Marc Benioff
Marc Benioff
Marc Russell Benioffis an American internet entrepreneur, author and philanthropist. He is the founder, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, a leading enterprise cloud computing company. As of March 2016, he owns approximately $3 billion worth of Salesforce shares. Benioff started Salesforce in March 1999 in a rented San Francisco apartment and defined its mission as The End of Software®. He is “credited with turning the software industry on its head” by using the Internet to “revamp the way software programs...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth25 September 1964
CountryUnited States of America
I've seen how important this concept is in business. To be truly successful, companies need to have a corporate mission that is bigger than making a profit. We try to follow that at salesforce.com, where we give 1% of our equity, 1% of our profits, and 1% of our employees' time to the community. By integrating philanthropy into our business model our employees feel that they do much more than just work at our company. By sharing a common and important mission, we are united and focused, and have found a secret weapon that ensures we always win.
Once you know what you want and what is important for you to achieve, also define the values associated with it. What is important? That is something a lot of entrepreneurs pass by too quickly. For us, the things that were important were, No. 1, customer success. Nothing is more important to us than making sure every customer is successful in our service.
Multi-Tenancy is a requirement for a SaaS vendor to be successful
I believe a balanced life is essential, and I try to make sure that all of our employees know that and live that way. It's crucial to me as a manager that I help ensure that our employees are as successful as our customers and partners.
I think a critical part of being successful in our industry is having a beginner's mind
The secret to successful hiring is this: look for the people who want to change the world.
Our customers are not just customizing fields and tabs--they are building their own applications across a wide range of functional areas.
Like some of our best ideas, trust.salesforce.com was inspired by our conversations with customers. We have a tradition of leading the on-demand revolution with breakthrough innovations, and we hope that trust.salesforce.com will take its place among some of our best new products.
We haven't seen any loss of customers from any service interruptions. A lot of the problems were around a new data centre, and we believe a lot of those issues are resolved.
My approach to politics is that I'm not a Democrat or a Republican. I'm an American and I always support candidates I think are great for the country.
There are a lot of politicians who are just obstructionists.
I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I started my own software company in high school and went to college to study entrepreneurship.
I think the most surprising thing about giving is it takes a while to find out what you're really interested in and what you really want to do.
If someone asks me what cloud computing is, I try not to get bogged down with definitions. I tell them that, simply put, cloud computing is a better way to run your business.