Marc Benioff: AI Copied 400 Companies | Talk with Tim

We are in Honolulu, Hawaii, on the island of Oahu, and we are up in the botanical gardens. On my right, The amazing, the extraordinary Marc Benioff.

Hi, I'm Marc Benioff. I am the chairman and CEO of Salesforce. What I look for most in an entrepreneur is a mindset that is flexible, that is open, or as the Japanese say, a beginner's mind. In the beginner's mind, you have every possibility. In the expert's mind, you have few. The best founders are the ones who have shoshin, the beginner's mind.

Marc is the founder and CEO and chairman of of Salesforce, and Salesforce has become one of the greatest companies in the world today.

Thank you.

And not only is it an extraordinary company itself, but all the companies that run off of Salesforce are much more efficient because of it. Anyway, Marc has also started his business in Silicon Valley and moved to Hawaii.

Yeah, 6 years ago.

And he has figured out—

Yeah.

Turns out people are willing to come visit you here.

Yeah, no, it's exciting to work and live here in Hawaii. And to everybody here, aloha, and thank you for inviting me over here, you know, to the neighbor island. We're happy to come over and visit you. And we are building, you know, we are building some new healthcare here in Hawaii. And one of the new hospitals is actually Big investment in a new hospital right in downtown Waikiki with Straub. So we're very excited with Hawaii Pacific Health. Yeah, that's going to be a $100 million investment that we're making to improve healthcare right downtown here.

Fantastic. And you also funded some helicopters so you could go back and forth.

We have helicopters going back and forth because we don't have the same great healthcare on the Big Island, even though we do have a new hospital in Hilo. So we do bring a lot of folks over here for all kinds of advanced work at Straub and also at Queen's Punchbowl and so forth.

So tell us a couple of things. First, I'll start with just Salesforce. How did that get started? What made you do it? And what was the vision when you were just getting started?

Yeah, I was spending actually a lot of time here in Hawaii, and I've been coming here since 1974. I have always been very attracted to the aloha spirit and, and the values of the Hawaiian people. And I was actually doing something that we're not really allowed to do anymore. Everyone here knows we're not allowed to go swim with the dolphins anymore in the ocean.

Oh.

But back in the day, we used to kind of go out and the dolphins would come and they would Swim around, and they'd say something to us like.

And so then wow, that's a good dolphin.

Thank you. Thank you. I do a variety of animal sounds, and I am invite. I am available for birthdays and also bar mitzvahs. Yeah. So we were out there swimming with the dolphins, which we'd be doing, and you know there's a lot of very kind of people who are extremely interested in the spirituality of Hawaii, so they're. in there doing their dolphin thing. And then I just had a vision that, you know, the world was going to change in technology like it's changing now, and that I wanted though to leave the company that I was at. I was at Oracle for 13 years, so I started my own company called Salesforce. And today Salesforce will do— we have about 83,000 people all over the world, and we were the number one supplier of enterprise software, and a lot of it came from the visions that are available here in Hawaii. So we encourage everyone to come here to Hawaii.

So all of you out there and all of you in TV land, learn to speak dolphin. It'll come in handy someday. Okay, so—

I do other sounds too. I'll do a variety of them during the—

yeah. Good.

I'm counting on that. Whatever you want. I know you do a couple sounds, don't you?

What do you do?

What's your best animal sound? I think it's elephant.

Yeah.

Yep. We're 2 elephants, so we're happy to do more sounds as it's going to—

As time goes on.

Here we go.

That's what the show's all about.

That's it. This could just be— Yeah, it's the sounds.

That is the—

that's the social media moment right there. All right. Go ahead, Tim.

OK, so we got the sounds down. OK, now you— Okay, you built this incredible company and you decide you move your family, your world, everything to Hawaii.

Yeah.

Tell us about that move and tell us about how you separate, I mean, when I'm here it's like vacation.

Yeah.

Right? And then occasionally it's like, oh, I got some work to do. How do you do that? How do you have a, Hard work.

I've just been coming here for decades and then decided not to go back.

Okay. I asked you something and you gave me a good answer. How you separate the work from the family and the play and all that stuff. And you said, well, we put up an office and you go to that office and then you bring your board over, you bring your management over and you do regular meetings with them.

Sure.

And then the rest of it, it's just Zoom calls, right?

It's, you know, I, I, you know, I'm working 24/7. You know, I think that once you actually decide to start a company, you're working 24/7, especially today. And so, but you're living 24/7 wherever you are, and then you can decide to be wherever you are. And of course, I'm still going all over the world. I love traveling, and we have offices all over the world, customers all over the world, employees all over the world. So I need to be all over the world, so it's all fine, but I always get to come home here to my ohana. That's the Hawaiian word for family.

Right, yeah, absolutely. I'll tell you though, Marc does work 24/7 because when I send him a text or an email, it's almost immediate that he gets back to me. So if you really want to be a huge success, you move quickly, efficiently, effectively, like Marc Benioff. Okay, one pretty serious question.

Like Tim Draper.

Thank you. Yeah, like, one serious question is AI. This is sort of an interesting factoid. We have a company that just did a press release that said our AI has just copied every one of the YC companies, so 400 Portfolio companies all, and he's created the exact same software in 400 times just with AI within about a week from when they were all launched. So that's going to change some things. So how's Salesforce going to change? What's going to happen there?

Well, I think to that point, you know, we're, we're kind of entering a new world of AI. AI, of course, as you know, Tim, because you've been in the industry for decades, this is not your first rodeo. It's not your first paniolo Hawaiian rodeo either. I would say that You know, over the decades of AI, we've seen these incredible models and we've seen them do unbelievable things. But now there's one specific thing that's happening that's really pretty awesome, which is kind of, you know, the idea that we have the ability to code, that these are now coding agents. And that is really exciting because I think up to that point, to, you know, to like what you just said, if you didn't have an engineer, you weren't coding.

Yeah.

And I think now if you have an AI model, you are coding.

Mm.

The second point is it's an agent revolution. You know, it's incredible what is happening. Software is really, you know, becoming not just software, but agenticware, the idea that it's about humans and agents working together. The models are only so accurate, so it's still very important that the humans are in the loop. But in all cases, agents can make things so much better. So it's customer service. Yes, it's your customer service humans, but also these AI agents that are working in tandem with them. Your sales folks. Yes, it's your salespeople, but it's also AI agents who are out there doing qualification and prospecting for you, maybe even closing deals. And I think in all cases, it's gonna be agents supporting you and helping you. All of us have had the experience of working with a ChatGPT or an Anthropic or a Gemini at home, and that's kind of our agent kind of helping us along. You know, these agents are gonna be a little bit more loose, a little bit more autonomous. They're kind of supporting us in the wild. It's a very exciting moment in software, something that we haven't really seen this kind of revolution in quite a few years.

So I was just interviewed. Some press person asked me the question, well, is AI smarter than you are? And I said, yeah. And then I said, But AI works for me.

Yeah, for now.

Hey, I'm actually trying to get AI to replace me. When AI can do a better job of choosing and motivating and driving and helping entrepreneurs.

Yeah, well, I think Peter Schwartz, who's our futurist at Salesforce—

Then I'll just be here in Hawaii. I'll be riding the waves.

Yeah, well, you can make that decision anytime you want. But I would just say, you know, Peter Schwartz, who's our AI futurist at Salesforce, and he wrote like a movie and was responsible for writing a movie quite a few years ago called Minority Report.

Oh, wow.

And we all remember Minority Report. And he wrote another movie, WarGames. And these movies are kind of about, you know, what does an AI future look like? We're not exactly in that world yet. You know, we're still in this intermediate stage. Now we have to kind of keep our mind, while we've been all convinced that we're in the world of AGI now, okay, we've all seen the movies and we know we're not in the AGI world. But we are in a world where these models are providing a little more intelligence, a little more capability. So we have the ability to do things we just did not have before. And I think some of the little examples that I gave are, are very good examples of what was possible, maybe not even just a few years ago. And I think especially with coding. So because these are large language models, coding is very much a language type of activity. We have the ability now to do things we just couldn't make happen. And when we see the software coding itself, that's very exciting.

You know, you reminded me of WarGames, and I feel like breaking out my AI and have it play itself in tic-tac-toe. Which was how they solved the— how they had it blow its mind.

Right.

Yeah. I was thinking, has anybody done that? Somebody out there do that and then let me know at the end of the show.

You're ready to do it.

But Minority Report was a little scary because they were arresting people before— Really? Yeah. Before they had—

The Precogs.

Yeah, the Precogs said, you have a 93% chance.

You're kind of like a Precog though, aren't you? You're like the modern precog.

Precog. And hopefully they don't arrest me for being a precog. Yeah, that's right.

This week we announced the new version of Slack. I don't know, hopefully every company is using Slack that's starting here.

Great way to communicate.

Great way to get the foundation operating system for your company. And now Slack has Slackbot, as well as the primitives to kind of help you manage your customers and service and support with Slack CRM. But the new version of Slack is amazing. I run my company on Slack, and I encourage people to look at Slack as providing that kind of operating system for their startups.

Now also, you are also an investor. Is there a company that you're really excited about now and you want to tell the world and go use it?

New company, you mean that we're— a new company that we're invested in? We have Salesforce Ventures, which is very exciting. One of the companies that we're invested in is a company called Anthropic, which does coding agents. So that's very exciting. Heard of that. We also have Time Ventures. You know I own Time Magazine. Time Ventures has a great new company called Artera, which has a whole democratization of the— you mentioned UCSF. We obviously have invested a huge amount in the prostate cancer center there. We've been able to democratize that technology and bring it to everyone through Artera, which is AI meets prostate cancer. So every urologist has the best cancer certifications and diagnostic capabilities as you would at UCSF, for example.

Okay, I've got a question. Sorry, this is a follow-on question on there. We've noticed that a lot of the entrepreneurs were going for— 10 years ago, they were going for chemotherapies and they were gonna spend 15 years and $2 billion to get a drug through FDA. And now we're seeing something that we're calling bio-cures, where you take your blood out, they play with it, they shove it back in, all of a sudden you're 5 years younger. What do you think of all that? And is all your experience with UCSF, are they doing that kind of thing?

Yeah, well, I mean, you're kind of, that idea, called parabiosis, the idea that the regenerative properties of your body are in your plasma, what we call platelet factor 4, other things. It's definitely all right there. And we're just at the verge of being able to regenerate a lot of our body in real time. And I think that's a very exciting moment in biotechnology.

Yeah, and they're growing new body parts. They're doing all sorts of interesting things.

I don't need to go there, but OK.

Which body part would you want to—

I think when you get over 50, knees is your big one, right? Knees.

Yeah.

And you have what, your hip? Is that the one that you want?

No, my hip's fine.

Yeah.

Kidney.

Kidneys.

Okay. I need a new kidney.

We'll regenerate your kidneys for you.

Yeah, because they took one out anyway. Okay.

Yeah.

So any of you guys creating something to do that, let me know. because I'm adopting you to be Drapers.

Oh, no.

Perfect. Because there's— the name of the show is Meet the Drapers.

Right on. Oh, the honorary Draper. Do I get in your will with the Bitcoin reserves? Absolutely.

Absolutely. You're in my will, but it's probably not— you'll be a little disappointed.

Well, if it's after Q Day, I'm going to be very disappointed.