Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - EP #10 The Multi-Billion Dollar Purpose Behind Salesforce w/ Marc Benioff

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

In this episode, Marc and Peter discuss what it takes to create a multi-billion dollar business, the power of purpose in entrepreneurship, and how to build a company that changes the world. You will learn about: 06:57 | The steps you need to build your company 33:11 | Should you start a company in the cloud? 57:01 | How to tackle inequality in the workplace. Marc Benioff is the Co-Founder, Chairman, and Co-CEO of Salesforce, the #1 CRM in the world. With over 30 years of experience in the Customer Management Software industry, Benioff was named “The Innovator of the Decade” by Forbes and one of the “Top 25 World Greatest Leaders” by Fortune. He’s also an avid philanthropist alongside his wife, Lynne, with over $250 million pledged towards causes like homelessness. _____________ Resources Read Marc’s book, Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change. Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter  Consider a journey to optimize your body with LifeForce. Learn more about Abundance360. Learn more about Moonshots & Mindsets.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Peter, life is a squishy balloon. You know, your life is a squishy balloon. We don't have to go through your life, my life, our businesses are squishy balloons. Whose life and whose business is not a squishy balloon? These principles, these ideas, it doesn't matter if you're trying to handle homelessness, biodiversity, your business, your life, your relationship, your marriage, whatever it is. The reality is, is that these are the principles that can help you achieve what you want. And a massive transform to purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am. This is what I'm going to do. This is the dent I'm going to make in the universe. It's a pleasure to share a conversation I had with Mark Benioff. He is the chairman, founder, CEO of Salesforce. This conversation took place in January of 21, right in the middle of the pandemic. We're talking together about the future of work, about how to be a CEO during this difficult

time, so how to come out of the pandemic. Also talking about Mark's moonshots. One of them is homelessness. He's been dealing with it head on in San Francisco, and perhaps you have in your hometown as well, as well as the environment. Mark is an incredible philanthropist. He is the individual who funded Dr. Yamanaka to create the Yamanaka factors, which created induced pluripotent stem cells. He's funding research across the board on health and biotech, an incredible entrepreneur,

an incredible CEO. Please join me for this masterclass on philanthropy and leadership with Mark Benioff. By the way, this conversation took place at Abundance360, my year-long executive summit. If you're interested in learning more, go to a360.com. Aloha, Mark. How are you, Peter? Thank you for taking time. I know how busy you are and how much you have going on. And Salesforce has been one of the most extraordinary success stories.

I think the fastest growing software company ever. And with the acquisition of Slack, that was, I'm sure, an extraordinary experience going through that. Mark, the things that I'm most impressed by is the scope of your philanthropy. We had yesterday a team from Gladstone, and I know that you were principally funded Yamanaka's work on IPS cells. I'm curious how that came about. Well, thank you, Peter. It's great to be with you. And, you know, it's been an exciting journey building Salesforce. We're now 54, over 54,000 employees, and we'll do more than $21.1 billion in revenue this year. We're very excited with the company's progress.

But looking back, you know, it was really all about focusing on three things. And when you think about what are your moonshots and you're thinking about what you're trying to create at Salesforce, 21 years ago when we were putting together the company, we said there were three things we were going to do. One, we're going to create a new technology model. A new technology model, which today is easy to describe, called the cloud. But we realized technology was changing. Two, a different business model for software. Up to that point, licensing was the key part. And the key to the business model was subscription. So that's very powerful because when you couple a new business model and a new technology model,

you can transform an industry. And three, we weren't going to just build products and sell products. We were going to do something philanthropic along the way and integrate service into our culture from the beginning. And the way we did that is we took 1% of our equity, 1% of our profit, and we took 1% of all of our employees' time and we created something called salesforce.org, which has become a very substantial nonprofit and NGO. And probably one of the most exciting things is that it's done 5 million hours of volunteerism, given away hundreds of millions of dollars in grants on its own, and runs 50,000 nonprofits and NGOs for free on our service. And those three ideas really created Salesforce. And that's what we really pioneered. And everything came from that intention that we would create a commercial company that we could do well and do good at the same time. This is a really powerful

thought for business in that we would focus and we would manage for all stakeholders, not just all shareholders. At the time, and certainly when I went to business school, I heard Milton Friedman's comment that the business of business is business. Our idea was the business of business is improving the state of the world. So how do you improve the state of the world? How do you build a company that does, you know, more than $20 billion in revenue, has a global management team, but has the right values, the values? That is, what is really important to you? You know, as an entrepreneur, you have to make these decisions up front. Number one, what do you want? That's what you've been asking. You know, what is your

goal? What is your moonshot? What is your vision? What is your idea? But number two, what is important about it? What are the pioneering values? And we've seen lots of different entrepreneurs have different kinds of values, don't we? And when we look at those values, that was when we asked the question, what do you really want as an entrepreneur? What is really important to you? Well, different entrepreneurs have different value systems. And we can see that across the board. Look at the social media entrepreneurs. Look at the energy entrepreneurs. Look at the automobile entrepreneurs. Different entrepreneurs have different kinds of values. That is, what they want and what is important to them is different. So you have to decide not only what your vision is, your outcome, where you're going, what your direction is, what your trajectory is, but what is important about it.

Is it about trust? Is it about innovation? Is it about equality? Is it about innovation? Is it about equality? Is it about power? Is it about control? You just said, is it about money? Is it about market share? Well, look, everything cannot be important. You have to choose. You have to make choices, especially as an entrepreneur. And you can't just say everything is important to me because if everything is important, nothing is important. You have to choose because when you have those values in hierarchy, then you can really operationalize your values. And I'm happy to talk about how to do that, what that means. And when you operationalize your values, that's when you can get transformation and that's when you can get change.

Let's do that because I think you hit on probably one of the most important things. And that's when you can get change. Let's do that because I think you hit on probably one of the most important things. As people are calling their shots and shaping their future, their values or their guideposts, having a target to shoot for, but also the values you're going to maintain as you shoot for that target. And I am curious about how much of a moonshot success like Salesforce is luck, timing, your emotional drive, you, the company's values, the team. How do you rate those things? You know, it's not about rating them. It's really about operationalizing. And I think that this is really the, I think, where people kind of really struggle.

And I think in our industry that we have a whole concept called OKR. There's another, you know, there's a lot of different methodologies for kind of getting your head around things. Look, number one, the most important thing is you've got to start with a beginner's mind. You have to really let go of the past. Look, we're in a new world. I'm at, you know, I'm basically at home while everyone's at home. And, you know, we have to let go of the past. We're in a new world. We're in a new world, and where we're going is completely different than where we were going even just a year ago. So we have a new world, and we're going in a new direction. Well, this is an opportunity to have a beginner's mind.

You know, in a beginner's mind, there's every possibility. In the expert's mind, there's few or no possibilities. So you need to regain your beginner's mind, especially at a time like this. And a key way to do that is what the Japanese called shoshin. That is to really kind of clear your mind, really let go of the past, to really say, what is it that I really want? Not what my mom wanted or my dad wanted or my friend wanted, you know, but what do you really want? Because at the end of the day, you know, 20 years from now, you're going to look back and go, this is what I really wanted. So do you want to be the richest person on the world?

Is that the most important thing to you? Do you want to heal the planet, you know, and restore ecological balance? Is that the most important thing to you? Do you want to dominate your industry, whatever it is? Is that the most important thing to you? Do you want to create a breakthrough innovation that transcends your company and inspires others? Is that the most important thing to you? Do you want to create an industry and change the dynamics of that industry? Is that the most important thing to you? Get clear about what do you really want? What is your outcome? Because whatever you focus on, you're going to get. You're going to have that emotional fitness, the energy, the power,

all these things you're talking about. You're dancing around on the stage. You know, great. And then, but what are you focusing on? What are you focusing on? And what is it that you really want? That's step one. But then step two gets right into, okay, now what are you focusing on? What are you focusing on? And what is it that you really want? That's step one. But then step two gets right into, okay, now what are the values? Look, for me at Salesforce, the most important thing to us is trust. Nothing is more important than the trust

we have. The trust we have, first of all, with myself as an entrepreneur, I have to trust myself. Two, others. Do I have trust with you? Do I have trust with others? Do they have the integrity? You know, do they have the ability to work with me? Do they say what they're going to do? Trust. Where is trust in the hierarchy? For me, it's up at the top, not for everybody. So I talk to and I work with people all over the world. Trust may or may not be at your highest level, but you need to kind of look at how important is trust. You know, one of the books that I love reading is the Psalms. The book, the Psalms, when you read those Psalms, trust is a big part of what is being written in there. Go back and read that. That will like inspire you around the

word trust. Second one is, for me, is customer success. You know, if my customers aren't successful, I'm not successful. My customers aren't happy, I'm not going to be happy. So that's a key driver for me and my company. That is, I'm all about making sure that others are successful. It's not enough for me to be successful. The others must be successful or I cannot achieve my success. And really, the third thing is then about, you mentioned, you know, we've received a lot of recognition for the innovation that we've achieved over 20 years. Different outside periodicals or national engineering organizations or whatever it is. Innovation is extremely important to us.

But, you know, like for us us it's a dance what's more important customer success or innovation a lot of people in our company go we innovate a tech company we have to have innovation has to be first but i will like push back customers because if we're building product for product's sake it doesn't mean anything if the customer isn't successful but that is a dance inside our company. These values have to sometimes dance together. Sometimes it's hard to have a priority. Sometimes it's hard to have an order. But number one, trust. Two, customer success. Three, innovation. And four, for us, is equality. The equality for every human being. It's why we do our work for

homelessness. It's why we do our work in education that you mentioned. It's why we do our work in the environment, because the environment is equality. So those four values, then we start to operationalize that. So that's the, you know, the first step is get clear about what you want. The second step now is get clear about what's really important to you. What are your values? What are the principles, the tenets that you're going to build your idea or maybe your life on? Who are you as a person in your heart of hearts? What are your values? And three, now I'm going to get into, whoa, how am I going to create all these things? How do I take my vision and my values and turn

it into my manifestation? And that's the third step that we call methods. That is methods. How do I get what I want? Well, look back to our values. Methods and actions and those kind of OKR world, now we're in the OKR. Look, that's operationalizing your values. That's all it is. And the best way to do that is you want trust? What are the three things you're going to do to get trust? Tell me what they are. You know, we are going to do what? What action are you going to take?

Are you going to build ethical guidelines for your company? Are you going to build information security? Are you going to be transparent in your company? Are you going to build information security? Are you going to be transparent in your operations? How do you build trust inside your company? And tell me how much are those things going to cost? The reason why that's important is this is going to become your operating budget as well, which is a critical part for any entrepreneur. How are you going to get customer success? Are you going to hire some salespeople? Are you going to hire some customer success managers? Are you going to operationalize customer success in some

powerful way? How much are those things going to cost you? And three, innovation. You're going to hire some engineers. You're going to hire some product managers. You're going to build some products. What's that going to cost you? And equality? Okay, you're going to pay men and women the same for the same work? You're going to take care of your local schools? You're going to be a net zero company, which I hope every single person is signed up to be? Well, what is that going to cost you? And you start to add those things up, you're having the beginning of your plan. Here's what I really want.

Here is what is really, truly important to me. And here is how I am going to get it. This is my operationalizing my values. And then the fourth thing, fourth step is, now what is preventing you? Now this is where things are going to come up. These are your obstacles. These are the problems where you're going to call people and go, oh boy, I've got a problem.

This is not working out. This is an issue. And by the way, those obstacles manifest through those values. What is preventing you from having trust? What is preventing you from having customer success? What is preventing you from having innovation? What is preventing you from having equality? Or whatever your core values are.

Your values could be quality. They could be all kinds of different things. And you could be saying, what is preventing me from having that? And then the fifth step in that I kind of get my head around is, how do I know now that I have it? What is my measurement? What does the world look like? And that's the measurement. How do I know I have trust? What is my measurement for trust? How do I know that I have customer success? Hey, thanks for listening to Moonshots and Mindsets. I want to take a second to tell you about a company that I love.

It's called Levels and it helps me be responsible for the food that I eat, what I bring into my body. See, we were never designed as humans to eat as much sugar as we do and sugar is not good for your brain or your heart or your body in general. Levels helps me monitor the impact of the foods that I eat by monitoring my

blood sugar. For example, I learned that if I dip my bread in olive oil, it blunts my glycemic response, which is good for my health. If you're interested, learn more by going to levels.link backslash Peter. Levels will give you an extra two months of membership. It's something that is critical for the future of your longevity. All right, let's get back to the conversation in the episode. Your book, Trailblazer, which I've read, is a beautiful story that hits on all of these beats and gives you the details here. So please, I commend the book to everybody watching. And what I'd like to do is shift a little bit to some of the big moonshots. And you and your wife, Lynn, have been extraordinary philanthropists, far more than most people in

Silicon Valley by a significant amount. Are you open to talking about some of the big moonshots and some of the things that you're most passionate about? Because I think one of the things that's important is I want to inspire everybody watching on the notion that you can go big, you can go bold, you can, because if you say you can't, then you're not. There are four or five that I want to at least touch on you decide what you want to talk about the one trillion trees uh homelessness um ocean plastics biodiversity

those are four that i've heard you speak speak to can you which one you want to jump into what are you what are you excited about making a dent in well i mean let's go right to homelessness because it's such a complicated issue for every major city in the world. But especially where I live in San Francisco, it's a major issue. And, you know, with homelessness, it feels very, you know, like you can't get through it, that it's too difficult. And or that you should, you know, this isn't my issue. This is the mayor's issue. This is the homeless organization's issues.

issue. This is the homeless organization's issues. And the way I manage my business is through stakeholder theory, which is I'm managing for all my stakeholders, not just my shareholders. And that idea of stakeholders, well, you have to define like, who are your stakeholders that you're managing for? They have to be part of your vision. And I'm managing for all my stakeholders. That is, of course, my customers are my stakeholders. So as I mentioned, I'm managing for them. My employees are stakeholders. I have to manage for them. Okay, my partners are my stakeholders.

My shareholders are my stakeholders. Who else are my stakeholders? Well, the public schools. I've adopted a public school. I've adopted a school district. You know, everyone should be adopting a public school. I've adopted a school district. Everyone should be adopting a public school. Who are the key stakeholders in your community that you're going to adopt as an entrepreneur? Now, well, I'm walking out, we're the largest employer in San Francisco.

So when I'm walking to our headquarters building, well, if you've been to San Francisco, you know there's a homeless issue well what am i supposed to do just ignore it or you know there through the grace of god go i what is it you choose what is your level of compassion or what is your you know level of ability to see yourself in others you know are you the other or you yourself and this is really important you know how do we look at that this is where after a while it's like whoa we've got to do something so you know we can form we can fund the local ngos they're taking care of the homeless you can give money directly to the homeless you can look at the budgets you can but eventually say wow i don't know how to move

forward so i realized that we need a lot more funding. We needed a much more aggressive action towards the homeless. And we created something in San Francisco called Proposition C. And we wrote a very simple proposition and said, you know what? A very small tax on the very largest companies would fund $300 million a year into the homeless, and we could directly address this problem in a material way. We also started at the University of California, San Francisco, with medical doctors, the research that is published, by the way, in New England Journal of Medicine, AMA, clinical trials, how to actually deal with the homeless. I'm not an expert on homeless. I'm not a medical doctor. I don't know about addiction. I don't

understand about mental health issues, but I know that where there are people like that, I know where they are. I know who those experts are. So bringing them in and then saying, okay, now if we did this, if we had the funding and we had the expertise, how do we put it together to really address this? Look, at the end of the day, the answer to homelessness is very simple, a home. Everyone who's homeless needs a home. It's not that complicated. Housing is a critical part, but you also have to address the addiction issues. You have to address the mental health issues. And there's other issues that you have to address. So we focused on creating something called Prop C in San Francisco.

We got that on the ballot. We had a huge fight, a huge fight, mostly with people out of our town who are anti-taxers, who came in from outside San Francisco and said oh no all taxes are bad you know it's very pavlovian for a lot of people especially ceos you say tax they say no it's a pavlovian response but it's not true in a lot of cases you need the ability to directly address serious social issues with taxes and in this case these um homeless services needed to scale so he put it on the ballot 62 of san franciscans said we agree this is the right approach then the anti-taxers was not good enough for them they had to come back and sue again and they kept it in the courts once the supreme court of california and we won and now there is the, all, it's only

been going actually for about 90 days, all the funding that we now need to directly address the homeless situation in San Francisco is in place. So is, what is that? Well, it's clear. What did I want? What was important to me? You know, how am I going to get it? By the way, how, what is my obstacles like these anti-taxers? And then how will I know that we're successful? Ultimately, you know, that we have a reduction in homelessness in San Francisco and that we are able to get, you know, our city back into a stable ecosystem. Just to hit on that last point, I think without a target, you'll miss it every time. And being clear about what you're measuring and whether you're going in that direction is so critical. And homelessness is such a squishy balloon. You push

in one place and it comes out another. Do you have any kind of a actual metric over a timeline that you're targeting yourself? Peter, life is a squishy balloon. Your life is a squishy balloon. We don't have to go through your life, my life, our businesses are squishy balloons. Whose life and whose business is not a squishy balloon? These principles, these ideas, it doesn't matter if you're trying to handle homelessness, biodiversity, your business, your life, your relationship, your marriage, whatever it is. The reality is, is that these are the principles that can help you achieve what you want, but you've got to get clear about what you want. You need to be able to take a pen. By the way, I do this all the time. Just take a pen and I just say, what do I really want? And

write it down. Five, 10 words maximum. And then I'm like, what's really important to me? I can't tell you the thousands and thousands of time that I do that exercise. And now I'm getting older. and thousands of time that I do that exercise. And now I'm getting older. I'm 56. I'm not 36. When I started my company, I was 34. I didn't graduate when I was college, graduated college when I was 21. My values and how I look at the world, it changes as I get older, of course. And now it still works. I write down, what do I want? And then I just write down, what is the number one word that is most clear to me on what my value is? And then, how am I going to get that? So if I'm working on a new project,

like I was just on the phone with an amazing climate scientist in Switzerland, and we're talking about some amazing vision that he has for biodiversity. He's already published some amazing research on he has for biodiversity he's already published some amazing research on something called one trillion trees he's just an incredible person and when i'm on the phone with him i'm trying to get clear what do i want what does he really want what are the values and are our values congruent that is what he wants and what i want and what's important to him and what's important to me. I need to ask that question. You know, I elicit his values. Hey, hey, Tom, tell me,

what do you really want? Tom, what's really important to you? These are tools not just to ask for yourself. You could say it to others. And then that helps you model and profile them. So you can say, oh, this is now I understand this person or this business or this entrepreneur. You know, we have a lot, as I said earlier, we have a lot of different characters, entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley where I am. And you can say, okay, well, I know this entrepreneur, so-and-so, you know, they're really great. Oh, now just tell me, what do you think is the most important thing to them? What is truly the most important thing to them? And how are they operationalizing that in their business as priority one? And you can see it. It will give you the gleam of insight into that personality and that person. But then if you're going to connect with

that person or you're going to try to either do business with them or invest in them, hey, that's going to give you the ability to say, yes, I want to align with that person because they have the same values that I have. Or hold on, you know what? That's not giving me the best feeling. This is giving me a little bit of the eebie-jeebies here, that this person's values are not exactly what I want because everybody's values are different. And let's not put any judgment on there right now. Let's just say that you have the ability to look at these look at everyone or everything or your company or abstract and say okay yes i can align here because you can choose what you want to do and what your life is going to be about and you have to think about it from the perspective of

not just your vision, not just your moonshot. The moonshots are very important. Of course, going to the moon. But what is most important about it? What are the principles that are guiding us there? Let's jump into the environment because you're super passionate about that. You're a great spokesperson for it. You're supporting the work there. Do you mind jumping into One Trillion Trees and educating the community about that? Well, I just had one of my mentors. I was just on a conference with Al Gore. This really inspires me over and over and over again.

I'm sure all of you have watched, know him, read his books, heard him speak. And for someone like me, I'm not an environmentalist. I don't really understand a lot of the environmental actions. It's taken me a lot of work to try to understand what can I do? You know, I'm the CEO of a software company. What can I do? So, you know, the first thing that kind of came to me was, well, I guess I could commit to my company being net zero because clearly it's all about emissions, number one. So what is our rate of emissions in our company? And we're a big company, so we have emissions. So how do we reduce those those emissions how do we bring them to zero how do we become net zero and then how do we net zero our whole supply chain as well and that is a big

motion for a company and for a big company it's a very big motion and also like for some i i was just uh in the same event with the ceo of one of the largest oil companies in the world. That is a very big motion for him. Very complicated. How do you go net zero? But I think for each entrepreneur, raise your hand. Are you net zero now? Are you net zero now?

Or are you not net zero? Because we all can say we're for the environment, but you have to say you're for being net zero. And if you're not net zero, when will you be net zero? And this is a big motion because we have the tools, we understand the principles, and I think this is also what our employees want too, and our stakeholders and our shareholders. They want us to become net zero. We have to bring global emissions down. We all know about the Paris Accord. We all understand these global emission targets. So that means each one of us have to assume some level of net zero. Okay. Then you start looking at carbon, you know, and what is the carbon math? And this

is the complicated part, which is, you know is when we have so much carbon in the environment and we're emitting carbon in the environment, the number one vehicle for sequestration is right there on your screen, the ocean. And, you know, probably on the neighborhood of 200 to 300 gigatons. Why is that? Well, you know, what is the number one technology for sequestering carbon on the planet? You just saw Elon Musk just tweeted he's going to have a carbon capture technology contest for $100 million. His moonshot, I don't know if he's doing it with you or some other organization. You know, the thing is, is that that moonshot that idea carbon capture you pride if you follow the tweet stream some folks came in and say oh i got the invention here the tree yes the tree is i know there's other ideas but that's one yeah so but by the way just to the

numbers i think uh if i'm correct mark there's about 2 trillion trees or there are 3 trillion trees on the planet. If you planted an additional trillion trees, that would bring us back to pre-industrial CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Well, you are right. We used to have 6 trillion trees on the planet, and each trillion tree sequesters a little over 200 gigatons of carbon. Now, these can't be monocultures. This has to be highly diversified you know um planting it has to be it could be far it could be by the way it could be um old growth forests it can be uh groups regenerative and in farm regenerative farmlands these things all add up but the reality is we need to get back to what is essentially one trillion more trees.

We have three trillions now. We have lost half the trees on the planet. We've gone from six trillion to three trillion. And as we've burned those trees or they're gone, where does that carbon go? Well, guess what? It goes into the atmosphere. Some of it gets sequestered back into the ocean that's why the ocean is getting hotter i'm not a scientist i'm not a climate scientist so i'm not the right person to do this lecture and then if we plant

more trees we can sequester more carbon or maybe elon musk was going to invent the next carbon capture technology that would be very exciting too know, you see some other great entrepreneurs out there like Bill Gross and others who are all trying to create carbon stores. But yes, we need to sequester carbon. So one step is we need to go net zero. So to reduce the emissions, the second step is we need to sequester that carbon that's out there. And then the third step I would also suggest is, wow, we're going to have more plastic in the ocean than fish by 2050. There's nine rivers that are dumping the majority of plastic into the ocean. You go into a lot of these developing countries, you see the people in the village, there's no other way for them to get rid of

their trash. They put it in the riverbed, The river comes at night. The trash is gone. It's in the ocean. We have ways that we can get that ocean out, that plastic out of the ocean. One is get it out of the river first. And so we've started to put river machines in these nine major rivers using technology like you're talking about, like AI, robotics, and we can start to make a difference. But that's a very serious issue also on my mind. Mark, are you willing to go to some Q&A with the community now? Sure. And I also just want to say, Benioff Ocean Initiative, we're running crowdsourcing ideas on how to get ocean plastics. So you can go there and submit your idea.

And we've been funding entrepreneurs with their ideas to address ocean plastics. So you can go there and submit your idea. And we've been funding entrepreneurs with their ideas to get, to address ocean plastics, for example. Nice. And thank you for the work you're doing. Hey everybody, I hope you're enjoying this episode. I'll tell you about something I've been doing for years. Every quarter or so, having a phlebotomist come to my home to draw bloods,

to understand what's going on inside my body. And it was a challenge to get all the right blood draws and all the right tests done. So I ended up co-founding a company that sends a phlebotomist to my home to measure 40 different biomarkers every quarter, put them up on a dashboard so I can see what's in range, what's out of range,

and then get the right supplements, medicines, peptides, hormones to optimize my health. It's something that I want for all my friends and family, and I'd love it for you. If you're interested, go to mylifeforce.com backslash Peter to learn more. Let's get back to the episode. Let's go to Sean Valles for the first question. Sean. First, I'd like to say just a word of thanks for your relentless pursuit of not only philanthropy,

but also activism, both in Indiana in 2015 and in my home city of California. I think philanthropy can come easy for some people, but activism kind of requires taking a stand. And I respect how you advocated for your employees. My question is, I'd like to talk about kind of what you think about the kind of local quote-unquote exodus of jobs and companies from the Bay Area, given the new remote work and high cost of living. You kind of hear these horror stories of Google employees moving to Wyoming and being able to outspend their local communities. Or even there was one employee that worked at both Google and Facebook remotely and was busted. So what do you make of that?

Well, I think, you know, we're definitely in a new world, which we call the cloud. That's a catchy term. You know, this cloud, boy, you know, I don't know much about it. You know, the reality is, look, everyone on this call, everyone knows what the cloud is. The cloud is that you can basically do everything from your computer. So you've got video, you've got collaboration. You can take your seminar from Peter or his friend, Tony Robbins. Whatever you want, you can do it all in the cloud. Maybe we can do too much in the cloud. We also need to have some human interaction. And also,

we want to get out and be in nature too. But here we are in the cloud. Let's just address that for one moment. We're in the cloud. All right. Well, can I start a company in the cloud. Let's just address that for one moment. We're in the cloud. All right. Well, can I start a company in the cloud? Can I run my company in the cloud? Well, let me tell you, for the last year, I have a company that's 54,000 people. I have a second company, Time Magazine. We're all in the cloud. Let me tell you a funny story.

A year ago, exactly, I basically called the guys at Time and said, guys, pandemic is coming. This is not going to be good. You're going to have to go home and start producing the magazine. And the magazine's amazing. If you haven't seen the magazine, time.com slash subscribe. It's awesome. Get my sales pitch in there because we're trying to – the importance of the free press. And they said, Mark, you don't know what you're talking about.

We can't produce a magazine at home. This is crazy. We've never done such a thing. Time is 100 years old, never produced a magazine at home. I said, go figure it out, guys. Go figure it out. I didn't have to do very much more because the next day the mayor of New York shut down New York and said everybody go home because we're going to try to stop the pandemic so they're at home now we're

all on zoom hey guys welcome we're all back on zoom we're all in the cloud yes when's the magazine come out well we have to produce by thursday i'm like all right let me know how it goes guess what in my mailbox on Friday, the magazine showed up. It was the first magazine in 100 years produced at home in the cloud. If we can run a magazine in the cloud, I also have a 54,000-person company called Salesforce that no one is in the office anywhere in the world. So guess what? We're doing it all in the cloud.

We also make tools in the cloud. We're using Zoom like this in the cloud. We have this thing called Salesforce works in the cloud. I have a friend of mine, Michael Dell, called me and said, look, I got a problem here in Austin, Texas. I said, what's that, Michael? Well, we're going to have to close our call centers tomorrow and we're moving everyone into their home to answer all the questions. I said, no problem. Guess what? You're on Salesforce. Boom. You're done. So that idea that we're in the cloud, we can move. Now, where do you want to work? You can basically work anywhere. We're in a new world. We're in a digital world, right? Look at you. Look at me, right? You're not sitting on

top of the Presidio in San Francisco with the Golden Gate Bridge behind you. You're at home with some background, okay? So we're in the world. We're in the cloud. This now is a whole new world. We can do anything. We can do it from anywhere. I can work from anywhere. And I can be anywhere. And I can collaborate.

And I can use these basic tools that we're talking about here, the alignment tools. They still work in the cloud. You can still ask questions in the cloud. You can still get congruence with your values in the cloud. You can still align your questions in the cloud. You can still get congruence with your values in the cloud. You can still align your methods in the cloud. And when you do that, all those same principles come together and you're going to have success in the cloud as well. So how will that be for San Francisco? How will that be for the world?

Well, the whole world is going to reorganize and reassemble. And that's what's happening right now. And I think that that's a great thing because look, I'm all for, you know, things moving forward. And that's what we want. We want things to move forward. For San Francisco, before this hit, just speaking as a fourth generation San Franciscan, I can tell you, we were sold out. There was no room for anybody. We were sold out. There was no room for anybody. We're a small little city, seven miles square. It's a finite space. It's a tidy little space in California, San Francisco. And there weren't enough apartments. There weren't enough homes. There wasn't any commercial real estate. It was

sold out. And so prices were going way up. So could this help maybe renormalize the system and bring some equilibrium back to San Francisco? Well, this isn't our first gold rush in San Francisco, okay? This isn't our first summer of love. San Francisco is the home of gay rights. We know how to create and innovate and change the world, all right? And this will be great for San Francisco. It's still the number one tech economy in the world, except for one other place. It's very popular right now. The cloud. Thank you. Thank you, Sean.

Let's go next to Jeffrey Branch. Jeffrey, congratulations on Proposition C. You raised $300 million now through it. How do you stay involved and get government to execute? Wow. Interesting. All right. and get government to execute.

Wow, interesting. All right, well, it's 300 million a year, which is amazing and very important because this is a hard problem in our city. And the question is, how is it governed? So there's a couple of things that I did. One is, I didn't architect all of Prop C, but part of Prop C has a phenomenal thing called the Governance Committee

that includes basically a number of people who are all critical stakeholders in homelessness. A little bit of government, some science, homeless NGOs, homeless advocates, some people who have been homeless, and they are the ones who decide where the money goes. That's very cool. When we were fighting Prop C, it was all about people were saying, oh, you can't, you know, we're going to get this and the mayor can't decide and this kind of, the reality is all, it's a collaboration. And then I did something else. I gave $35 million to University of California, San Francisco to create the Benioff Homelessness Initiative has scientists, the best in the world, medical doctors primarily, PhDs who are running the clinical trials that are published in the major scientific journals around the world, run by an incredible lady named Margo Kushel.

And she basically and her team then can advise this committee on where the money should go to be directly addressed homeless. And she has also addressed, you know, basically addressed mayors in all kinds of cities all over the world and helped them solve homelessness. This is a very solvable problem. Now we have the resource. We have the intellectual capability. Let's get it done. Fantastic.

Thank you. Let's go next to Pierre Lobes. Lobes. Just one question. Do you think a different leadership profile between leading your company and advancing your non-profit agenda? And if yes, how do you feel this profile differs? It's a great question. And it's kind of related to the last question about advocacy. And we did get a call from the state of Indiana. Mike Pence, who just retired as vice president, was the governor at the time. And he had signed a law that basically discrimin part of the LGBTQ community and contacted me and said,

we cannot work in a company in a state and be, we're the number one tech employer in Indiana where they're discriminating against the LGBT community. And so we had to dispatch our lawyers and I knew Mike Pence very well. I called him and said, hey, let's work this out. And we did, we negotiated it, which is how all things should get resolved through communication and collaboration. And we did. We negotiated it, which is how all things should get resolved through communication and collaboration. I am not two people. I am not Mark Benioff, the philanthropist over here, and Mark Benioff, the CEO over here. I'm not talking to you one direction and saying, let me tell you about my company and everything we're doing to create the world. And then saying over here, let me tell you all the things I'm doing to improve the state of the world. I am one person, one integrated human being. And maybe this is

the most important thing that we can all do is to say, you know what? You want to change the world? You want to have a nonprofit agenda? Business is the greatest platform for change. Your business is your platform for change. You want to change the world? Use your business. And by the way, what's the platform to manage your business? You. It's not two worlds. It's not two executives. It's not two people. By the way, people did this in their marriage too. I'm one person in my marriage. I'm one person in my company. Two different personalities. I'm one person with my friends. I'm one person in my company. I'm one person in my company two different personalities I'm one person with my friends I'm one person in my company I'm one person in my church in my synagogue in my mosque I'm a different person in my company or at home no be one person be one integrated person remove your

incongruencies let them surface and resolve be integrated you're far more powerful if you come together as oneself. So for me, I don't have a nonprofit agenda. My whole life is the same. It's one integrated purpose. And if my business isn't helping me to achieve my goals, all my goals, then what's the point? 99% of all my time is spent on my business, just like everyone else's, you know? So I want to make sure that the work that I'm doing with my business is improving the world. Not just I'm 99% making money.

And then over here, when I get one hour a week, I'm going to, you know, go call the homeless shelter and find out what I can do for them. No, I can have one integrated life. And that's what I recommend. That's beautiful. Great question, Pierre. Thank you so much. Let's go to Joe Honan next.

Joe. Hi, Peter. Hi, Mark. First of all, thank you so much for what you do. I'm a big fan of Salesforce and even bigger fan now of the One Trillion Trees initiative. My question for you is, you know, Salesforce has been helping other businesses reinvent themselves to the cloud. But as a business with 54,000 employees and $21 billion of revenue, do you feel a need to reinvent Salesforce in a post-COVID world? And, you know, assuming that is, what amount of time, what amount of capital do you think is a recommended or an acceptable percentage in pivoting your company for a post-COVID world?

Great question. And let me answer it in two ways. First of all, the beginning of every year, I sit down and I do the exercise that I just went through with you. I've done it for 21 years. Before I ask anyone in my company to do it, I have to do it. I have to answer the question for Salesforce. What do we want? What are our values? How are we going to get it? And then I'm like, and I want to do that from a position of a beginner's mind. Forget Salesforce even exists. Forget anything we have ever done. Okay. What do I really want? Forget the 21-year history of Salesforce. What do I really want this year? And then I start writing,

writing, writing, writing. And I have that V2 mom right in front of me of what I want to create for this year. All right. Now, boom, that was January 2020. Oh, pandemic. Oh, man. PPE, not on there. Contact tracing systems, not on there. Vaccine cloud, not on there. Money for mental health for my employees, not on there. Okay. on there money for mental health for my employees not on there okay taking care of the small businesses in my community not on there whoa beginner mind boom new same process again right because the world changed so i need to change world is changing i am changing i'm not going to do the same thing. It's a different world. I need a new plan. All right, now here we are 2021. I'm about to launch my new fiscal year, February 1. Who are we? Everyone's at home. Are we the work from home leader? Everyone's rebuilding their relationship

with their customers. How are we going to build through customer 360 and deliver a single source of truth? Whoa, everyone is more focused on our stakeholders than ever before, starting with how are we going to get everyone in California vaccinated? How are we going to resolve all the cases? How are we going to contact trace? How are we going to do everything necessary to resolve the pandemic? So one, two, three, new plan, Completely new plan. As part of that plan, I actually did an acquisition that you probably read about a month or two ago. The second largest acquisition in the software industry. Largest applications acquisition ever, which was the acquisition of Slack.

I don't know if you've heard of it. It's a collaboration. Amazing collaboration. Work fromhome company. And then integrating Salesforce and Slack means that all of our products can immediately become work-from-home. I think work-from-home is not going away, back to our previous questioner. I think we're in a new world. I think work-from-home is a critical part of that. And every single one of Salesforce's capabilities, our sales cloud, our service cloud, our marketing cloud, our commerce cloud, our core platform, our analytics, our ability to integrate,

they all need to be work from home first. So it's critical for us to either A, take some existing technology we have, and we've pioneered things in that area, like something called Salesforce Chatter, or B, really go for it and say, you know what, we're actually in a new world. We're in the new world where your corporate headquarter is this thing called the cloud. That means we're in a new cloud. It's not cloud one. When I started my company, it was cloud one, which was Amazon and tabs. And it was a basic UI on my computer. Then it was cloud two was mobile and social and these incredible new capabilities. We're into cloud three now. Cloud three is the new work from home world. You know, cloud three is the customers expect everything from me world.

And cloud three is also we're in a stakeholder-based world where our communities expect more from us as CEOs than ever before. So we better be able to step up as CEOs, as leaders, as entrepreneurs and give back, not just create products and sell products, but give back as well. And so that's why we really said, okay, we're going for it. We're going to buy some slack. Sorry about that. We're going to buy slack, and we're going to make this happen. We're going to go next to Ross Thornley, and then to George Bundarian. Ross, and thank you very much for that question, Joe. Hi, Mark. Hi, Peter. Thanks. My question evolves around what you've just been talking about, this pace of change where the context of yesterday

is different by tomorrow. And how are you preparing your workforce and how do you see society preparing the workforce for their different careers, roles, reskilling, whilst maintaining positive mental health through all of those changes and transformations and friction? So I'm very interested in this because we measure adaptability as being a key component for future success. You're right. You know, people need to be re-skilled, re-trained. They have to be able to really pivot and shift and move into new positions. They need to be able to quickly skill themselves with new things. Great example, mental health, right? How do I meditate? How do I take care of myself during a pandemic? I'm at home.

I don't have the social infrastructure that I had before. I need to talk to somebody. You know what? That's why we built Trailhead.com. So we built Trailhead.com to directly address for our employees and our customers a re-skilling revolution. We want to skill and certify and train and build community and give feedback to people. And we've done all that through this trailhead.com. And as part of that, it took it one step forward for mental health. We've even started an incredible new series called Be Well Together, which you'll find on YouTube. Started, by the way, at Salesforce. I mean, I could go through all the things that we did to try to survive the pandemic over the last year. But one of them was, wow, a third of our employees were reporting mental health issues, including me. So I'm like,

whoa, how am I going to make this happen? How am I going to go forward? So we got some of the best people in the world, and we started to have dialogues with them and invite in our employees and say, here are the things you need to do to make sure not that you have just physical health, you know, eating well, working out, getting checked out by your doctor, but mental health, because mental health and physical health are health. So now when we look at that, that's a whole nother level of training and capability that we have to provide as a company. So we've been able to institutionalize that and be well together on YouTube and also in Trailhead. It's something that every company has to do so much. So we started to get a lot of

questions from our customers. Well, we don't have these resources. We need these now. We just opened, we just gave it all, opened up all the doors and gave it to everybody. So this is something very important going forward. Yep, amazing. Thank you very much, Ross. Next, go to George Vandarian. Hey, Mark. This is great so far.

The last two questions I want to just kind of double-click off of. So I'm an emerging VC here in L.A. with a thesis around the future of work. So I'm just curious to get your take on kind of what are the trends, the inflection points, what's happening, enterprise kind of SaaS, B2B. You're talking about some of them, but I would love to get your perspective on what would you advise me to look at as far as investing? you advise me to look at as far as investing? Well, I have my own little hobby, which is venture capital myself. So, you know, I probably get about an email a day from entrepreneurs. They just email me at my either my corporate or my personal address. And I see business plans and I've been very fortunate to invest in. It's become a far bigger thing than I could have possibly imagined. Some of the companies that I've invested in just went public. And, you know,

some of my friends like Max Levchin at Affirm or David Gerrard at Upstart, Brian Chesky at Airbnb, I'm about to see some very exciting new entrepreneurs, very exciting entrepreneur in New York who's starting an amazing company called Compass about to go public very exciting new entrepreneurs, very exciting entrepreneur in New York who's started an amazing company called Compass about to go public. So what I am doing is things like, that's what Salesforce is doing. So that's the Salesforce VC Sun, which has had some great outcomes with things like Snowflake and Zoom. But things that I like are number one, like we just talked about, digital health.

I think digital health, telehealth, the ability to be healthy online, using the things that Peter's talking about, artificial intelligence and others. We're at the beginning of a digital health revolution. There is no question. Another one, you know, Peter's sitting on the moon during this conference here with this thing behind him. Space is obviously going to be very important. You know, I've been fortunate to be able to invest in a few space type companies like SpaceX or Swarm or Planet Labs or Astra. I think space is an exciting category. I think that's another one that I'm very, you know, very interested in. And the third one is biodiversity. I think companies that are focused in biodiversity and healing the world using this technology. I love this little company called Windward. Windward is a company where they take geospatial information. They're able to use transponders on boats to identify who's overfishing, who's illegally fishing.

fishing. They're also able to provide information to insurance companies so people who have boats can get great policies because they can prove, oh, hey, I did all the right things. Very exciting. So those are really my big three categories that I'm most excited about right now. Wonderful. Thank you, George. Let's go to David Chu, one of our Platinum 2020 members. We want to thank you for all your visionary philanthropy over the years. You mentioned San Francisco is a small city. It turns out my office was at 62 First Street, catty-cornered from your new Salesforce tower. And about 15 years ago, I remember that you announced the $100 million gift for the Children's Hospital, and we're all stunned. You were also well-known for twisting the arms of a lot of the wealthy folks and forcing them to contribute.

The question I have for you is that last year we heard Dr. George Church say that if you can't do the research and get through a first stage human clinical trial for less than $2 million, you're not smart enough to tackle the problem. Could you tell us how much you needed to fund the Yamanaka research? Well, Shinya Yamanaka is obviously one of the great visionary scientists of our time, winner of the Nobel Prize. Yamanaka is obviously one of the great visionary scientists of our time, winner of the Nobel Prize. He is half-based at UCSF in San Francisco and half-based in Kyoto University, Kyoto probably being my second favorite city in the world after San Francisco. And his Yamanaka factors we've seen have been critical to us understanding cell regeneration. And he can take normal stem cells, turn them into, sorry, normal skin cells, turn them into stem cells, and he's even been able to show that you can put those in your eyes and get reverse demacular generation. So he's a visionary

beyond visionaries, and he's like focusing on really exposing the mechanisms of how that transformation works. When you're doing basic research like he's doing, we're beyond clinical trials. That's what I really enjoy. I like basic research. I just did some basic research investment in prostate cancer. Prostate cancer therapies are not moving fast enough. I've invested in a prostate cancer team to just look at basic research. The biome. We all know how important our biome is. Our doctors will say to us, well, you're taking antibiotics, so you better go take probiotics. Which probiotics?

Which ones actually work? How do I do that? How do I reboot my biome? What is a synthetic biome? Basic research. I just funded some basic research at UCSF and Stanford. I love basic research. That's the area that really excites me.

And when it comes to getting to clinical trials and drug trials and all that, I would have to say I'm not your best person to talk to because I'm much more thinking about really the beginning of it all. Thank you, David. Appreciate that. Mark, if I can squeeze one last question in from Judy Fairburn. Judy. Hey, a real honor. I'm a big Slack user and love it. I hope that's going to be your main platform with everything else tied into it in the future. It's terrific. So I'm a co-CEO of a purpose-driven business, The 51, and women-led capital investing in diverse, innovative startups.

So my question to you is in this time, this terrible, but opportunistic time, how are you energizing and double down on the women in your organization to really make a difference, given all they have on their plate? It's a great question, and I'll tell you that this is something that's been a major focus in our company now for several years. And when we think about women in our company, there's probably a number of critical issues. One, of course, is opportunity and providing equal opportunity. Another critical area is preventing sexual harassment, I feel is extremely important. And we have zero tolerance in that area. Three is equal pay for equal work. This is extremely important. And I think in regards to the pandemic, you're right. This is another level of complexity

where, you know, we've tried to be as flexible as we can on work hours and times and teams. as we can on work hours and times and teams. And we're still, I think, at the beginning of understanding how do we balance all of this together. And I'll give you a real answer, a real challenge that I have, which is I'm about to do a major presentation and the presentation is going to be at 4 p.m. It's going to be three hours. And one of our top female leaders said, wait a minute, I don't know if you can do that because that's going to put a huge burden on me and my family. Whoa. You know, that's something that we have to kind of look at. How are we going to handle that? You know, we cannot ask people then to participate in that presentation, need to make sure that it's recorded, that they can view it, that there's no interactivity required to have respect for that

time. So these issues, I think, are, you know, front of mind for me. And 10 years ago, 20 years ago, or look at when I went to college, do you think I took a class on gender equality at USC? No, I did not. Did I do a class on equal pay? I did not. Did I take a class on preventing sexual harassment? I did not. Did I hear about equal opportunity? Maybe that was the bumbling beginning of that in the 80s, you know, but we're in a new world. And so I think this kind of advocacy and bringing these issues forward. One other area I think that's extremely important, investing in women entrepreneurs, encouraging women venture capitalists to make sure that we have impact funds set up specifically to address and impact women. One of the companies

I just mentioned to you that I'm very excited about, Swarm, which is a tremendous satellite company. It's run by a phenomenal female entrepreneur. That's very exciting from my standpoint. Thank you so much, Judy, for that great question. Mark, grateful for your time. I know you have a heart out right now. Purpose-driven drought values, a beginner's mind, operationalizing it. Let's hear it for Mark Benioff, everybody. Thank you so much.