Fireside Chat with Marc Benioff and Parker Harris | Salesforce

Please welcome Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff and co founder and CTO Parker Harris in conversation with business insiders Julie Bort. Hi. Hey. Thank you.

Sorry to all the people behind us.

I know. Hello, people.

I'm really sad about that.

We will. I will be knocking things over. So, you know, thank you so much for inviting me because this is a journalist's dream come true. This is a little, you know, being on stage like this is a little bit like a truth serum. I get to ask all these questions, and here we are. You gotta answer them. It's gonna be so fun. Okay, so I had all these, like, serious questions, you know, printed out, and then I jotted down these fun questions and I'm like, oh, oh, no, no, no. We're going to skip straight to the things I know people really want to know. So, Mark, are you related to Game of Thrones creator David Benioff?

And you do know that, right?

I know it.

Now, why do you want to tell everybody why you know that before I answer it?

Because I wrote. I wrote the story.

Was that like your most popular story?

It was a very popular story.

Yes. And that is my. We have share the same great grandfather, Isaac Benioff. And so we are related. And his mother is Barbara Benioff. His father, Steven Friedman, he changed his name to Benioff. So he is a Benioff through a name change.

So you're like the official.

What's that?

You're like the official.

No, I blessed him. He is official.

Okay, so, but here's the thing. Now it's just a setup question. The real question is, so can you text him right now and find out what's going to happen on the last Game of Thrones? Oh. And so, Parker, the question for you is like, who designed your costumes and how did it come about that you are the one that tends to be dressed up? I know. You gave it up.

Well, let's see, Mark. How did it end up that I was the guy in the costumes?

Well, we asked our customers, how many people here want Parker dressed up at Dreamforce every year. It's customer choice.

So it happens. Sometimes we do fun marketing, and sometimes marketing with a C gets interesting. And Mark was like, oh, I have this great idea. You could be Einstein, or you could dress up with this wig and you.

Could drive a car.

This would be really fun. And, well, what are you going to do? He's like, I'm going to wear a suit. But those suits were really cool because they were actually very expensive suits. We had Movie studio suppliers are basically the people who make the suits for superheroes make these.

So it's a real superhero suit?

Yeah, I didn't really always feel like a superhero. I was trying to fit into them, you know. But yeah, they're pretty cool. They're in our office here if you want to come see them. I'll give you a tour of the suits. They're on some mannequins in one of our offices.

So have you ever repurposed one of those suits for Halloween? Did you like them?

I have not. My children have been strongly advising me never to put them on again.

Have they seen the suit?

They have seen, yes.

So, Mark, we recently met at what I would call like a billionaires party at south by Southwest. It was.

I wasn't invited.

It was a billionaire's party. I wanted to invite a billionaires.

Elon Musk was there, Ev Williams was there. And then you were famously photobombing yourself into all the shots. Yeah, so there's a lot of shots there. So my question is, like, do all the billionaires in tech know each other? Do you, like, have a secret Slack channel or something?

It's.

It's the triple comma club, I think is Silicon Valley.

Well, I know you hang out with Dell, Michael Dell.

Right.

Isn't he a buddy that is a.

Close friend of mine for many decades and he's been. Michael Dell is actually fantastic and is a close friend of mine and has been also not just a friend, but a huge mentor and has really helped me at every stage of the growth of Salesforce right from the very first day that I started the company. And I knew him way back before I started Salesforce. And he's always been a huge role model. You probably know he started his company in his college dorm room when he was 19. He's the original college tech dropout. You know, dropped out of college, had to explain to his family while he was why he was gonna create this computer company. And today he's the leader of the enterprise industry. So I'm very fortunate to have him as a friend of mine.

So mentor. So what's one thing you learned?

Mentor, friend across the board. What's that?

So what's one thing you learned from him?

Well, one thing that I love that he says that's always in the back of my mind, is there's no linear success. Everybody thinks the line goes from here to here, and there's no jagged marks along the way. And there's a lot of ups and downs, you know, along a long journey. And that is something that I learned from him and I always kind of go back to, because there's points where you're like, oh, boy, this is a real downtime, or this is a real uptime. And the reality is there's no linear success. It's going to. There's going to be times that are ups and downs. But you want it. You want it to be going up and to the right as much as possible over the long term.

I mean, that's great. Actually, I have a lot of questions for you guys about that. I'm really interested in this idea of how do you know when to go on and how do you know when to quit? Right. Because we all face that. Every one of us faces it in every journey. I mean, even simple things like should I move from this house? So. So can you tell me a little bit about something from the early days where you were like, I don't know, Salesforce was. Wasn't a given. I remember those early days, and we were all saying, oh, it's not Internet software and the Internet.

I never felt that way. I mean, I have a lot of faith. I mean, a lot of my life is built on my faith. And I feel that my faith has really helped me to give me the ability to belief in Salesforce before there was Salesforce. That my faith has also kind of guided me to Parker. I mean, that's a really good story where I was just at lunch with a friend of mine and said, gee, I have this idea for this company. I've been thinking about it for a couple years. It's really gotten to this point, and this is kind of how I look at it. And he's like, well, you need to meet Parker because that's the person you're going to partner with. And he was right. And that's kind of, I think, how a lot of things happen. You know, for me, I try to set my intention. I try to get really clear about what do I want. And then I just notice that things start to show up in my reality, you know, to help me create my future. And I think the times when I probably struggle the most are the times when I am not. Are the times when I need to double down on my faith to realize that that clarity and that path forward is there. And instead I kind of wonder, well, is it really there? No, no, it is there. And off we go.

Yeah. And I think for me, it's always, you know, when you meet someone, you know, and since we met at Kincaid's in Burlingame through a mutual acquaintance we were working on, I was working on a job there but we talked about the idea but it was more about meeting Mark. And I said there's something, I felt it that there was something amazing that could happen. And so I said I'm going to attach myself to this energy.

Unfortunately, when I told Parker it was at MRI software, he got very upset. So he had just come back from Nepal and he's like, no, no, I'm not doing this again. I am not going to do enterprise software. I just got back from Nepal and I had a huge meditation and I am not going to do your company idea. Is that right?

Turns out I was wrong.

So let's talk about your guys relationship a little bit. The co founder relationship is a lot like a marriage I think. I haven't, I'm not a co founder so I don't know, I'm just imagining it. But you guys, there's some things that.

Are not the same.

That is very good to know.

You missed the keynote. He did kiss me at the keynote.

Missed that.

So.

So you two have been happily co founded for like 19 years, right? 19 years. Co founded. Happiness. So what are your secrets to a happy relationship?

Happy wife. Happy wife.

I agree. Welcome to san francisco, julie.

So Parker, the founder of Cnet Halsey Minor, he was an early investor in Salesforce. He called you the creator of one of the most efficient development organizations in the history of the Internet. And I know, I know. And Salesforce, I mean there's.

I love superlatives.

It's wonderful, right? But Salesforce did grow from 100 million. It grow from nothing to 100 million in revenue with about 25 engineers, if I read the story correctly. And yet I understand that your mantra is to work fast and not break things. So can you please explain this audience? I'm sure they'd love to know. How can you be so hugely efficient and work fast and not break things?

Is that really. That's not really your phrase. You have a sign over your desk and that's not what it says. Oh yeah, that's not accurate. Actually none of that part is accurate. Here's the real story.

Okay.

Yeah. Now we'll actually tell you what really happened. That's somebody else's narrative. Yeah, this is his. Here's a sign that he's had over his desk since day one. And this is what it says.

So what we said, or what I said when we started was really three things. It needs to be fast, needs to be simple and right the first time. And Then the third one, the fourth one was. And did I say fast? That was. My co founder, Dave Molyneuff always added that.

Oh, and did I say fast?

There you go. So we wanted.

This is all being revealed. For the first time, we knew that.

People weren't going to use. This is the no software. Like, what in the world's no software? Enterprise software. I need to own it, I need to control it. And if we didn't make it fast, the IT department would not trust us. Trust has always been our number one value. Salespeople are not patient people, if you've met them, and that they wouldn't use. Had to be fast for us to understand it. You know, so then that got to simplicity that everything had to be simple. The user experience had to be simple, the code had to be simple. We used to celebrate removing code. We probably need to go back to that, make sure we're always carrying that value. And then. Right the first time was probably one of the most important things to me that everyone misunderstood in that it's not always right the first time, but when you know as an engineer that you're about to do something and it's going to be wrong, don't do it. Because the minute you do it, code lives forever and it's just going to stick there and you're going to say you're going to fix it later and don't do that and choose a different problem to solve and come back to it when you know the right way to do it.

Oh, so that's a good tip. So I was going to ask for a couple of tips for this audience, particularly from you and your giant sales, sorry, engineering organization, about working efficiently and all the things that you're known for. So one of them is, if it feels wrong, don't do it.

And I think one of the things that we did really well at the beginning was we kept a very small team for a long time.

And I'll actually credit Mark in part for that because we were in the apartment and we said, we're ready to go. We had two other co founders and Mark, and we said, mark, we have found our first employee. We're ready to go. And Mark said, great. Did you do a coding test? You're like, no, we didn't do a coding test. What's a coding test? And he said, you need to go back and really double check. Is this the person that you want to add? Because, you know, and this is common, everyone says this, don't hire the wrong people. You can ruin a team, but saying it's one thing and actually doing it and understanding how to do it is another. And we ended up not hiring that person. And that just taught us that I would rather have a backlog of all this work than have one employee or one wrong person in the company that's not the right person for the team. And keeping it small and tight. We're a big company now, I think the last time I checked, and I see these little companies that we acquire, and I love that I see these small teams. And whenever someone comes to me and says, well, to do this, I need 50 people, I need 25 people, I can't do anything. Is that really true? That's not true. And they're not thinking about it the right way.

And I think that that's really, for software and building software that's really important is that you can get a lot done with five or six people at some point. There's kind of an effect where once you get more than, let's say, 20 people, you end up with some dysfunction. And then until you get maybe over 100 or more to kind of get your productivity back. So I've always kind of recommended keep these teams really small. And I think in a lot of the products that I wrote when I was, you know, started in high school and in college and even in my 20s, and teams that I worked on companies before I was at Salesforce, small teams are key. And if you do let your teams get too big, you're gonna end up with a problem. That's the opposite is true in sales, by the way. In sales, you want as many salespeople as you can have, and you want them as fast as you can get them. Because you know you're the only way you're going to win a market share war is with an army. And that's why you need account executives. With development, it's completely the opposite. You want small, highly qualified people who are well trained, who work together well, who accomplish their goals, who meet their milestones, who get their product out, who listen closely to their customers, who and iterate quickly. So there's a little bit of a dichotomy between I think those two parts of a software company.

That makes sense. So you mentioned your childhood. I wanted to ask you a little bit about that because you have this sort of classic young geek history. I would say learning to code as a teen for Atari and then Max and, you know, with a twist. I mean, most teens don't get to work for Steve Jobs.

Today.

You've been Called a visionary and also a salesman and a showman. Someone with a big personality. So I want to ask, you know, were you always so self assured, you know, where did it, where did that come from? Or did you have to learn it along the way?

No, you know, I think that, you know, I got into, I got into the software business because I was not so far away from here in Burlingame. I was, you know, the same city where we met. I, in high school was, had my first, you know, not actually my first real job, but I had a job which was an after school job which was cleaning jewelry cases at a jewelry store and didn't really love that actually. So I, I had, when I was, I had started a company that was fixing radios and fixing CB radios.

You started a company? How old were you?

When I was probably 12 or 13. But I didn't really get, didn't scale, didn't really work. There's a lot of reasons why my grandmother felt I had my wrong pricing model.

You should always listen to your grandmother.

There's a lot of things that we could go into that then. So I ended up in this jewelry store, probably as part of that. And then right across the street from the jewelry store was this Radio Shack store where I would go to learn about these CB radios and how to fix them and repair them. And they had just introduced their first computer and I was just fascinated with that. And I'm like, wow, I'd really like to buy one of those. And my grandmother said to me, okay, I will match you. So if you make enough money in the jewelry store and you get 50%, I'll pay the next 50%. So in fact, we were able to accomplish that. And then I kind of taught myself how to use that computer, wrote a first piece of software called how to Juggle and sold it. And I said, wow, this pays better than CB radios. And I was in business and that was probably when I was about 14, 15.

I have so many questions about that.

Okay, not that interesting actually.

Did you know how to juggle?

What's that?

Did you know how to juggle?

I am good at juggling.

You can still juggle?

I sure can.

Oh, you got to juggle on stage.

Ok, well.

Well, maybe out of this.

I don't think we need to do it right now.

Oh, dang. Who did you sell it to? How did you wind up selling this piece of software?

Well, back in the day there weren't that many software developers, so I didn't have that much competition. But I wrote this piece of software. And there was a group of people teaching each other how to use these Radio Shack computers. And one of them was a company called C Load magazine. And the reason it was called C Load magazine was for cassette load because we had to read and write all of our software onto cassette tapes. It's pretty far back. And that's what we were doing. And so you would write that piece of software, load it on that cassette tape, send it down to this place, and they were like a newsletter and they went out every week or month or something like that.

Well, how much did they pay you for it? Cut to the chase.

They paid me 75 bucks for that piece of software. And I was like, let's go, this is happening.

It sounds like you were pretty self assured though, back then.

Well, I mean, at that moment in time, I probably was. Sure.

So, Parker, you also taught yourself to code as a kid, right? But then you went a completely, totally different way. You studied English lit in college. So tell us a little bit, I'm curious, do you write? Do you write poetry?

Do I write poetry now? My daughter writes poetry and I should write poetry, but I'm a little busy with this thing. So I fell in love with computers mainly because all the games that were coming out early on, this very simple games, and it's just amazed, like, how do they work? And then I just got turned on with the plasticity of coding that you could take this computer and write some code and make it do things and then change it and it would change what it did and, you know, and there were no real mistakes because you could just always keep redoing, redoing, redoing. And I loved it. And my grandfather, it's interesting some parallels here. My grandfather gave me some money and I got an Apple II. So not the Trash 80, but the Apple II. And I also had for a short time a cassette load chair.

Sadie was way before the Apple ii. Okay, just to keep the time frame straight, the apple's not out yet.

And you are older than me.

It was coming.

You are older than me.

I am a lot older. How much older am I?

A lot older. No, you're like what, three years?

Two years.

Three years.

Born in 67.

I was born in 67, yeah. Anything else? But I also was loading from a tape for a short period of time. And then I was so excited, I got my first floppy disk drive. And so I taught myself to code and I loved it. And I went all through high school coding. Then I went and I spent my senior year in high School in France. And so I was like, okay, yeah, it was good. I was at an all boys boarding school with a lot of rules. And then I went to France with co ed and there are a lot less rules and it was wonderful. And I learned French, among other things, but I didn't come out right. But I really started to think about the other side of my brain. And I always had loved writing and English literature and went to a liberal arts school in Vermont called Middlebury College. They did not have a degree in computer science when I got there. It's crazy. I took some computer science courses. I took one on simulations. This would be really cool. Simulate the world and it was simulating a drive through and I'm like, okay, this is really terrible. So I really got turned off and I got turned off by math. I took linear algebra, like I don't know what to do do with this. And so I just went the opposite way. But then towards the end of school I went back towards it because I still had that love of writing code. It's just, you know, academically it wasn't really turning me on. I did, you know, and then I left school, followed my now wife up to Montreal, Canada. I was learning assembly language and messing around and got a job writing. This was a very big market. I was writing accounting software for the Macintosh in French. So huge. And I was doing the coding, the quality assurance, the tech support, you know, everything, everything. So I learned a lot. It was great. But you know, that was kind of my transition. But big thumbs up for liberal arts colleges and spreading your knowledge beyond just, you know.

I also didn't take any computer science classes in college.

Ah, you didn't. What did you study?

I've never taken a computer science class, which explains a lot actually. I have undergraduate degree in entrepreneurship. I know this will surprise you and that's actually why I went to USC because of the Entrepreneur program. And I was really interested in that. I really felt like I wanted to learn how to start a business.

Did you start any other kid businesses?

Well, I started the CB radio business. That didn't go well. And then I started Liberty Software in high school, which is the software company I had in high school and college. And then in college that kind of went on hold for a little while because I had bought these Macintoshes and was trying to write assembly language and get them to work on the Macintoshes, but it wasn't very well developed. And so when I complained to Apple, they actually hired me to come up for a summer and fix their assembly language system, which was cool as part of. As an intern. And then I. Then I kind of got fascinated with. With the Mac. But I didn't return back to that kind of writing software world. Instead, I kind of ended up going into the kind of sales and marketing world.

Do you still write any software?

No, I have not written any software in a while. But I did find a lot of the software that I had written has been kind of recorded into a series of YouTube videos. So I went back. I know somebody has taken all my games and things that I wrote, and they made YouTube videos of all of my games and they have put them all on YouTube. And so I was like, wow, this is like credible that somebody would take the time to do this and rated them and all these various things. And some of them they liked, some of them they didn't like. It's amazing. But it was cool to go back and see those and even games that I had written. Like, I had written this Atari cartridge called Flapper and my grandmother had written the music for it. And it's like on a cartridge in my garage. And I'm like, how am I ever gonna get this to work? And it's on YouTube and I'm like, flapper. And it's playing my grandmother's music and I'm like, this is a modern age. This is incredible. Like, everything is on YouTube.

Internet. Who would have known?

I know.

Okay, so you said you've never doubted, you never doubted the big vision for Salesforce, but you also said that Michael Dell taught you that there are always ups and downs. So I'm not going to quite let you off the hook of that. I really, really would like you to share just a couple of stories from the early days of when something didn't go right and how you fixed it and what it helped you learn about building a company or making great software. Something that these folks would all love to know.

All right, which one would you like to hit? There's been a lot of problems along the way. Which one do you think will be a good story?

Well, I'll tell a personal story. So, you know, at one point we were spending maybe more in marketing than we should have early, early on. And we were right sizing that. We were working pretty hard. And I had a two and a half year old daughter and twin infants. And my wife is. We're working on a Sunday, we're writing V2Moms, our planning document, which I think many of you know. On a Sunday, my wife's pushing the stroller up the Hill and some investor was very competitive with. You somehow knew us from the parks. You know, you get to know random people at the parks and said to my wife as she's struggling with a stroller up the hill and I'm working on Sunday, we got these little kids. Salesforce is never going to make it, you know, and I still remember that.

That's a sad story.

It's a really sad story, but it's not really sad because I don't know where he is today, but we're doing all right. But, you know, but, you know, you look at our history and it looks amazing. But there were. There were some hard times. There's a lot of hard work. You know, it wasn't all easy.

Yeah, I mean, I would say that, you know, there's been a lot of. There's a lot of times where you're like, oh, man, I can't believe this is happening. And it could be a technical issue, it could be a business issue, it could be an outside issue. Somebody trying to influence you from the outside. I think those for me, those are the, you know, there's a lot of that kind of story, which I think is unfortunate. Those for me are easy to put those aside because you just have a lot of people who are not wishing your best success. I think that that's why it's important if you are starting something like Salesforce, that you surround yourself with people who do believe in you, who do believe you're going to be successful because you're going to have a whole bunch of people who are going to tell you that you're not. I guess that would probably like go to one of those stories, which is we're starting the company. I put up some of them, I rented the apartment, I put up some money. We're going, you know, we bought the computers, we're, you know, programming, et cetera. I need to then go kind of hat in hand, like as a high tech beggar down to Silicon Valley to raise some money, raise more money. And then I'm thinking I'm just going to do that in the traditional way where I've kind of written this business plan and the slide deck. And as I go from venture capitalist to venture capitalist to venture capitalist, and a lot of them are my friends, people I've been going to lunch with, whatever. And each and every one of them said, no. That's why Salesforce was never able to raise a single dollar from a venture capitalist. When I go out and look at the world today and see how much money is raised by venture capitalists, like, why are these people not investing in Salesforce? And there were a lot of stories. There was a competitor who would call these venture capitalists after I would be there and say, don't invest in that company. That was kind of an amazing phenomenon. There was just people who did not believe that this was going to happen, that that was part of it. And then there were just venture capitalists who are looking for something in the short term and can't really see that there is going to be a huge paradigm shift like the cloud and just don't have that mental model. And that in my mind, that was like a really powerful thing. And so that's why the money that we needed to raise for Salesforce we raised 62 million. It took us about 55 million before we went cash flow positive. That money came almost entirely from private individuals. So the people who believed in us were people who I would just meet and talk to and say, here we go. And one example is I recently heard from the family of one of our investors who since passed on, Patrick McGovern, who was the founder of IDG, a phenomenal publishing company and also created an amazing venture arm in China and was somebody who I always had a huge amount of respect for, who also created a brain science center at MIT and did many, many amazing things was influencing me. And I was on just one of my trips to talk to customers or whatever in the very early days, like within the first few months of starting the company. And this is a little bit about when you set a positive intention. You need to pay attention to the people who are around you and things that are going on. And I'm about to get on a United flight down to Los Angeles and I'm in the line and the person just taps me on the shoulder and it's Pat McGovern is right behind me and I'm like, oh, hey, what are you doing? And he's like, I'm flying to Los Angeles. And he's like, well, what are you doing? And I'm like, well, I've been starting. I just started a company and this is what I'm doing. And I'm like, I'm very excited. It's about, you know, really the next level of software. And he said, I want to invest. This is very exciting to me. And that kind of thing is really kind of, I think how we kind of were able to make it happen. And I think we were lucky to be able to find those people because the traditional funding route was not happening for Us.

And how sad are they that they never invested in it?

Well, the cool thing that I heard from Pat McGover's family is that he bought the stock and he never sold any of it. And they found it. Wow. They did. Yeah. And so that was a very good return. I know Keg because that was, like, in one of our very, very first rounds. Maybe our very first. Wow, that's a good story.

What a thing to find in your attic. So, Mark, you like to talk about having a beginner's mind, and it does seem like you're in expert mode these days with running Salesforce. You know, does it feel that way to you? Do you feel like, oh, okay, I've been CEO for 19 years now. I've got this now?

No, I don't think you can ever do that. And I'll tell you right now that I'm. I mean, as an example. I'll give you an example then, which is that I try to keep that mindset. And we were just at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and, you know, I was kind of thinking a lot about different technologies and different things that are going on. And we were at a crypto conference. I'm like, wait a minute. We're at a crypto conference in Davos? Yeah, we're at a crypto conference. Wait, it's the World Economic Forum. It turned out there was a crypto conference that double booked with the World Economic Forum in Davos accidentally. It was very weird. So I'm in this bar at the Intercontinental Hotel in Davos. We're having a Salesforce event in the venue, and this person starts to come up to me and just talk to me about cryptography and also cryptocurrencies and. And bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and all of these various things. And I'm just thinking to myself, what is going on? You know? And we're going. I'm like, there must be a reason this is happening now. I had been thinking a lot about, what is Salesforce's strategy around blockchain and what is Salesforce's strategy around cryptocurrencies? And how will we relate to all of these things and how will these things move forward? And just by kind of having that conversation and just talking to him and just letting it happen, and just, you know, when it happens, I always get a feeling like, well, there's a reason I'm talking to this person, and I'm just going to talk to this person. I have no. Never met this person before. I don't know a ton about this area and going deeper and deeper and deeper. And then I'm like. And then in my mind, all of a sudden, I just kind of hear this click. And it's like, you know, if you did this, this and this, you could put blockchain and cryptocurrencies into Salesforce, and this is how you would do it, and this is what it would mean to your customers and how it would impact them. And I'm like, whoa. And that's kind of how it works, you know, and what I hope that by Dreamforce, we will have a blockchain and a cryptocurrency solution, you know, for Salesforce and for all of our customers, because I think it's really exciting area for all of them. And a lot of it comes out of exactly that, which is just paying attention, listening, knowing that innovation is coming. There's new ideas coming all the time. There's more ideas than we can possibly execute. You know, but just let's listen. And then, like, as evidence of the story, now I have that idea, and I'm thinking, okay, blockchain, cryptocurrency, Salesforce. And I can kind of see this is what it looks like and this is what it could be. And then he, you know, he's a huge part of everything we do. And he comes to me and he says, well, you know, this senior engineering leader that we have doesn't really have a project, and I don't know what to tell him and what should I do? And I'm like, send him over. And then I brought them in. I said, let me tell you about my idea, and we need to get this done by Dreamforce, and that's kind of how it works. And again, I'm listening and I'm kind of paying attention. And if he hadn't said that, maybe that would not have happened because I wouldn't have that ability to execute that. It's just out in the ether. And by the way, there's just plenty of things along the way, I can tell you, that were just in the ether, not going to happen, because we never were able to kind of put that together. We're working on other things. You can only do so many things. You can't do everything. As you know, Parker always says, if everything is important, nothing is important.

Mark says that.

Actually, maybe it's me that says that if everything is important, nothing's important. But this idea that you do have to prioritize and you can't do everything and you need to have a V2 mom. And yet at the same time, you have two worlds. You have the important and you have the urgent. And there's kind of a competition between those two things, but sometimes and usually want to focus on the important. But sometimes the urgent does become the important. When that idea can be a game changer or something can really happen. And in certain examples in our company's history, at times when mobile became more important or social networks became important, we will just say to everybody, okay, stop. This is all we're going to do and we're going to change our platform. We're going to do something completely new.

So what about you, Parker? Are there things that you feel like you're in constant development as a leader that you're working on right now, the next set of challenges you hope to conquer? Oops.

They didn't find the answer to that question. Apologies.

Hey, Siri, play Imagine Dragons.

So I think one of the things that I love about Salesforce is we have such an incredible team. And so, you know, I think of Brett Taylor, who's our head of product, and Srini Talipragata, who I see over there running all engineering and just all of the, you know, we have an amazing team and so we try to find how do we each play our roles. Where I'm spending a lot of my time, spent a lot of time on mobile, spent a lot of time on social, spent a lot of time on lightning, which I think all of you have heard of. And where I'm spending a lot of my time now is looking at how we run all of this software. And we run it in our own data centers. We run it with our partners like Amazon and like Google. And our customers want choices and our engineers want agility to be able to, you know, float between all of these different places. And they want to use all the coolest new tools. And we acquire companies that add that complexity. And it's this very complex problem that's also a very human problem, too. A lot of people with very strong opinions that maybe don't always agree. And that's where I'm spending a lot of my time. Because I think that that's one of the really important things right now, where we are as a company, as the next big thing, that maybe people in the room won't see it or buy it directly, but it will affect you guys in a very big way.

So software's already eaten the world. I think most of us in this room would agree to that. And there's a company right now that's Very much under the gun over it all. Facebook has been in the news lately, busted for collecting our data, selling ads to Russians, all that kind of stuff. So I know it's easy for a developer to get so caught up in the work, how to solve a problem and never look up and see what they're contributing to. And I'm just wondering what your guys thoughts are on what the role is of everyone in this room towards some of these, these issues that we're seeing.

Well, I think we all have a role and we all have to take our place in that. And specific to that world. I think that, you know, I've been saying this for a while, which is that trust is the highest priority in our industry right now. And we're trying to align with that. It's not easy. You have to constantly reinforce it. Trust is everybody's highest value. When we're dealing with these next generation technologies like artificial intelligence, okay. Like social media, like mobility, in all of these areas, trust has to be our highest value. And that's different than where the computer industry used to be. Computer industry used to be. And I think that, you know, Travis Kalanick actually is a friend of mine and says this really well. I think he very much characterizes his leadership as the best idea wins. And I think that for many decades that's a great way to paraphrase how the computer industry was the best idea wins. And good for Travis, that's very much how his leadership is. The best idea wins. And off we went until at some point there's a crisis of trust. And that is the issue, which is that there's a tipping point for a company or a technology or a culture where you have to say, okay, hold on, this is not about the idea anymore. This is now about trust. And the trust I have with my key stakeholders, which can be my employees, my customers, my partners, the media, it could be the homeless in my cities, it could be my public schools. And this is an incredibly powerful moment for every CEO of every company to look in the mirror of a Facebook or even an Uber and say, what is happening? There is really a focusing on trust. That is, do we trust them? Are they acting with trust as their highest value? And in many cases those companies don't act that way. They are not exhibiting that behavior. And then they have to pivot again. And the new CEO says that of Uber, for example, trust is his highest value. Okay, So I would expect that from the new CEO of Uber. And that's the shift between the two. It's not in Any way, am I not saying that this was not necessarily wrong? As an entrepreneur, you have to come in and say, this is my idea. I've got this great idea. But at some point, you have to realize you have a level of responsibility to something greater than yourself. And when are you going to establish that? When will you say, you know what? This company, this idea is now something bigger than who I am, and I bow to that, and I am going to lead from that position. And that is difficult. That's a difficult shift for leaders to make. We're witnessing that in real time with Facebook. Okay. We've witnessed that. It's actually, you can see it's taken them now a couple of two or three years. They've known about this and haven't done anything about it. And that's why, you know, I was in Davos and I got in trouble with friends of mine at Facebook who were calling me and, you know, very upset with me because I said, facebook is the new cigarettes. It's addictive. It's not good for you, and there's outside forces trying to manipulate you to use it.

Okay, and why would they be upset that you said that?

Well, it was either that or then I said, and it's a lot like now, those kid cigarettes they used to sell, where used to buy those cigarettes in the store that were bubblegum cigarettes. Does everybody remember those?

I remember those.

And then what happened when you blew the bubble gum cigarettes, like powdered sugar blew out of them. Do you remember that? Does everybody remember that?

I do remember that.

And now we have Facebook for kids. And it's like, it's the same link. And they got really mad at me, really upset, but I'm trying to just protect our industry. Just tell everybody, look, we have to take our consciousness up a level. We all have to rise up and realize we're in a new world with this technology. This technology is new. It's something like we've never had before in each of these categories. And that means our leadership has to get to another level of excellence.

But what about the developer? Like, is there a role for developers in social action? I mean, like, say you're a developer.

Absolutely, there's a role. Do you want to know what the role is? Good for Susan Fowler. Susan Fowler was a critical person in the Uber story. She wrote a very powerful narrative saying this culture is toxic and it needs to evolve. And now it is evolving. But yes. So every employee, you know, employees are not extracted. They're part of the ecosystem, and we have to be listening Deeply. To our employees, our customers. That's one reason I do like social media. I love Twitter. I love to be able to listen to what's going on. I try to respond to people. I can't respond to everybody, but I try to listen to what's going on and pivot and shift based on those things. But we are at a new point in technology. There's no question about that. And our values have to shift. And I think that that's true for leaders like myself. CEO of a company. That's true for CEOs of other companies. You know, when I travel, I always try to bring CEOs together in these different cities. I was in Chicago last week. I had a dinner with 20 cos, and we talk about CEO activism. What can CEOs do to make the world a better place? It's like there's two types of cos. Are you. Are you committed to the state of the world and committed to improving the state of the world or not? And you have to kind of choose. And that's where we are. That's where we are today. And these pieces are related. So if you look at trust, if you look at CEO activism, if you look at responsibility, these things are all connected. There was a really great article that came out on Harvard Business Review last week called Divided We Lead on CEO activism. This is not something that, you know, when I graduated USC in 1986, that's not something that I took a class on CEO activism, and that's why I'm good at it. No, this is just something that has kind of evolved. And so you can then. And then we can, like, dip down into what those different issues be.

I'm curious, Parker. I'm curious what you think, too. So say, you know, you're working at this organization and. And the boss come in and says, boy, Android gives us access to everyone's text messages. Let's take that. And you're someone. You're like, that sounds a little sketchy for me. So, short of burning the house down, overturning the tables and walking, or as great as Susan Fowler's memo was, which was astounding, short of that kind of thing, you know, can someone within their job affect change?

Absolutely. You know, I think it starts, as Mark said, with values. When we started the company, we started not talking about the product, but what are our values as a company and the V2MOM process and across our whole employee base, we do that. You know, I've heard Mark talk about when people say, mark, why don't you Join the government, you know, go make changes. And he says, well, you know, it's our responsibility to make change. So Mark's saying, you know, CEO activism. Everyone in this room is an activist too. And they can't look to Mark to say, I care about the same thing. Mark, I hope you do something about it. Right. Because Mark can't get it all done. You know, he's a great guy. He's really powerful, doing great things in the world, but we can't just sit back and look. And so I do think that we each have a role to play, but it goes back to those values. And I think starting to have a discussion around the values and looking at a problem like you described, and just go back to the value discussion, say, well, let's talk about why is that right or wrong, and talk to your customers and have some transparency. It's all the culture that Salesforce has had ever since we started. I think every company needs this. That's also why you see the energy in this room at all our conferences. Our ohana is being built by that transparency, by the connection we have with each other and by their shared values, and that everyone feels like they're part of it, that they have a role to play in making change.

Yeah, everyone's speaking up. Everyone can quietly speak up or big speak up. You have choices. So I want.

Everybody has an obligation, I think, today to speak up. I think it's more than everybody can. I really think we have to. I mean, everybody can see what's happening in the world. There's more transparency into the world now. There may be this concept of fake news, which is this filter, and we may be being manipulated by different forces. At least that's what I heard on Homeland last week. But, okay, still, we can persist, have a commitment to the truth, and we can work to find that true north and work towards that. But I think we all have a commitment to make the world better. And we all know the world has challenges. We know what those challenges are, and we need to be the change that we're trying to seek. And Salesforce can do it in its tiny way, but every single person can do something. And I think this is the most important thing. I think we talk about public schools all the time. I think each and every person can adopt a public school. Everybody knows where their public school is closest to their home. Mine is just a few blocks away from mine. For me, yes, it's my obligation to walk down there, knock on the door, and say, what can I do to help? Parker does that as well. He's adopted a public school not so far away from here in Visitation Valley, where he went. And he's painting the. What were you painting? You were painting something. The pavement or the basketball court and the whole thing. But we all have to do something, and public school is a great place to do something. Very actionable. Our ohana, especially, are especially enabled with technical skills. Every school needs that. We can all do one thing. Companies have a bigger responsibility. They can do more with schools and school districts and large companies like Salesforce. Yes, we have an obligation to adopt an entire school district like San Francisco and then Oakland, too, because we're big enough to do that. So that's. And that's important. That's important to me. That's important to our employees. Their kids are in those schools. That's important to our stakeholders. It represents our values. You know, we have $100 million commitment to our local public schools here in San Francisco. We've already fulfilled more than 20 or 25 million dollars of that. It's been transformational. I've seen, you know, we have a 6,000% increase in underrepresented minorities in K through 12, computer science in San Francisco, a 2,000% increase in women participating in computer science. And in San Francisco, those incredible increases in attendance in math and science scores. And I attribute a lot to our employees being in the schools doing volunteerism. It's why I love that all of our employees get four hours a month paid for volunteerism. I'll tell them, go to the schools and do that. And our leaders, every single one of our executive team, their responsibility. Like, I have a public school, Presidio Middle School. He has Visitation Valley. Every single executive has to adopt a public school and lead their organizations to improve that school. That's something that we can all do. We can all take that initiative. I love to give that example because it's something that people know where their local public school is. But you know that we cannot delegate this off to our governments or to our local officials or to our school boards. We have to be in partnership with them. We cannot be, you know, we cannot dismediate ourselves from our communities. We have to be part of our.

Communities, speak up at our companies gently or wildly, however the mood and the opportunity takes you. And then we have to act locally. And you like the idea of education in schools because we all have a school, and it can be extremely influential. I like those ideas a lot.

Good, Willem.

Thank you.

My stamp of approval. There you go. So let's talk a Little bit about the women in tech efforts here. You're honoring Emily Chang later this evening. So I do want to ask if you guys think that Silicon Valley generally has sort of a bro culture problem that makes a lot of women want to give up on the industry and what do you think that the Valley needs to change? Learn?

Well, I think there's, you know, first of all, I think that, number one, that, yes, we're in pursuit of equality. You know, we believe in the equality of every human being. That's what you heard Keith talk about that in the keynote this morning. And equality can mean a lot of different things. One of the things that I really loved in the keynote this morning as I looked around and I saw a very high level of diversity and inclusion in the room. And at this conference, I'm sure everybody agrees. I've been to a lot of developer conferences, but I just kind of got a good feeling this morning and I'm like, wow, in our ohana, we really have a pursuit of diversity of inclusion. And I look at what's happening in our women in tech groups around the world with Salesforce Ohana, it's amazing, you know, and the women are kind of taking over, which is probably how it should be. So that is. And it's not a gratuitous comment. It's not a gratuitous. They know it's not a gratuitous comment because when I go to these cities, they're there in force and they're running the show and they're lining up and they're taking over our user groups and it's powerful. And then the second thing is though, in our company now. So one thing I talk about, in our customer base and our partners in our communities, when I travel, when I'm looking around in our, you know, in our, in the MVP world and in some of these amazing next generation NGOs that we have that we saw represented today. I had lunch with some of them, things that are going on with our veterans group, all of that is I see a lot of gender equality. I really do. And I see a lot of diversity and inclusion. And I there's going to be more of it because that's happening in our company. As a CEO, when I think about gender equality, there are four things that are on my mind today. One, of course, I want the equal advancement and equal opportunity of every woman in the company. That's extremely important. I want to make sure there's no ceilings. I want every great female executive to rise. And then three, there has to be pay equality, okay? And pay equality is that we have to pay men and women the same for the same work. We've had to make two pay adjustments already. One three million dollar adjustment and a second three million dollar adjustment. When we acquired a bunch of companies and we bought their pay scales, and even though we had gender equality, we rebooted again. And this may not be completely the same definition of gender equality in all worlds. You know, the different geographies and different cultures may view it differently, but for us, it starts in this pay equality area. And then four is preventing sexual harassment. You know, you see the MeToo movement, this is real. This cannot. You can't deny what is happening. And every CEO has to have that responsibility too, to prevent sexual harassment in their organization. And every CEO and have zero harassment, zero tolerance in these four areas.

Every company says they have zero tolerance. Every company says they have zero tolerance.

Every company does not say that. This is a discussion that we're having back and forth. Well, all I can do is speak for my company, okay? And if there was some. If someone.

So what does that really mean? Like, when you're with your company and you're like, I have zero tolerance. You also have to be fair. If.

No, I don't.

You don't have to be fair.

No, no.

All right, let's hear. Let's hear what.

I think that in some areas, you have to have a very strong line. And you've got to make it clear. You know, the thing about values is values don't mean anything until they turn into behaviors. And you've got to really look at what is the behavior in your company. Now we have 30,000 employees, and I can tell you they're not all lined up for sainthood. Okay? Starting with this one and this one. Okay. That's reality, right? So we're doing the best we can. We have to hold ourselves to a high standard. We're not going to be perfect. We're going to make mistakes. There's going to be issues. But if you cross a line, okay, there cannot be any way out of that. You're going to. That. That is just where it is for. In that area, in sexual harassment. That's one of those lines.

Well, I think all companies agree that once something somebody's been proven to have sexually harassed.

That's not my experience in my career, honestly, it's not. And I really think there's probably a lot of women who would agree with me that they see that sexual harassment out there and action is not taken. And if there's actions that I should take that I'm not taking. I encourage people to come to me and tell me. We run a social network internally. We have a lot of transparency inside of our company. But, you know, we recently had to fire. I'll just tell you, we recently had to fire an executive that we did not want to have to fire. It's not the first one, because they crossed a line that was gray. And in our company, gray is not all right. You just have to hold that line.

Well, excellent. Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me to do this. It's been so much fun.

Well, thank you, Julie. It's great. We love reading your stuff on Business Insider. Please be nice to us.