by Marc Benioff
In 2017, I took an outside construction elevator to the sixty-first floor of the new Salesforce Tower, under construction in downtown San Francisco. Once completed, it would become our new headquarters—as well as the tallest office building west of the Mississippi. The top floor was magical, with stunning views of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Pacific Ocean, and all the major landmarks of our city. Elizabeth and I literally had our heads in the clouds as we stood on the slab of concrete and tilted our faces toward the open sky.
The only question was how to design the floor in a way that would do justice to this fabulous perch.
“Let’s create the world’s best living room,” I told Elizabeth.
The living room in the clouds ended up being a warm and welcoming space with 360-degree views and a coffee bar, comfy furniture, and window seats for hanging out. We covered the beams in thousands of living plants and flowers and even brought in a Steinway piano. Then we hung up a sign that read OHANA FLOOR, ALL ARE WELCOME.
EIGHT
GIVING BACK MEANS LOOKING FORWARD
Investing in the Trailblazers of the Future
On an unusually warm September morning in 2017, I joined several carloads of Salesforce employees for a short convoy over to Visitacion Valley Middle School in San Francisco.
In the several years since Salesforce had “adopted” the school, small contingents from our office had been going there regularly. They dedicated their paid “volunteer days” to everything from mentoring the students on computer science, to backing up the teachers by working with individual students during classes, to just shelving books in the library.
Today was different. The middle-schoolers wanted to turn the tables, and today they would be teaching us. Specifically, they wanted to show us a few new projects our employees had helped them dream up.
The kids demonstrated a “smart” mirror they’d designed that displayed a calendar and a digital readout of the day’s news and weather. They showed us a selfie booth built from scratch, and a musical instrument made of blobs of slime that they had wired for sound. Another group led us on a tour of the basketball court, which had just been transformed with a major assist from my co-founder Parker Harris, who had volunteered his time one night and ended up staying until daybreak painting lines on the asphalt.
As our guides at Vis Valley led us from one stop to the next, their pride and enthusiasm for learning were infectious. I remembered what it was like to be that age—to be so thoroughly enchanted by the wonders of programming in particular and possibilities of the world in general. I couldn’t help but think about how thoroughly these curious children embodied the trailblazer spirit. They were experiencing life with true beginners’ minds, and were eager to bring others along with them on their journey of discovery.
One of the most memorable parts of this visit was witnessing the profound impact of one particular Salesforce volunteer: product innovation manager Kim Chouard. Kim had already made a major impression at Salesforce. He was something of a phenom who had come to his passion for technology and education early; at ten years old he started his own business in building company websites. By the age of twenty-five, he’d gone up against some of our most seasoned engineers and won seven internal hackathons with his own product concepts. And even as he was giving 110 percent at work, he was simultaneously running an after-school coding club he started for underserved students in the Vis Valley library.
Every Thursday, Kim showed up to teach the kids the basics of computer science, programming, and 3-D printing, as well as crucial soft skills like teamwork and problem solving that were critical in the classroom—and that would become even more critical when these young innovators eventually entered the workforce.
On this portion of the tour, one student, Lilian Emelife, proudly demonstrated no fewer than four robots she had built herself. Another student, Carolina Mendiola, used a 3-D printer to create the components for a fully functional remote-controlled robot—then assembled it right in front of us. I might be a veteran of the tech business, but on that day I saw the promise and possibilities of technology through the eyes of a curious child.
During a visit to the playground later that day, one parent of an eighth grader approached Vis Valley’s principal with an urgent question. Her son was graduating from the school that year, she explained. “Which high school has the best coding program?” she asked.
Principal Joe Truss stopped in his tracks. In all his years at the school, he’d never been asked that question before. That was because in the past, barely any of these kids had even known what coding was, let alone identified it as something they wanted to do more of. But the exuberance these kids exhibited was astonishing: unlike anything I’d ever witnessed at the many product demos, conferences, and trade shows I’d attended in the years since founding Salesforce. I was floored.
It’s natural for a large, growing company with a healthy commitment to building a better world to focus its attention on the weightiest, most urgent global issues. But what this one morning signified to all of us was that while all acts of giving back are paramount, none is more powerful than giving back in the form of learning and knowledge. The time, money, and resources we’d devoted to that school might seem small when compared to the sum of our charitable work, but the dividends are tremendous. Every dollar of your money and every minute of your time that you spend delivering knowledge—and the tools to attain it—to kids and teenagers is an investment in both the trailblazing innovation of the future and in the workforce of tomorrow.
Whether it happens inside or outside the classroom, these investments in education and in learning were the soul of the culture we’ve built at Salesforce.
Several years ago, we began focusing our philanthropic efforts on building a genuine partnership with our local Bay Area schools because we wanted to help give kids in our community an equal opportunity to a high-quality education. But let me be clear: Our public schools need people to show up and care more than they need the donations of benefactors. They need people who can contribute professional expertise mentoring students, assisting teachers, or even applying a fresh coat of paint. All of those activities are equally powerful tools for change, and Salesforce employees are deploying them all over the world.
This initiative had been born in part out of a visit I had made to one of my neighborhood public schools. Without a plan, or even an appointment, I’d walked through the doors of Presidio Middle School on a fact-finding mission. I knew going in that like many multicultural schools in the Bay Area with students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, Presidio was woefully underfunded and understaffed. After dodging my way through the obstacle course of students racing down the hall, I found my way to the principal’s office. Once inside, I introduced myself and asked its occupant one question: “How can I help improve this school?”
The principal wasn’t sure how to respond. We had never met and he may have thought he was in for an awkward parent discussion. But once he realized what I was really asking—and that I was serious—he promised to get back to me with an answer.
A few weeks later, hundreds of middle school students sat cross-legged in the crumbling asphalt courtyard that passed at that time for the school’s playground. I told the kids that I wanted to help make Presidio the “best school in the universe.”
This impromptu meeting in the principal’s office turned out to be the first of hundreds more of such meetings at public schools all over the world.
Getting Off the Sidelines
Our collaboration with local schools may have begun to blossom after I walked through those doors of Presidio Middle, but really, the seed had been planted long before.
In April 1997, I had just returned to Oracle from my sabbatical in India determined to do more with my life than advance my career in Silicon Valley. My boss, Larry Ellison, asked me to go to Philadelphia to attend the Presidents’ Summit fo
r America’s Future, chaired by General Powell.
Now here I was, attending an event in Independence Hall, the building where the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution were adopted, surrounded by former presidents, governors, mayors, cabinet members, and many of the nation’s top CEOs. To an ambitious thirty-two-year-old looking to expand his impact, it was an awe-inspiring scene.
The Summit’s goal was to mobilize America’s citizen power in a united effort to solve the problems facing our society—especially those that threaten young people, such as inadequate healthcare, drug abuse, and lack of education needed to compete in the global economy. General Powell wanted us to get involved in what later became a nonprofit called America’s Promise, which works to improve the lives of millions of at-risk youth in the nation. It was a pivotal moment.
I couldn’t believe that I was hearing the same message from General Powell, one of the most respected public servants, that I had heard from Amma, the hugging saint, during my visit in India. He offered a pledge, which I took, and it would end up influencing me profoundly:
“We pledge to reach out to the most vulnerable members of the American family, our children. They are at risk of growing up unskilled, unlearned or, even worse, unloved….All of us can spare thirty minutes a week or an hour a week. All of us can give an extra dollar. All of us can touch someone who doesn’t look like us, who doesn’t speak like us, who may not dress like us, but, by God, needs us in their lives.”
I had never heard this concept expressed: that business could be about solving social problems. And I’d certainly never heard a more persuasive or urgent call for businesses to focus on giving back by investing in our nation’s young people.
“This is about Americans getting off the sidelines and getting onto the playing field,” General Powell said in his remarks.
I came back from the event inspired to do just that. I soon met with Larry and convinced him that Oracle should become part of America’s Promise. He agreed, and we decided to help in the area we know best: by bringing networked computers to economically disadvantaged schools. In the first year, we placed six thousand computers in schools everywhere from Los Angeles to Israel.
One was MacFarland Middle School, an inner city school with two thousand students in northwest Washington, D.C. We had a plan to install a hundred networked computers, but we had failed to account for the fact that it was the close of the financial quarter, and everyone at Oracle was scrambling to make their sales numbers. As a result, we were short of volunteers. It was over 100 degrees on the day we needed to carry those hundred computers up three flights of stairs, and we didn’t have the people to do it. Eventually, the computers got delivered, but so did the message that this cause just wasn’t a priority for the team at Oracle.
That was when I began to understand the value of creating an organizational culture where people know that it’s important to show up. It was wonderful and generous that Oracle was committing to upgrade computer equipment in schools, but giving back wasn’t connected deeply to the culture of the company, so no one felt compelled to exert any extra effort to actually make it happen. I resolved right then—two years before leaving Oracle—that when I eventually had my own company, things would be different.
The 1-1-1 Model
In 2000, about a year after my co-founders and I launched Salesforce, we had some fifty employees, which was enough critical mass to mobilize volunteers and do some good in the world. However, we were a young and fast-growing start-up and didn’t have the time or expertise to build up the philanthropic side of things ourselves. We needed to convince someone to come on board and help.
Suzanne DiBianca, a management consultant with a background in technology implementations as well as corporate foundations, turned out to be just the person for the job, but when we first met about the position, I could tell she was skeptical of our intentions. The dot-com boom had created enormous fortunes, both real and on paper (many of which would evaporate in the ensuing dot-com crash). Several of those entrepreneurs were talking about how they would donate portions of their personal wealth to charitable causes, but it was turning out to be mostly that: just talk.
I knew I needed to convince her that Salesforce was committed to doing more than just arbitrarily giving a few dollars to the founders’ pet causes. I explained what I had learned from my Oracle experience about the challenges of integrating philanthropy into a corporate environment, and I assured her that we were building a different kind of company. I told her that Salesforce had a mission: We would be dedicated to giving back as much as we were to our core values.
The truth of the matter was that giving back had been baked into every one of our core values from the beginning. After all, the very act of helping others develops and demonstrates trust: It shows employees and customers that we’re motivated by more than money. And the way I wanted to give back—by investing in the workforce of tomorrow—is all about ensuring that we will continue driving the kind of trailblazing innovation that will help our customers succeed not only today, but many years into the future. And finally, our focus on improving access to education for all is far and away the best antidote to inequality.
Once Suzanne grasped that this wasn’t smoke and mirrors, she accepted the offer to lead our fledgling efforts. Salesforce already had innovative new technology and an innovative new business model; now Suzanne and I were determined to create a new philanthropic model to complement them.
We sought out advice from companies like Ben & Jerry’s, which had successfully created a philanthropic foundation with donations of both profits and employee time. We talked to other Silicon Valley start-ups, such as eBay, which had endowed its foundation with $1 million of corporate stock before going public the year before. We learned how Cisco was donating product, as well as employee time, to help nonprofits get connected to the Internet. Alan Hassenfeld, chairman of the toymaker Hasbro (who would later become a Salesforce board member), shared how Hasbro employees were given four hours a month of paid time off for community service. And we learned about how the outdoor apparel company Timberland donated up to forty hours per year of employee time to volunteer through social service agencies around the world.
After a few weeks of reflecting on these examples, it dawned on me that our new model needed to integrate all of our resources—our money, products, equity, and people. The answer: Take 1 percent of equity, 1 percent of product, and 1 percent of employees’ time and put them into our own nonprofit. This way, rather than pursuing random acts of philanthropy, we would fully embed giving back into our culture. This model would allow us to distribute funding and support on a consistent basis, and we would rigorously track the impact of our efforts.
Coming up with a memorable way to describe our new model of corporate philanthropy was easy—we just went with the simplest formulation: 1-1-1. Getting it up and running was pretty simple, too, since we didn’t yet have much by way of resources in any of the categories. We had only a few employees. We had yet to launch a product. And we had zero equity. What we did have, though, was a deep-seated belief in the power of giving, and the energy to back it up. This turned out to be more than enough.
* * *
Since day one, every single employee we have hired has received paid days off to volunteer wherever they choose—and we match their donations to whatever cause is most important to them, up to $5,000. My goal was to fuse philanthropy so completely into our culture that it couldn’t be disentangled from the core business, and that included making it easy for everyone to give of their time and talents in the ways that work for them.
By June 2000, we were ready to publicly launch the Salesforce Foundation. From the beginning, we knew that if we wanted to truly engage all members of our Ohana in this mission, employees would have to have a strong voice in how we allocated the foundation’s funds—and that they would have to be the ones to decide what cau
ses to support with their seven days per year of paid volunteer time off (VTO for short). We’ve found that employees today are more likely to participate in giving back if they have a say in where the money or their volunteer time is going. Suzanne called this the “democratization” of giving back, and as the foundation grew under her guidance, employees took our corporate philanthropy in myriad directions.
Employees volunteer at hospitals, schools, food banks, and other community institutions, locally and as far afield as Cambodia, several African countries, and Tibetan refugee camps in India and Nepal. When massive disasters like Hurricane Katrina hit, employees also volunteer to provide aid on the ground, helping to rebuild areas and get schools back up and running.
When a disaster of great magnitude occurs, there are many urgent priorities. People need medical care, food, water, and shelter. But we were struck by how access to information, knowledge networks, and data—and the computer literacy to utilize it—would help local aid workers and governments manage those efforts, and do more with less.
So when the 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti in 2010, affecting 3 million people, for example, Salesforce not only donated to relief funds, including matching employee donations, we also provided Haitian government and local organizations like Sean Penn’s J/P Haitian Relief Organization with free Salesforce technology that would allow them to capture data about those being housed in the shelter camps. Then we flew in fifty employee volunteers to install computers at a primary school in an impoverished and densely populated neighborhood in Port-au-Prince. Similarly, when Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, employees raised $250,000 to donate to the cause and volunteered on the island to help with the rebuilding.