Marc Benioff: Founder and CEO of Salesforce, Owner of TIME Magazine, and Philanthropist

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Find the answers@pmi.org Guy Kawasaki of the Remarkable People Podcast Here I want to give a shout out to the My First Million podcast. It's hosted by Sam Parr and Sean Pury. It's now available on the HubSpot podcast network. Just like Remarkable People, My First Million features guests discussing how they made their first million. Duh. And brainstorming about the hottest trends and opportunities. They recently made an episode called How Venture Capitalists Make Money. They interviewed solo capitalist Brian Kimmel in that episode. Listen to My First Million wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People Podcast. Today's remarkable guest is Marc Benioff. Marc is the founder and CEO of Salesforce.com he is also the owner of Time magazine. He has a reported net worth of over $10 billion. He and I go way back, almost 38 years to be exact. At the time, I was a software evangelist in the Macintosh division of Apple. Mark was a student at the University of Southern California. I gave him a job as an intern in the summer of 1984. His task was to write assembly language programs so that Macintosh developers around the world could see how Macintosh software was created. Mark is also the author of the New York Times bestseller the Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change. And last but not least, Mark and his wife are major philanthropists. For example, they have given $200 million to the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals, also another $200 million to combat climate change. They are signatories of the Giving Pledge, which means they have promised to give the majority of their wealth to philanthropy. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. And now here's the remarkable former intern, Marc Benioff. It was 38 or 39 years ago that you spent the Summer of love at Apple.

1984, I remember very clearly. I was in my dorm room at usc. And you know, USC is a great school in Los Angeles, Guy. And I was on my computer at the time and I was Watching the. And this incredible commercial came on with this amazing woman who was running down an aisle with a sledgehammer. And the commercial said, 1984 won't be like 1984. And the next thing I saw was an Apple logo. And I picked up the phone and called my mother and I said, you know, I've been working on Atari, building Atari now for so many years. I'm moving back to Apple and I can't wait for this new Macintosh computer. And the next person I called after that was you. And I said, I want to become a developer. And you're like, okay, we're just trying to figure that out right now. We're going to help you. And I was kind of a 19 year old, snotty nose kid with a little software company built out of a bunch of my high school friends. And you were great. You know, you got me all hooked up and I was in business as a Macintosh developer.

And the rest is history. Huh?

The rest is history.

I tell everybody that I knew you were going to be so successful.

Oh yeah, yeah. Oh sure. Oh yeah. Now. It was bumpy. It was bumpy. I would go into your office, it was hard to get product actually. So we had the Mac 128 at that point. And the big coveted Mac was the 512. And you had a few of them around, root around your office and they were going out to very key developers like Lotus who were building Jazz or Microsoft. But independent guys like me, well, we, we could only hope and pray for something quite as exciting as that. And it was, it was, it was cool. And you gave me a job in May or June working right in Apple in badly 4 near you with these great people who I even keep in contact with like Scott Commencementer and others. It was a moment that shaped my mind of what a great technology company was because Apple really had it all. And Steve Jobs of course was there running around and yelling at everyone. And it was, it was, it was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

Did you learn any specific lessons there?

Well, I think the number one lesson that I learned while being at Apple is that a technology company, great one, you know, is filled with amazing energy, vitality, in a sense of urgency because if, if there was anything there, everyone felt, oh, we gotta go, go, go. We have a window and it's close and you're, you're fighting the technology continuum because you're coding, you're building, you're creating, you're doing all these amazing things, but at the same time you Realize others are doing that as well. You're in a race. And you felt that sense of urgency there. And at the same time, there was a great culture. Deep jobs, have those wallet juices for everyone. And Giapso Lesurs were going up and down the hallways, keeping programmers limber. You know, they could work 24. 7. And Dan Farber, who was a great journalist who at the time I think was editor of Macworld or something, he actually works at Salesforce now, stowed up in my dupe, hey, kid, what are you working on? And. And it was like, wow, this is a real amazing environment. And there was a motorcycle in the lobby, There was a pirate flag on the roof. And when I had problems, I could walk across the street from Banley 4 to Banley 3 and I would go talk to someone named Steve Capps, who was one of these incredible visionary, you know, kind of savant engineers, to go, I don't understand. I'm working in assembly language and I can't get this to work, and I can't that to work. And he's like, oh, you forgot this, you forget to get that. There was no documentation. Nothing was written down. Everything was oral story. Usually in the. In the development world, you're picking up some amazing textbook and you're going, oh, yeah, I see, I could do that. I could do that. But we were in many ways writing the textbooks in real time while we were building the product. And Steve Katz, I mean, I wouldn't have made it through that without him. I mean, it was an amazing moment in time. There's no question, truly.

And Mark, I have to say that your success, it just brings such joy to my heart that you have succeeded to this extent. So that's one level of the joy that Mark has brought into my life. But the next level is that you have not squandered your success and you've paid back society, which not a lot of people do.

I think we can go back to that moment in time, that Summer of Love, 1984, that incredible time. Bandly 3, Bandly 4, Apple, Steve Jobs. And I'm sitting in my cube and I'm 19 and working on my computers, and, you know, I've won Mac 128, which is I'm compiling on, and the other Mac 128 I am linking and debugging on, and they're connected with a cable and it's barely working. And it's kind of an amazing thing. We're building something called the Macintosh 68,000 development system for assembly language. Programmers and there's this great engineer, Bill Duvall is putting it all together and having the time of my life. And I truly just wrote my first piece of code. It was a game called Raid on Armo, which was a the headquarters of IBM at the time. And yep, Scott Canal comes in my cube. Well, how you doing, Mark? Near now two weeks. You got anything? No. For what you're doing? Yeah, Scott, I wrote this. We're going to use this as our example for Macintosh 68,000 assembly language. It's radon Arm off. I'm an assembly language programmer stock, but I'm a video game developer. And here we go. And we're sitting down these IBM computers and executives and it's going to be great. And he's like, okay, this is going to end now, Mark. This is not what we're doing. You're going to do something simple like show people how to make a window, show people how to make a menu. And I'm like, oh, I didn't realize that. And he's like, yes, I realize now I need to give you clear direction. I'm like, okay, well, tell me what to do. And it was kind of an amazing. And literally right then Scott left. I'm like, oh, gee, I have to throw away this whole game. I've written and my phone rings and it's Henry Singleton. Now, I didn't know who Henry Singleton was, and I had to start asking people who he was. In fact, I had to go ask Steve Capps who he was. But Henry Singleton, he was the chairman and CEO and founder of Teledyne big sealer products company, but also defense contractor Los Angeles. And he was living in Bel Air. And he called me and he said, hey, I'm using your sample code and it's great. And I'm going to write a chess program and it's going to be an amazing chess program on the Macintosh. And I figured it out based on what you've done here. I'm like, whoa, this is great. Somebody's using my stuff and recycled in. And then I realized he's also on the board of Apple and that's why he got all my stuff early. And so I'm talking to this Apple director and then I start to freeze. I get nervous. I'm getting panicky, you know, I'm having a little panic attack. And Henry Singleton says, so who are you anyway? And I'm like, I'm 19. I go to USC. I am just here for the summer. I'm writing all the sample code on Macintosh 68,000. I'm just an assembly language programmer and I usually have my own software company. And this is like my first job and I actually got. Just got a paycheck and I have an employment badge from Apple and. And this is all really cool. What's happening is like, now, Mark, listen here. I live in Los Angeles, and when you get back to school, you're going to come and see me. And he became really my first mentor, really. And I went out to see him that many times. Many times, actually. And I would drive out there to Bel Air and his house was next to Hughes, Hugh Hefner's, a Playboy mansion in this gorgeous, gorgeous residence. And the gates would open and his wife would come out. Everyone was so gracious and generous to me. And he started to talk to me about different things. And I realized, oh, this is a different kind of CEO and this is a different kind of way to think about business. And this is another idea. And I began to realize, oh, I actually have been influenced in business in many different ways. And this all came out of that moment on Bandley.

I should claim a lot of your success. You should, because I gave you a job.

Why not claim all of it? Ty.

I think that people do not fully appreciate the difficulty of what you accomplish in the sense of convincing companies to trust their data to the cloud, because that just wasn't an idea back then. So how did you pull that off?

I think probably through pure ignorance. You know, it's a funny thing. And our story continued after Apple and I went to Oracle and I bump into you all the time and we'd exchange stories. And our life has constantly been intersecting during this, this moment since 84 now to 2022. I would say that when we started Salesforce, what we built was just killer app, but that's all we were trying to do. The easiest business app of all time, just make it easy, make it simple, very basic functionality. Just get it working, try to make it so you could just log on and manage. No one had really done that yet. And what I really had was a vision that you could build basic business apps using the browsers at that time, which were still relatively unstable, insecure, hard to use, but that things had kind of started to make a movement where, yeah, you could deliver a really high quality app. And Jeff Bezos has done such a great job with Amazon. He had already been five or six or seven years. And I'm like, Jeff Bezos can build an app that sells books, we can build an app that manages data. And we did it literally in a matter of months, about six months, we were able to build a very rudimentary system to be able to manage information. And this category that we decided to Salesforce Automation, which also I would say was kind of a fluky thing that I picked there because I really didn't know anything about Salesforce Automation. I was mostly an application development and deployment executive. I had been working on building tools at Oracle. So kind of build an app that this was really my first business app. And all of a sudden we put it out there and people just started liking it and using it and and we didn't have to do too much convincing. What happened was people just found it to be fun. They just enjoyed it and made and it just brought them in. They told their friends. There was a lot of word of mouth and it grew and that was really how it and I think you can bring it back to Apple. And the reason why is what are the things that we learned at Apple. We knew it had to be fun. We knew it had to be low cost. We knew it had to be accessible. We knew it had to be for the every person. We knew that we had to deal at the ground level. We weren't selling to CIOs at that point. We were just selling to whoever wanted to call us and talk to us about managing information. And that was I think a lot of that Apple energy. I was lucky to keep some of that with me in that 15 years between 84 and 99 when we started Salesforce.

So you're saying that people didn't directly confront you with I don't trust the cloud, I don't trust your servers with my data. That kind of question never came up.

It was not a dominant part of the conversation. I know it's kind of hard to believe because I think like yourself that that would be like a natural thing just to kind of go right there and I look at critique it. But maybe the category person we were talking to salespeople, we're thinking salespeople were thinking hey, I really like this out then I need to manage my and we only did five things. Contacts. I need to manage my contacts. I need to manage my accounts, I need to manage my opportunities. I need to manage my forecasts and I need to manage my reports. Oh, and also their tasks and these things. That's what made Salesforce Salesforce. We got the app right and then that was really the beginning. And then we went from being an app to a platform. We added another app with service. We acquired a company with Our marketing cloud, a small company called Exact Target. And that was the fundamental foundation of our company, which is still true today.

And with hindsight, why didn't Oracle do what you did?

Oracle was really never in this business. Oracle was really a business that was for very large enterprises, number one, selling them databases. So Oracle is still the best database in the world. It's a great database. It's been well engineered. Larry Ellison is still very passionate about solving all the mathematical problems associated with a database management. He's done a great job since 1977 to today. It's like 45 years of database excellence. And that's what Oracle did. And everything else around Oracle, including the apps or everything, that was always a second thought. But Oracle also was never at the bottom. Oracle was not interested in that bottom consumer. Where we work, where we started right at, hey, you're just on the Internet and you found salesforce.com, you can make this useful. That's not what Oracle was. Oracle was much more of a enterprise quality sale. And in some ways, Salesforce has evolved into that. We're a company this year that we said we're going to do $31.8 billion in revenue next year. It's a big company, 75,000 people. Our bread and butter today is very much that kind of enterprise solution. We're really working with the largest, most important companies in the world to manage their information, to take the concepts that we learned early on, make it easy, make it useful and make it available over the Internet, but to really deliver it at an enterprise class. And, and I think because we kind of started at the bottom and then kind of came up, we were able to achieve this position today.

And what did you learn in the transition from startup to Fortune 150? What did Marc Benioff have to do differently?

Well, I think that the transition from startup to Fortune 100 actually this year, so we're going to be in the 100 is amazing. Who would have ever, I never would have thought when I started the company that I was creating a Fortune 100 company. But we, we, we have. And I think that what I've learned is a lot about what I've learned open, which is, as you go from the beginning to the end, stay focused on your core values. What are your core values? What's really important to you? This might not have been something that we talked about at Apple. This may have been a thought and an idea that came after Apple. Apple's core values were more around product, not around the company per se. Our Core values, I think, are more around our company, who we are as an organization, and as we were able to stay true to our core values. Trust, customer success, innovation, quality of every human being that. That guided us through this growth period. We operationalize those value every year. So even in next year, which is our fiscal year 23, when we look at those core values which stay with us and probably sustainability is a value now that we're also operationalizing, we look at each one of those values and say, how do we achieve trust? This and also what is preventing us from having greater levels of trust and how we know that we have trust as we look at that and as we get bigger and as the company scales by employee, but also by revenue, it's more important than ever to stay true to our core values. And as Covid has really taken us and grabbed us by the throat and tried to take us down the, you know, into a back alley, it's been like, okay, let's just stay true to our core values because that's going to guide us through the most difficult situation. You know, I think that when we forget who we are as a company or even as an individual, or we kind of all of a sudden find ourself looking at different potential futures for ourself, ultimately we have to get back to our values and what's truly important to us. And that's, I would say, the secret sauce of Salesforce. We really got clear of what is truly important to us and we have stayed to it.

How about you explain the 111 plan, because there is no greater data point about your values than the 111 plan.

Well, I'm so glad you asked me that question, because I would say that as I got ready to start Salesforce, I knew somehow, and I don't even know where exactly it came from, I went through, really, I had a number of really unusual experiences when I took sabbatical, Oracle in 1996, 97, and met quite a few people, including one of my most important mentors of my life, sadly, perhaps General Colin Powell, who really took me aside at that moment and looked in my eyes that you've got a big future and you're probably going to start a company. And when you do, I want you to start thinking about something. Stop thinking about now. And I would say, what is that, sir? And you said that you have to be thinking about how you're going to use business as the greatest platform change, how you're not just going to do well, but how you're going to do good. And you have all these amazing resources, financial resources, relationships, technology, customers. You can maximize them for your shareholder value, or you're going to be able to do that and you maximize them for your stakeholder value. That is for everybody in the world. The planet even is a stakeholder. And that's kind of a big and overwhelming thought as an entrepreneur that you're going to have to build a company that's trying to improve the state of the world. Not to conquer a market or a. A product segment, but, you know, it's kind of a fun challenge. And I think being at Oracle as long as I was, and I think you remember some of those moments where I was very conflicted. I felt at some point I was happy to be building great products. But in the afternoons, you probably remember, like during net day, when we were wiring schools and we had these amazing, inspiring figures coming out of places like Sun Microsystems, which doesn't really exist anymore. But these incredible people were like, saying, hey, we need to get out there and wire the world and get kids connected to the Internet. And I realized, because during the morning I was in my office at Oracle at Redwood Shores, and then in the afternoon I was in the Bayview and different parts of San Francisco wiring schools. And I was saying to myself, dude, I think we can do both of the company. It's not an either or, it's an and. And there was one very seminal story the General Powell actually got quite tired of me telling. But I'll tell it again because it was an important story. And what happened was, is General Powell had called us and said, mark, I really want you to get 100 computers at McFarland Middle School in Washington, D.C. it's a school I've adopted. No, Mark, every one of us needs to adopt a public school. And I said, yes, sir, I will do that for you. And I agree. Every person needs to stop at public school now. There's nothing more important than our children's public education. And so I, you know, arranged to get the computers out there. I got our executives there. I had two amazing executives there. One still works at Salesforce, Jim Cavallari, another one, Mitch Wallace, who works at a company called viva. And they called me and they said, hey, we're out here. We're at the Parliament Middle School. We got the computers, but it's 110 degrees in Washington, D.C. and we're like, we're San Francisco guys and we're not really used to this, and there's no way we're going to get these computers. Up three flights of stairs, wire this school and get all this done. So I had to call General Powell and say, okay, J. General Powell, hey, it's Mark Benioff. I look, I got the computers there. I'm really excited. But look, my guys are there. We, look, we. Yeah, I know we have an office, you know, in Bethesda. But they didn't come out to help us. And going to take us a while. And it's really hot. We're not sure. And then. Hello? Hello? And he had hung up on me. And I said, general Powell, I don't understand what happened. And I called Jim Powell, Larry back. And I said, jim, I think he's pretty bad at us. This is a bad situation. We pissed off General Powell and Chip's like, oh, shit, man, this is really bad. I don't know what we're going to do. We've got the computers here and Mitch is here, but I guess we're going to try. And then my phone rang again. Hello? Hello? Is it you, General? No, it's Jim. Oh, Jim, what's happening? Yeah, Mark, Battalion of Marines just arrived at the school and we're getting the computer. And I was like, good to be a general. And all computers got in. The battalion of Marines got him in. And we accomplished our mission in partnership with General Powell. And that this is very much a major influence in my life. I've told this story many times. But what happened was when I started Salesforce said, how do we create a company that does well and does good, that doesn't become kind of a cultural aberration, that we would wire up a school and put computers? Just what we do, we sell software, we make companies successful, but we are improving the state of the world and we're doing all these things simultaneously. How do we do this? And this idea actually worked out really well that we came up with a one, one, one model which was we would take at the start, when we started the company, 1% of our equity, 1% of our product, or 1% of our time, 1 1% of our profits, whatever we would do. And we would give that back at scale. And it was easy because we had no employees, no products, no problem. We had, you know, no one said, put enough push back and there's no direct, can't give away what percent. Now we just did it. And then today we have done six and a half million hours of volunteers. We have given away a half a billion dollars. We run 50,000 nonprofits and NGOs for free in our service. And yes, the Planet is a stakeholder, which is why we are net zero and fully renewable today. It's not some future commitment. It's something that we practice, which we call now. We have a name for it, stakeholder capitalism. We didn't have a name for it then. It was just our one, one, one model. The idea that we could be more integrated between businesses and society and that it doesn't have to be just about great products. Look, when we were at Apple, it was all about great products. And, and we had a positive influence on society because we've influenced society with our products. And Apple, of course, as of all, has done a lot of this type of thing. But this kind of idea that there would be a structured, integrated way to unite a company with a community, I think this is something a lot of companies are still learning today. When we look at Fortune 100 companies, and I think I mentioned you, Salesforce is a net zero company, which means that we have no net new emissions and we are doing everything we can to continue to reduce our emissions. But in the Fortune 100, very few companies are net zero. Today, we're one of them. It's a very important and I'm very proud of it. In the Fortune 100, very few of them will do six and a half million hours of volunteers. I think these things that we're bringing into the Fortune 100, I hope that it's influencing not only the Fortune 100, but entrepreneurs like me, like I was quarter of a century ago thinking about starting their company, saying, hey, I don't want to just build a great product. I also want to build a platform for change. And that is what Salesforce than God has become. And also other organizations that I am associated with. And I think that, you know, I also own Time magazine. And here's this Time magazine, I'm showing it to God. You probably can't see it because we're doing audio. Dave Goodall is on the COVID is one of my mentors now in the environment and Time magazine. One of the reasons I bought it and I love it, and it's a platform for change. You know, it's a positive influence on the world. And that's what I think we need to all do more of collectively. And this is an important part of the world today. And that, you know, look, we, we have a lot of challenges in our world and we all have, and you're going to know this word, Dyke, Julian, Juliana. We all have a responsibility, a Hawaiian word which means that we all have a responsibility to ourselves, to each other. And to the planet and that this is what we do. We take care of the world, we build it in the right way. And in Hawaii they say kukulupona build things in the right way. And that I think for our companies we need to recognize our companies also have that Kugli on Up next on Remarkable people. I went to sleep and I didn't realize until the next morning I turned on cnn, CNN and CNBC and my tweet was on and I was like what have I done? One glass of wine and a little San Francisco energy and I'm just telling people how I really feel. And we were in it. We were, we were in it. And my phone rang and this time it was Mike Pence, the governor in Indiana who I knew and who I like and is a friend of mine.

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@Hubspot.Com you're listening to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki.

Another proud moment for me was your stand on the Religious Freedom Act. So with the space of a few years what's your analysis? What did you learn from that entire episode?

Well it was a scary moment in my life and and and and a scary moment in my own personal development go as a leader and kind of talk. Look I'm born raised in San Francisco. I'm a San Franciscan fourth generation I was born on the visit narrow street and that's we're the home of the summer of love gave rights and and this is a city where people are free to be who they are and do what they want and that has gone in a lot of different directions for San Francisco over the years. But it's very much how I grew up and I grew up in a house that was a family committed to social justice. My grandfather fought for what was right a world civically, in political office and in his business. And I would say that when I got a call from my head of, you know, operations in Indiana, I don't think a lot of people know Salesforce is the largest tech company in Indiana, in Indianapolis. We are also the largest tech company in San Francisco. That he said, hey, we got a problem here in Indiana, because our governor is about to sign a law. The fact that it's going to discriminate against the LGBTQ community. And I said, let's not happen. No one would do something such a thing. And that was my San Francisco mindset talking. And in fact, in the next day or so, what happened is the governor did sign this law. And they called me back and said, well, see, we were right, you were wrong. And I was in a car on the way back, pretty much dinner. I had a dinner at. In Palo Alto, where you probably are right now, guy. And I was at that Rosewood hotel having some nice dinner with somebody. And now I'm back, Uber heading to buy a house in San Francisco. And I just had my. My phone with me, and I tweeted, we're gonna. We're forced, based on the new law in Indiana, to reduce our investment in Indiana and to inform our employees and customers that this is no longer a center of investment and growth for Salesforce. And I don't know if those were the exact words, but it was that kind of intention. And I went to sleep, and I didn't realize until the next morning, I turned on cnn, cnn and cnbc, and my tweet was on, and I was like, what have I done? One glass of wine and a little San Francisco energy, and I'm just telling people how I really feel. And we were in it. We were. We were in it. And my phone rang, and this time it was Mike Pence, the governor of Indiana, who I knew and who I like, and his partner, mine. And I said, hey, Mike, how's it going? He's like, mark, we need to talk about this. What do we need to talk about? You're leaving Indiana. You're de. Investing. I have all kinds of other CEOs now calling me telling us they're going to do the same thing. Mark, we need to talk about this. Mike, I'm fully negotiable. Let's have a conversation. And Mike and I had a nice talk about that, and. And I sent a team to Indianapolis to negotiate with his team. And within a couple of days, it was resolved and the law was changed and everything was behind us. And I think we need a little bit more of that in our country. Right. I don't think we need. There's so much political division that we can't talk to each other. And we're not two football teams going down the field. Red team and a blue team. And I'm sure cheering for one team or the other, it's. Well, we need to be one America and one United States. And I actually think that the results of that law and result of that situation was a great outcome and that we should all be looking at that as an example of how we can work more closely together.

Let's say the slope of that curve certainly hasn't continued because there is a.

There is two football teams on the field and they get very committed to. And by the way, you know, here there was a funny joke I made at the beginning that no one laughed at, but Guy went to UCLA and I went to usc. So we're both. Both love Los Angeles, different schools. And there used to be a USCLA game every year and there still is. And at usc, UCLA game, it's exciting because it's two kind of consciousnesses and two different universities playing against each other, two excellent schools. And that is not how our country operates, where we have to become so emotional during these games. And I think that's kind of how it is where we've kind of turned our politics into two football teams. You're either for USC or you're for ucla. And we have to find a middle way. If you actually go and see how great our country is, how our highest values, our highest principles, our highest levels that we've talked a lot on this call about entrepreneurship. And one of the great things, it's kind of an amazing thing, but this is not true in most countries, guys, is that I could just kind of quit my job, arc Salesforce and put some money in and hire some people and ask some friends of mine to give me a little more money and put it together in a bank account, get things going and put something out on the Internet and start managing companies data. You can do that in every country. You cannot. You cannot. And in this country, not only is that legal, it's celebrated, it's encouraged. It's something that you get a pat on the back from Guy Kawasaki for doing. Because I think that that is a big differentiator that we have, that we do have a ability to be free, the ability to have liberty, the ability to have a democracy. These high values, we need to come back to those and realize this is what truly unites us. And some of these other issues which are more tactical, more operational, they can divide us a little bit too easily. And when we become more divided than united, that's when we become a little bit more susceptible to the competition from these other countries. And that's not where we want to be. We want to be in a position where we continue to assail as a great country in the world because we have an important role to play. Everyone knows that. I don't care what football team you're on. And we have a lot to do in our country. We've done a lot for the world. We have a lot more to do in the world. And a moment like this where we need to improve the state of the world, the US has the ability to do that. We can't lose sight of our ability to make our country great, but also the world great as well. And we have to do both.

People have generally only heard one side of the story about the selling to the Customs and Border Protection controversy there. So give us the scoop that.

The U.S. government has become a major customer of Salesforce, which has been a great thing for us. And we have many parts of the US Government who are customers of ours and that includes the U.S. border Patrol and many other parts of the government, including the Veterans Administration for example, or the gsa. This kind of. So all of a sudden in the previous administration, everything was amplified and everybody was on edge. And I think that we just saw what there was just a very serious situation with the customer Border Patrol. Everybody saw the situation that just occurred and there wasn't a massive flare up like there was previous administration. And I think that everybody forgets that when you agree to be a vendor to the US Government, yes, they have to agree to be aligned with your terms and conditions. But look, this is a long term customer of our company and we're not going to be making aggressive left and right turns down the road based on who's in office. I want to get back to what I said earlier because this is how I look at it. Presidents change, administrations change. Our core values do not change. We know who we are, we know what's right and wrong to us. And we have a very strong MSA in terms of conditions. And if you are agreeing to that, we're with you. And we're not going to just make a change to one of our customers based on the current political situation.

Switching gears a lot, what is the role of meditation in your Life.

Whoa, whoa. Now we're really going to go to a whole nother place here. Well, I think meditation is something that has allowed me to keep everything in perspective, to help me to do what I just said, stay more aligned with not my corporate values, but my personal value. The world that we're in today gets switched on. We're on our podcast, we're telling our stories. We're talking about the past, we're talking about the future. Meditation gets us into the present moment. It helps us to reconnect to where we are right now in this moment. And that is very important for me because in my life, I have a lot coming out. I've got my text coming at me, I've got my email coming at me. I've got my phone calls coming at me, my facetimes, my zooms, I've got my slacks coming at me. I've got my family coming at me, my friends got a lot of things coming at me all the time. And I don't want to just be able to all of a sudden kind of integrate all that, know where I am and move forward in an intentional way. And I think the best way to do that is having mindfulness and meditation. One of my mentors talked about, Jane Goodall is obviously important mentor of mine. Colin Powell is an important mentor of mine. And I would say Thich Nhat Hanh, who is a mindfulness is a. A mentor of mine. He, when he had a stroke recently, he moved in with me for six months with 40 of his monastics. So it was unusual moment. And I learned even more about meditation and mindfulness and stayed in the present moment. And I think that this is a useful skill. You may know. I think it's so important that on every floor of every building at Salesforce Worldwide, whether San Francisco or New York or Japan or London, you'll find a Salesforce tower. And if you go in those Salesforce towers and look on any floor, you're going to find a meditation room. And in that meditation room, you're going to find the ability, first of all, you're going to find a basket outside the room where you leave your phone, drop your phone in the basket where you can set for a half an hour, quiet, maybe listen to some music, maybe have nothing going on in the room, and you can just breathe, breathe in and breathe out and do nothing else and let go and relax and let go of all of this stress and anxiety, fear, all the things that are going on in the world that we're dealing with, turn on the television or just looking at what's going on on Twitter. And it's like, I need to let it all go. And I think that's the role of meditation. I think the meditation and mindfulness give us this opportunity to switch off. We know how to switch on, we know how to turn on. We need to be able to turn off and. And come back to the. Come back to the now. And. And that's been an important part of my life and I tried to bring it into my company in a structured way as well.

I don't want Nikki's head to explode. So I'm gonna ask you one last question because she's gonna put a contract out on me.

Oh, no. Poor Nikki.

Not poor Nikki. Poor guy. So my last question. Yeah, so the last question is there are going to be young people listening to this and arguably they would say, you know, I want to be like Mark. I want to be a billionaire. I want to create this amazing company. I want to be a philanthropist. So you're this great. Not target. You're this great goal in the sky. So what's your advice to the 19 year old? What's your advice for them when they say I want to be like you, Mark?

Well, I think that that's powerful. When I think about being a role model and I think about that to others, my responsibility, I think that my Kuleana. Right, guy. When I think about my Kuleana, what I think about is something very simple, which is I didn't start with any of those goals in mind. All I did was start with Corvette. And I think what the most important thing is is really start with what's really important. Just break down. Here are the five things. Five words that are really important to me. What is it? Is it God? Is it love? Is it trust? Is it health? Is it happiness? Is it generosity? Is it equality? Is it charity? Is it integrity? What are the five or six words that really matter to you? And then prior really prioritize those five or six, what are they in priority? Is this more important than that? What's more important to you? Trust or love? Love or health? Health or family? Family or integrity? Integrity or success? Generosity or. Or enjoyment? What are your. What are the five or six words that are really important? And one thing you cannot say, that's part of this game. I learned this Pickman said you can't say both. You can never use the word both. These two are really important and not do that. You must choose and you must prioritize. And then if you get clear about those five or six values, and you prioritize those values, and then you operationalize those values. I guarantee you that when you come back to that, you do that every year, you come back 10 or 20 years from now, you'll say, yep, those are my values, and that's who I am. This is actually who I am right now. And as you make little lefts and right turns down the road, because there's Covid here or there's this situation there, whatever it is, or maybe you might have a personal situation or something else happens, you can always come back to your core values and say, what's really important to me? And this can guide you, and it can also take you in the way that mindfulness and meditation bring you to the now. This is another way to do it. It can ground you in what's really important, because the reality is, number one, you need to know what you really want. You need to know what's truly important to you. What do you really want? What's your vision? And then you have to get into that and set your values. And we all know that Steve Jobs values, especially for product, they were unique and they guided the company. But what are your values? We've talked about a lot of different values, even in this podcast. And then how do you get them? How do you operationalize your values? What. What action do you take for each one? And the. And then what is preventing you from having these values? What is preventing you from having trust? For what is preventing you from having health or what's preventing you from having happiness? Or what's preventing you from having love or a relationship or the things that you truly want in your life? And ultimately, how will you know that you have it? Write it down. Draw a picture. Maybe say, this is what it's going to look like when I have these. These five values. I guarantee you. I guarantee you. You write down those five words, you get clear about your value. You stay focused on that. That's where you're going to end up. And that's the most important thing. Not about all those other things, about that. It's about really getting clear about what's truly important to you. And you'll end up in a really amazing place.

So endeth the lesson. Yeah. Thank you so much. And, Mark, whenever I. Whenever I tell stories about you, the story I tell is that 36 years after I did you a favor, you did me a favor, which is, first of all, you help Mike Boich's son, and then you help my son get interviews at Salesforce and It was literally 36, 35 years later. And that has always stuck with me, that you are a person who remembers your friends. And that is not true of everyone, for sure. So I'm no Colin Powell, but I got my Marc Benioff stories, too.

Well, you're my Colin Powell. Guy and I, we do have the stories together. Some of them will never talk. Some of them will never be spoken.

So there you have it. Marc Benioff, billionaire, ten times over, philanthropist, CEO, founder, author, and someone with a very good memory who believes in reciprocation. If you learn nothing else from this episode, remember this. Be good to your interns, because they could be the next Marc Benioff. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. My thanks to Jeff C. Peg Fitzpatrick, Shannon Hernandez, and to the young ones, Luis Magana, Alexis Nishimura, and Madison Nismer. If any of the three of them become the next Marc Benioff, you remember they got their start on the Remarkable People podcast. Until next time, mahalo and aloha. This is remarkable people.