.

  One thing I’ve learned about high-stakes business initiatives is that they’re essentially a stress test. They’ll always tempt you to question your values, and maybe even loosen your grip on them. But often, they’ll also lead to new and eye-opening insights that only drill those values even deeper into your culture.

  That meeting in 2015 wasn’t a particularly long one. We went over some of the AI applications we thought were promising, and brainstormed some possible new directions to pursue. My team and I already knew this challenge would force us to walk our talk on innovation. What we couldn’t immediately see is that to do so, we would need to reinvent our approach. We were going to have to do more than simply round up our best people, give them a deadline, and send them off to work. As we were about to learn, meeting this challenge would require a certain form of courage.

  I ended the meeting by circling a date on the calendar: the kickoff of Dreamforce 2016. We would have less than a year to get our first ever AI product off the ground.

  We’d had ample time to study. AI was our final exam.

  “Be Mindful, and Project the Future”

  The first great role model in my life, aside from my father and grandfather, was Albert Einstein.

  He was a genius, of course. One of the greatest innovators of all time, he quite literally unlocked the secrets of the universe. But that wasn’t all. As an advocate for social justice who campaigned tirelessly against the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons, he also exemplified what it means to live and work by your values, just as my grandfather had done.

  Beyond all that, he still managed to approach his work with a passion that bordered on childlike wonder. “Imagination,” he is said to have observed, “is the highest form of research.”

  To me, Einstein’s rare combination of knowledge, moral conviction, intuition, and insatiable curiosity represented an almost impossible ideal. Like the Zen Buddhists who inspired me later on, Einstein was able to let go of preconceived notions and think about the world in an unconstrained way. This spirit was the one I’d eventually aspire to re-create inside Salesforce.

  As a teenager, I hung a poster of Einstein in my bedroom and convinced my high school math teacher to hang another in his classroom. In a classic case of youthful adulation (and perhaps a touch of hubris), I quoted the great man in my Burlingame High School senior yearbook: “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

  When we set up Salesforce’s first office in a San Francisco rental apartment, it was under Einstein’s watchful gaze that we worked ourselves ragged day and night. My co-founders—Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez—and I weren’t trying to codify the laws of physics, but we were dead set on disrupting the software industry and proving the doubters wrong.

  Of course, I’m hardly the only Einstein acolyte in my line of work. After all, those who dream of becoming the innovators of the future can’t help but pay homage to the great innovators who came before them.

  This may explain why my next greatest role model was none other than the legendary Steve Jobs.

  I first met Steve in 1984 when Apple hired me as a summer intern. The fact that I’d landed this gig in the first place was something of a fluke; as a college student at USC, I’d reached out to the company’s Macintosh team to complain about a bug in its software and somehow parlayed that conversation into a job. While I’d done my best to impersonate a seasoned developer, at nineteen years old, the sum total of my programming experience was writing a dozen arcade and adventure games in high school. Working at Apple was the big leagues, and while I felt profoundly underqualified, nobody tossed me out the door that summer. In fact, every time Steve Jobs passed my cubicle, I somehow summoned the nerve to strike up a conversation.

  It wasn’t much, but through those small interactions, a bond would eventually form. Steve and I shared a love for technology and science as well as a passion for meditation and Eastern philosophy. In addition to being a brilliant executive and peerless innovator, he was a spiritual, intuitive person who had a gift for seeing the world through many perspectives at once. I saw that he had a willingness to share his wisdom, and I wasn’t afraid to ask for it.

  Even once my internship ended, we stayed in touch, and as my career progressed he became a mentor of sorts. Which is why, one memorable day in 2003, I found myself pacing anxiously in the reception area of Apple’s headquarters.

  In the four years since Salesforce opened for business, we’d hired four hundred employees, generated more than $50 million in annual revenue, and were laying the groundwork for an IPO the following year. We were justifiably proud of our progress, but I’d learned enough about the technology business to know that pride is a dangerous state of mind.

  Truth be told, I was feeling stuck. To catapult the company into the next phase of growth, we needed to make a bold move. We’d survived the scary start-up phase where so many companies crash and burn, but I was struggling to imagine how I’d navigate the pressure of running a public company that has to lay itself bare to Wall Street every quarter.

  Sometimes seeking guidance from mentors is the only sure way to survive these bouts of inertia. That’s why I decided to make a pilgrimage to Cupertino.

  As Steve’s staff ushered me into Apple’s boardroom that day, I felt a rush of excitement coursing through my jangling nerves. In that moment, I remembered what it had felt like to be an inexperienced intern mustering up the courage to say a few words to the big boss. After several minutes, Steve charged in, predictably dressed in his standard attire of jeans and a black mock turtleneck. I hadn’t settled on precisely what I wanted to ask him, but I knew I’d better cut to the chase. He was a busy man, and was legendary for his directness, and ability to quickly zero in on what’s important.

  So I showed him a demo of the Salesforce CRM service on my laptop and, true to form, he immediately had some thoughts. After unleashing a torrent of rapid-fire suggestions on our software’s basic functionality, down to the shape and color of its navigation tabs, Steve sat back, folded his hands together, and got to the larger point. Salesforce had created a “fantastic enterprise website,” he told me. But both he and I knew that that alone wasn’t enough.

  “Marc,” he said. “If you want to be a great CEO, be mindful and project the future.”

  I nodded, perhaps a bit disappointed. He’d given me similar advice before, but he wasn’t finished.

  Steve then told me we needed to land a big account, and to grow “10x in twenty-four months or you’ll be dead.” I gulped. Then he said something less alarming, but more puzzling: We needed an “application ecosystem.”

  I understood that to hit the big leagues, we needed a huge marquee customer win. But what would a Salesforce “application ecosystem” look like? Steve told me that was up to me to figure out.

  By January 2006, Salesforce had topped $300 million in revenue, tripling in size in the three years since that meeting. We were growing fast, but the more innovative products and features we released, the more our customers expected from us. Our engineering team, brilliant as they were, had begun to bump against the upper boundary of its productivity. Privately, I started to worry about whether we could cope with the pressures of scaling up.

  In previous eras, a company in our position would have tapped its most brilliant scientists and squirreled them away behind a triple-bolted door with TOP SECR
ET painted on it. These appointed geniuses would have spent long days in isolation, wrenching together prototypes and puzzling over clay models, walled off from any ambient noise. Back then, the prevailing model for innovation was secretive, expensive, and time-consuming. Outside input was decidedly unwelcome.

  At the end of the process, these scientists would emerge from their lairs, likely overcaffeinated and unkempt, and would wheel out a gurney containing some new product, the likes of which nobody had ever seen. Then it was up to customers to determine whether it was a game changer. Too often, it wasn’t.

  We had subscribed to this outdated model too, in the early years of the company. Then, in 2006, the approach to innovation at Salesforce started to change. This wasn’t a conscious decision, or something we spent a lot of time planning for; it was almost purely a response to the challenge we were up against. To innovate on a truly massive scale, we realized that we couldn’t simply demand more of our already overworked engineering department. The only possible way to scale up our innovation efforts was to start recruiting outsiders.

  One of the unique things about this digital era is that it operates through a very different type of infrastructure: the common language of computer programming. You can’t build automobiles without a factory, but if you are a developer fluent in the language of programming, all you need is source code to build a new application. Every year, the global army of talented developers was growing. All we had to do, I suddenly realized, was harness that talent, and we could produce as many shiny new cars as we wanted.

  One evening, over dinner in San Francisco, I was struck by an irresistibly simple idea. What if any developer from anywhere in the world could create their own application for the Salesforce platform? And what if we offered to store these apps in an online directory that allowed any Salesforce user to download them? I wouldn’t say this idea felt entirely comfortable. After all, I’d grown up with the old view of innovation as something that should happen within the four walls of our offices. According to this view, opening our products to outside tinkering was akin to giving our intellectual property away. Plus, it would involve letting go of the controls, which felt like the polar opposite of leadership. Yet, at that moment, I knew in my gut that if Salesforce was to become the new kind of company I wanted it to be, we would need to seek innovation everywhere.