Salesforce Chair, CEO, and Co-founder Marc Benioff | Full Interview | Code 2021

[Music] hello hello how you doing i like your slow move your slow walk to the chair um i just i would be remiss if i said mark benioff is the most annoying person i know because he texted me over and over again literally i was i had like children i had work he's like what's your testing procedure what's this what's this a lot of the stuff we put in place was due to mark um so i would give you credit because even though you're irritating you were correct he was irritating that he wanted to keep you alive what did you no i'm not talking about that you have young kids at home i do and you were right and we made changes we already have a lot of friends but we doubled it i'm a protester are you what does that mean it means i'm protest okay why did you wink at me like that because i okay all right because i like you okay good um so let's get started because there's a lot of things to talk about workplace work from home uh tech in general yeah um and your own business but let's start recently i wrote a column in new york times about an interview we did uh in 2018 where you compared facebook to cigarettes um you've sort of doubled down this week and at the time i thought oh what is mark saying now you know he was just trying to be provocative um you talked about it this week also so i'd love you to sort of update that and why you're doing this and saying this because very few people will do so well one of the reasons that we are kind of on that testing thing we did a conference ourself last week dream force in san francisco which was exciting to bring dream force back to san francisco and it was not 200 000 people but it was you know a thousand two thousand and uh the things that you're doing here a lot of these things we also were doing and so i was just reflecting back some of the process and procedures yes because look we don't wanna set anyone back with an infection right we don't want to take somebody who's healthy and send them home because they want to come to the code conference or they want to come to dream force right but they go their party favor is uh you know some virus so um i think that um that is important you know we all want to get back together but we want to get back together safely and that's true in my business too that is you know i want to open my offices but i want to do it safely i want to have events like you're having beautiful event here you have in the hilton i want to do it safely i want i'm going to uh i have a lot of off sites also where i bring all my executives together but i want to do it safely and i am even building a huge new ranch you know which is going to be like a corporate training center kind of an about of the old model of uh ge and crotonville if you ever went there which is kind of she knows in new york where they you know companies used to build these big training centers which were like these dude ranch type experiences with dorms and all this and i think we're going to kind of move back into that world as well because you're going to need a way to onboard people culturally and you're going to need new ways to do that you know for big companies like ours right so when you look at all of those things you know working at home or working at an event or working at an offsite how do you bring it all together safely and i think that it's connected because it's all about trust you know we're in a crisis of trust worldwide there's a it's it's in many dimensions you know it's the pandemic it's equality it's um the digital revolution it's um it's the climate and this kind of crisis of trust is kind of out there and we need to kind of decide you know what side of the equation we are on that and that that's really what's on my mind and that's that's what's related to it right and i asked you a specific question i know i gave you actually the answer which was because it's about trust and it's really when i see the opportunity to um look you're either a trusted enterprise or you're not a trusted enterprise you're either trusted in business or you're not this has been your narrative by the way for a long time and you use the word your code word is responsibility yes that's where you clue in and you know um it's the same thing which is when we look at all these things and by the way that's how i could get to you you know i knew you were going to go testing because i said what's your responsibility and then you're like oh yeah i remember oh yeah of course i'm going to do the right thing so that's where it is important and i think in business or in social media for example because we have a digital revolution so the mistrust and misinformation that we see and stephanie was telling me issues you know that she is aware of you in in her world and the the reality is is that um it's related to what we're going through because in the pandemic in the climate and in the political environment these uh digital revolution that we've been talking about here at the code conference it you know go for it it's right yeah it um it is related because in those things in digital revolution it's wrapped into those other three categories very aggressively and if you don't have trust it can be very painful and i think we see that but are you making trust that's what's going on but are you making trust responsible for too much stuff right so as it relates to social media if it's are you a trusted enterprise are you trying to do the right thing right like we try to get our kids to do the right thing but what we really do at the end of the day is set rules and unless more rules are put in place can you get critical mass big important businesses to actually start doing the right thing well you're right in that it's about it's about values you have to decide look you're the ceo of a company and you're a journalist even right um your whatever come industry you're in what is your high corporate value you know we talked about this when we're together in 2016 i watched the interview to get ready oh god you know because you're it's hard to like be interviewed you because you run at such a high clip and i'm like i got to dial into this vibe and i'm like whoa like buckle up and hold on because cara is going to like take you down the roller coaster but go ahead yeah and the re i i know and that's where it's like really important that um we're able to say trust is our highest value you know it sales force is about trust it's about customer success it's about innovation it's about equality it's about sustainability right and if you're not able to really say what your high values are right and like when we talk about you did by saying your tester for example trust and safety are connected all right those are high values that if you can't say you're about trust and safety ask you why you are so articulate about it especially around facebook when you did that you had to know the impact someone after that yeah me called you a class trader yeah what class trader i was like you're an idiot but fine i was like oh interesting um and someone else said you broke uh joking scott galloway said he wrote the code of the white guy i love scott yeah yeah so why do you do that did you understand the implications and what do you think now i know why i did it but brat brad who you know he doesn't want me to say why but i do okay well i'll tell you why i will tell you why excellent just brad just hold your ears this is a dark story but you know i grew up in a family of kind of justice warriors and one of the leader was my grandfather he was an incredible attorney and it was a an amazing time in san francisco and he was kind of an incredible uh he was also a supervisor where he could be a supervisor and an attorney at the same time which you can't do today and he had a lawyer he had uh he had a lot of unusual lawsuits but one of the lawsuits that he had was um a young girl who is nine was raped on the beach baker beach in san francisco her name was olivia nemi and she was several of her friends went to the beach and raped her with a beer bottle and it was a horrible thing in baker beach and the night before a couple nights before nbc had broadcast a movie called born innocent oh yeah and they had a scene that mirrored this and the kids did this exactly the same thing but they were using a plumber's helper they broadcast it at eight o'clock at night and um my grandfather's uh uh client basically said that these kids were saying are you doing it like the way you saw it on television now i was 12 13 14 years old this is very deep in my mind and at the dinner table you know this was an unusual family that we had my grandfather would talk about his cases not just this one but others this case went all the way to the supreme court and he would fight that he fought this case and this was very important to him saying this was wrong do they not know they're using their media in this dark way and um and uh went to the supreme court the supreme court um uh mr lewis you are my grandfather's name was marvin lewis and they said mr lewis you're wrong you know this is covered by the first amendment you can go away and then basically right then the government the fcc came in and said actually he's right and that is how we ended up with things that we know from our life and childhood things like late night television um the family hour prime time all got regulated out of this famous case on born innocent with nbc and in my subconscious i still hear my grandfather saying all the time to me you have to do what's right you have to fight for what's right you have to use your platform for change you know in my case it's a business so i can say i'm using my business as a platform for change but you have to use your life for that you do that you do that i see it every day but it's very important but not everybody feels it maybe not everybody had the grandfather that i had and that's just one story you know that i have that really kind of opened me and like set my tone now i didn't want to go into law so i i i found a computer when i was 14 years old and i started programming and i started a software company when i was in high school so when i am out there today i am you know still feel my grandfather like a lot of us do we feel our grandfather or grandmother or parents inside us and it's what do lawmakers say to you right you're one of the most influential people we know you have been wildly outspoken and i can't imagine that anyone in this room disagrees with it with anything that you just said so when you tell this story to congress people govern who you've spent a lot of time in in the white house in current administration last administration what do they say to you when you make this case well i think that they are very sensitive just like you are that we are in a new world in a position to actually do something in a lot of cases people do not understand the new world as well as we do you know that you can bring them out here you're going to have regulators on the stage you have some excellent regulators i just spoke to a commissioner the commissioner outside margaret and she's amazing and you know she understands a lot of these things very well so i think some do understand it like her i think others don't understand it as well or don't want to understand it but look this has been going on a long time and it doesn't that doesn't shake off our responsibility to do the right thing that's all and it doesn't matter if you're a journalist you know or a ceo you're a journalist and a ceo or you're the ceo of a company or what does that mean no longer am i well you know what i mean you're a leader and that means you have to do the right right what has to happen were you surprised by january 6th and the involvement of social media i wasn't really i i think that we're really in a world where you're you know it's kind of the way i see it is uh when i got ready for the dream force keynote i kind of built a diagram that looked like this in the center i think the world is in a crisis of trust and then i think there's kind of four main elements and i think the digital revolution is impacting all the three other elements and one of them is this kind of political dysfunction and inequality and bifurcation and so it gets integrated in to this world and when we also when we talk about uh the pandemic like you just had a very nice panel up here on the pandemic you have another one but a lot of the things are like oh these narratives that get kind of put out there it's like wow how is that possible but you see it gets wound into the media and um not in every country as much but certainly here what needs to be done not just in los angeles it needs to be done but other places to some other topics but what do you think needs to be done cigarette companies were legislated i think regulation i think that regulation well i wrote a whole book on this so you can read the book it's easy to find his face is on the cover a good picture too by the way so you do say so i thought it was a very good picture but no you i you know i think that it is i think there is a role a very important role for government right and that we should call for more regulation but mark and i think it's important and i've i've said this now for a long way this is not the first time it's not like you're oh god mark this is shocking no we've been talking about this for almost a decade so it's got to be what's happening and things have only gotten worse things have gotten worse and we have and by the way the things that we care about pick one of these topics that you actually care about and you'll go oh yeah to be an influencing the topic that i care about so if you care about the climate like i really do care about the climate i'm trying to like come up with what are the things that we can do like salesforce is now a net zero company we're a fully renewable company uh we started something called 1t.org which is to plant a trillion trees on the planet that's very important to me because emissions have put out a hundred gigatons of carbon since the first industrial revolution but we've now deforested half the planet we've gone from six trillion trees to three trillion trees every trillion trees sequesters 200 gigatons of carbon you know that means we've lost 600 gigatons of carbon storage on the planet are we going to put it back we can we know how to plant trees not super complicated technology like we can do it so i think that when we look at things like climate and like let's go plant trees let's cut emissions let's educate let's light up ecopreneurs let's um regulate even with climate like what the i love what the the eu is doing with the green deal for example where they're going to tax companies for carbon which i think is the right thing to do and when you do all of these things and you reforest okay this is powerful but if you get on social media and you say oh yeah i'm going to plant trees and then you'll get like you didn't think there were anti-tree people but they are out there there are i know they don't they'll find you the anti-tree people what they don't advertise it it's like you would say they don't never know when they're going to just pop out say no no i'm anti-tree right you know you're the anti-tree person yes i am anti-tree and i was this cannot be true but it is so you know that's kind of how life is right now okay where you can before something in in climate or in the pandemic or inequality even you know which we've talked about right or in exhaustion and or in other areas and that anti whatever you are is going to appear because of the nature of uh media let me ask you i would you want to talk about climate change in more detail but if you were the ceo of facebook what would the first thing you do be what you do first i would just do what i'm doing to my company which is to say trust is my highest value and this is how i'm going to operationalize it and i think you know that is not true ladies let me tell you why all right you're right all right gentlemen everything you're none of that is a plaque that's not true and i'll tell you why all right thanks for saying that but you're wrong okay we're anti-tree but go ahead i'm worried about that part no i like it number one is i had this very cool guy call me i did not know him about six or nine months ago young guy in his early 30s uh vlad tennis he's the ceo of robin hood yes and he's got this hot company and it's growing i'm not really involved in and it's like and then he's like yeah you know my friends say i gotta talk to you i'm like fine and then they're calling me too you gotta talk to this kid all right i'm gonna talk to him and it's a great conversation i'm like whoa this kid was really smart like it was really impressive and has this really big vision for financial services and really incredible um entrepreneur and uh who doesn't think he should be regulated and so he's out there and um but he's got some issues and so we're kind of going through it and you know what my observation is after i listened to him for a couple hours or a few hours actually said i've been listening to you now for a few hours and i have a question for you you know what are your what's your highest value he said i got this my highest value is democratization it's i want everybody to participate in the financial system this is very important to me er you know what we just artificially remove people from the financial system and it is wrong and i'm like wow that's very compelling but i said to him democratization is not a high value so pick a higher value and he's like and i said let me ask you a question what are you doing to keep your users safe so that this isn't these horrible stories that we're hearing out of this company are not happening because they have horrible stories and he's like i haven't really thought about that i said what about this question what if you made safety your highest value what if you made safe to your highest value and you operationalize safety what are the five or ten things you could do to make your system safe how would you code it how would you create it how would you operate it and that is kind of how i work with an entrepreneur but that flies in the face of democratization because he could argue democratization means i get to ride in a car in the front seat you are 100 right i get to you're 100 right but you have to choose what your highest value is and yes it may cost you because you may not get to as many users you may not have as much revenue you may not have as much market share with your venture capitalist demand you have but you will have safety and when you get out there and you end up on jim cramer or you get out on stephanie roll show or or with sarah eisen or whatever it is and they say to you why did this horrible story happen with your product you have to say i feel terrible because our highest value is safety and we were operationalized at this 10 ways and we need to do these 10 more things and in these stories that are happening today where safety is impacted the the brand value market share revenue of the company those cos have to come forward robin hood is an example peloton is an example there's many examples of stories of ceos who need to really think about what is our highest value and this is we you know when i go back and i watch that horrible interview from 2016 you did great idea was not great and i was like it was like yeah that was actually one thing we talked about that every ceo has to choose i actually at some care don't really care what your value is but at least tell us what is your highest value and when i find a ceo or an entrepreneur and i say to them what is your highest value and they're like i haven't really thought about it that to me is the biggest gap because i think that we all have that opportunity to make a conscious choice to not only decide what we want for our company which is very clear for a lot of entrepreneurs this is what i want boom but then what's really important to you tell me your highest most powerful value and i know like for you it's responsibility because what's that one of them and what else stop lying to me yeah you want truth truth and responsibility these are high values right so that's very important and when somebody's comes up to you and they're not saying the truth or they are not preaching responsibility you can see that because that's who you inherently are all right let me i'm gonna go with would you still call facebook a cigarette company i'm gonna bring it back to them i i look you have experts here jim steyer as well i wanted to know from you because you said it i think that the characteristics that i kind of laid out are probably still accurate and i think that it needs to they need to continue to move forward stephanie has a a very good story that she was telling you know backstage maybe she'll tell it on stage no i i was just saying what i don't understand what i don't understand the whole right they keep saying we're trying to move in the right direction yesterday instagram ceo says you know we have a new feature we have a nudge so if cara you are you are looking at content over and over on facebook this instagram the same type of content and maybe it's you shouldn't be looking that thing what we do is we we nudge you with a different suggestion which is so obtuse and crazy because the idea is if this is a teen in crisis who's looking at things that are unhealthy for them if you're now nudging them to look at a babbling brook then you've clearly never met a teen because they're not going to do it and unless they're forced to do something we're just putting more and more people at risk so when you have shareholders or a vc breathing down your neck and you're talking about safety it doesn't become at the core of what they have to do it seems like an abstract and if you thought they were a cigarette company three years ago then then wouldn't you say they're crack cocaine today and that january 6 happened said it perfectly yeah right yeah that's not even the whole story she has another part of the story which is darker and maybe she'll tell maybe all right darker we had a rape and i think that that's and i think that probably for every person here if we asked you did you have a story like that raise your hand if you have a personal story around this so you have personal stories and i think that that's very powerful and that's where we are today and i think we'll have more personal stories and as we circle the clock in the pandemic or we circle the clock on climate or we circle the clock on equality or on the political process or whatever you're going to have more stories because we're in a world that's very dynamic things are happening and media is a very important part of who we are in society we're going to switch talking about your businesses but let me just say they're not under what i have a business but she's a hundred percent right they're not under pressure and they just can't tune out of kara and i they hear us they just tune it out you know what they look at their share price today and it's rocking and rolling and you know what and you know what lawmakers are up their ass none so thank you stephanie anyway um let's move on to your business why how is jim steyer cannot wait to start talking about that i know um you bought time unfortunately he's got a mask i want to talk about two of your acquisitions slack yeah and then time magazine that's your personal one yes start with that how do you like being a media mogul i like it i i've had a lot of fun i i really like time we have a great group in new york there are a lot of fun people they're very different than the people that i normally hang with right you know and uh because you know i try not to stay around journalists too much okay but we don't want to hang out i'm just kidding but i know i really enjoy it and i think that there's some fun things time has several things one is it's a magazine that everybody knows and has in their subconscious two it's the digital digital service three it's an event company four it is also a venture capital company which is actually doing really well and five it is a smoothie studio and that is doing way better than we could have ever imagined and it's got the number one movie on netflix right now which is inspiration for about these four civilians that went in the rockets and very proud of our team on what a great job they did on that it was something they completely architected if you have not watched inspiration for with your kids on netflix this is a powerful thing i also do not really get teary or whatever but on episode one i did i was very um impressed with the content and the story and the character development and then the second one that's coming is kanye west and i've seen that and it is going to change a lot of people's views of exactly what kind of a genius this is because you're going to see him in this is the the partner is a close friend of his from childhood who shot a lot of video from the very youngest years when he started writing music and so forth and when you see this incredible story you'll be just have a very like it's so amazing are you making money at it well i wouldn't say we're making a lot of money i would say it's a uh it's a labor of love for sure it's an impact investment for us we didn't buy it to make you know uh salesforce profitability and salesforce margin which is you know our margins are at record levels i would say that this is more about you know that we need a we need a free press and we need high quality journalism and we need something like time are you gonna buy anything else i think one media company is enough for anybody really not two i wouldn't do two all right and i think focus by the way we're making it when we had it we didn't have the movie studio the venture capital was not amplified we didn't there were parts of it that weren't in so we're making it bigger and it's very cool and you should come to new york and see them and i know that i know very well yeah he's very good very good person but slack slack is very also you know well you know take a look at the last 18 months my digital life and my digital headquarters is way more important than my physical headquarters you know that we have these towers all over the world in new york and indianapolis and san francisco and tokyo and london and we have 75 almost 75 000 people now they're not in their towers you know we built these gorgeous towers they're mostly at home and uh that's fine and so their digital infrastructure is extremely important the digital headquarters is just way more important than the physical headquarters and we're not going back and that's why we slack but i would say that we is that your ad i'm thinking about it i'm just going to try it out with you but i think that slack is essential for many companies in their and what we've done with it is not only continue to amplify all the amazing things that it's doing and now they have some great new audio video capabilities and so forth but we're rewriting the front end of salesforce to be entirely slack so at our dreamforce conference last week our sales cloud and our service cloud which is kind of our core they look they're just slack they just look like slack and then our marketing cloud our commerce cloud our platform our analytics that's they just look like slack so it's basically our new it's our new user interface and we're trying to amplify that and for a lot of our core products like service the ability to like swarm a case this is really cool so like you know there's a major customer service issue we're doing the incident management we're doing the isolation correctly we're doing the case management and then with slack now you're just able to swarm that case with your team and solve it together and i think it's very powerful to add collaboration and it's funny because we talked about that in our 2016 interview and it was took us a while to kind of kind of get there because we were kind of bumbling through other social media companies we wrote our own it didn't get as far as we wanted it to there was other ones that we tried to buy that we got pushed away from and then we ended up with this great company before that right what's that you did buy one before that i thought i don't probably i don't know yeah but this is the big one marketing 27 billion it was big evangelize you know how extraordinary it's been as we can now work from home but it's also great for your business it's great for salesforce yes it's great for slack yes can you separate the two in that do you really believe people working from home is optimizing business because there's all sorts of ceos out there who are kind of biting their tongue home right people who are saying this we're right we could not go out of business in the last year but we're certainly not optimistic i have to be very very careful what i say uh no you actually don't i will tell you because if i actually tell you what i think what will happen is within five minutes my phone will be lit up with very close friends of mine telling me that i have to stop saying what i actually believe so it's a very strange situation but uh but it doesn't help anyone for you not to say what you are all right well you know look at number one we're not all going back i i have talked to ceos all over the world all over the world of the largest and most important companies the most any of them really have is about 15 percent even in countries that are stabilized and are done with the pandemic some people are going back but people's consciousness and lives and ability to work has changed we have new skills like i always tease you you're at home you know how to make a whole television series right from home you have your assistant there and on and on and on that is not where how it was two years ago but it is now and it's a powerful thing for you and i think that you're a great example but if you look at our workers in sales and service and marketing and engineering they can work anywhere they can do anywhere they can achieve productivity now do they still need to be culturally onboarded do they need to meet their peers do they need to have relationships do we need to cede trust our physical relationships yes we do so what do we need to do we need to number one embrace we're not all going back and i'm sorry to all my friends but we're not all going back and i will get these phone calls and they will literally i've never heard people is mad at me what kind of people they are ceos of fortune 100 companies yeah salesforce you know we'll do we've given guidance now for over 31 billion in revenue next year it's a large company and these companies are peer companies and they call me and they say you need to stop saying this because i want all my employees back in the office and i'll say they are not coming back and i say there's five things you need to know one they're going to work at home and they are working at home very successfully two they're going to come in the office and that will be great but it might be a different experience three they're gonna work at events like this like we're all working while we're here you know we all got our phones and our laptops out who's not doing email and everything else while we're all talking four and i do like off sites and you know bring my employees around or do work four we also are going to have like the ranch that idea you know the some kind of cultural center it could be a you can do that you make a gazillion dollars no it's anybody can do that and as an example i am an investor in a company called ncx which is doing uh climate assets through ai and and they don't have any physical headquarters but they do get together once a month and they get a big airbnb and they all make it happen by the way another one that we do this is wordpress wordpress does not have he's a great ceo we're a huge investor he has no physical headquarters and he never has and he's a prophet in this area and he gets airbnbs once a month and brings all of his workers together and then five is this testing that is yes send us a couple q-tips that's all we're asking for we know you don't have the virus now everyone can get together safely nobody wants to bring this home to your kids so it's easy one two three i do you know different there's different quality tests choose the one that's most appropriate for you and make it work and that's the one two three four five so like a dream force last week people sent us their q-tips we registered them they showed up they give their lanyard is connected to their q-tips and they can walk in and everybody had a great time we screened out ten infections before the conference out of a thousand people so we had a thousand people we had 10 infections we screened those out they all came out we left with no infections thank god and i think that you know that's what ultimately we want and work and i want to come to the office and have that experience or an event or anywhere and that's my vision for the future work that five levels but with wrapped in a blanket of safety and i've even productized it where i built something called health cloud 2o and it does contact tracing it does vaccine management it does the digital certificate for the testing and everything you need and you can choose how you want to keep your employees safe or your customers safe or how you're going to bring people together safe and i think that it's what we used in new york city by the way to do all the contact tracing or all the vaccine management but now it's like appropriate for a company as well now you have the ceo's pissed at you i have just two more questions okay we've run out of time for a second we're gonna go a little longer you said that salesforce were more than double its revenue from 21.3 million to 50 billion dollars in the next five years yeah rock on okay we just gave guidance that we're going to do 31 i think it is i have i just we did i don't have the card in front of me so please check the actual numbers what we said but we're going to have we did we had two years in the 20 billions over the last this year and last year and the next year is going to be in the 30 billion so the company is really scaled will you be the ceo for that period of time because two years ago are you unhappy with me as the ceo no but you haven't so i thought we were friends you had it you had a co-ceo not long ago i did i did and um he wanted to retire which was literally retired one month before the pandemic i don't know what he knew and it would have been a lot easier if he was with me in the last two years honestly because i'm gonna get another call i wouldn't be opposed to it i think that these are big hard jobs and when you're on the road and you have like a lot of external responsibilities like i do it's nice to have operational excellence which i have i have a phenomenal management team when this pandemic started and we went through that transition i said looks to me like not only we're in a new world but i'm going to need a new model and a new management team and i put those three things together and it's been very powerful and you can see in the last five quarters three of the quarters we had our record operating margin of over 20 percent five out of the last five quarters we had more than 20 growth and we just said that next year we'll do more than 20 operating markets so you're not going to run from it's very powerful you're not going to run for may or san francisco you always ask me this and it's offensive why because just because i talk about social issues and just because i say you know that we should have equality for all it doesn't mean i'm going to be a good politician you know i would be a horrible politician why horrible why why because it's not at all what i do and i'm not politically savvy i don't think i'm good at all some of my friends who i see in the audience they're all shaking their heads up and down going don't encourage them because it's not true i'm i can barely do what i'm doing now it works so listen it worked for donald trump i'm just trying to stay on the ground and like do my best all right i'm here with everybody on the audience or i'm like let's just hang on here and like make it all work before we get to audience questions is there is politics in everything you do now you were very strong around ksu's in ohio true mike pence your friend indiana indiana sorry i forgot where he's indiana were the largest tech employer and we hadn't you know the lgbt community is very important to me you know that what about texas mm-hmm um look we have a parade of politicians governors mayors presidents ministers and they all want to discriminate against our employees and it is like whoa it is the lgbtq community is under attack this race is under attack this gender is under attack or whatever it is and all i want to say to my employees is i have your back that is i will take care of you and if you are under attack the power of salesforce which we have our power whatever it is whatever we can muster up somehow work it will move you we will protect you we will get you health care we'll do whatever you need because we have a big company we'll use it for good if we make any promise to anybody when we say that business is the greatest platform for change what we're really saying is we will do the right thing and over the last 22 years and you track me maybe closer than anybody and you you know we've had a lot of conversations in a lot of unusual venues and forums and programs and i didn't realize this but i told you the story of my grandfather but i'm a native san franciscan i was born on divisadero street when they called me in indianapolis and they go well they're going to discriminate us and we're gay i'm like what how could that be it took me a long time honestly to realize that's even the thing that that could happen and then when they did it i'm like well them we're leaving indiana then yeah man we're we're going to and then we got a phone call and then they negotiated the end of the law and i went whoa i guess we have more capability what are you going to do in time and we do are you going to say them we're going to leave what we said was you know if you're out of restrictive abortion laws yeah look we'll negotiate when we can but ultimately what we'll say is if you're unhappy you're working in salesforce you know you're not but let's say you you know one day maybe you will be you're working in salesforce it would be heaven for you no and then or you're working at time because it's the same policy think about it and then all right but you really you should really think about it never but then what we would say is all right you can move and we'll move you or you need help or you need support or you need something from us we are there for you that's my relationship with all what i call my ohana which is my employees but also my customers and my partners too and i get a lot of emails and there's a lot of help that has to go out to our whole community because we have 15 million trailblazers we have an economy of like 1.9 trillion that we are connected to with our salesforce ecosystem when i think about our world our life who we are i have to think about i have to hold them all in my heart you know and i can't when i get an email or a phone call every day which i do and they're like hey i'm part of the ohana and i need help and this is my issue and i am in another country even then i will say yes that is my responsibility we'll get a plane we'll fly them to wherever they need to go in some cases it's a lot of health care issues they need a real hospital they need to come to ucsf in san francisco where i've put more than 300 million dollars in it's i feel it's my responsibility in san francisco to focus on the public hospitals i also focus on the public schools we put more than 100 million into the public schools and i'll say help this person please if at all possible because i think it is important that we are helping each other this is a moment where if we're not all together if we are not going to get through this moment we have to be together we all have to be together not just in this room but collectively and that's how we're going to get through this difficult moment and this we can do this if we can stay together are you going to be the business leader to solve a major issue for families across the country and it's child care you cannot find a single successful working parent that doesn't have good child care and there's almost no companies in this country that actually own and solve that problem for their employees this is a very important issue for you and for everybody we all have to do it together that's what does that look like i what's that i don't know what that means i'll tell you what it means it means that you can do something i can do something i can talk to my congressman which i do i can talk to my senators i can talk to my mayors i can talk to the president when i have that opportunity and presidents are changing but my values are not changing i'm the same person so you know we all have to do something we cannot all do everything if we think we're going to do everything that's where we'll get lost just get in touch with what is the one thing you can do to make the world better what is the one thing that you're going to do to make the world better and when you come up with that like you just did then you can move forward and that's the powerful thing i'm i'm ready to solve child care in america here we go start here we have quite a few hi mark alex krugloff uh would you be willing to give up to reduce your profit margin or give up specific revenue to stand up for some of the values that you're referring to so for example you mentioned the software that you've built would you give that away for free to other companies to encourage them to do things you mentioned certain companies where you disagree with their values would you not sell sales force to them and give up that revenue yeah it's a very good question and here's how it's answered it's centered structurally with us so when we started our company we put one percent of our equity one percent of our profit and one percent of all of our employees time into a 501 c 3 public charity to address that issue today we've given away more than 500 million dollars in grants we've also run 50 000 nonprofits and ngos for free on our service which is like a billion dollars of service we also have done six million hours of volunteerism which we pay our employees to do good in the world and um we have also encouraged over 10 000 companies to run the pledge one percent program in addition to that in areas where we find that we can have an impact with our power or our revenue or our profitability or our margin to make the world better like in san francisco we have a terrible homeless problem if you come i will show it to you and it was not being correctly addressed structurally or systemically and so we came up with uh with other a group of people called prop c and the top 50 companies in san francisco pay about one percent of their revenue to fund homeless people we led the initiative we funded it it was we had to fight other tech leaders we won't go through the detail but i lost a lot of good friends over this and but it was the right thing today we have at ucsf the benioff homeless housing initiative which are a set of amazing phds and medical doctors who have the plan who advise not only san francisco but other communities who are struggling with homeless but san francisco has the funding to execute it went all the way to the supreme court and we won and so yes i will do those things just as i have for 22 years because it's act that's very much who our model and at the same time we're the fastest growing revenue the fastest growing software company of all time at our revenue level and our margin is at a record level so we can do it all and you can too so and if you want help we do mentoring and we show people but don't disconnect yourself from your community don't think that you're separate from the solution because the reality is in today's world if we're not all part of the solution we're not going to get to where we collectively all want to get to hi i'm yuval brisker ceo of alvire um as a ceo i you know i have a lot of uh issues with digital distraction not my own but my employees uh especially in a time when you know we're so little together in the same place do you have any ideas about how to deal with digital distraction in the workplace on one hand we actually need the devices to work on the other hand you know i'll fly people in from you know around the world and they end up sitting on their phone so it's a it's a you know distinct i think communications collaboration and and um and really connection um problem that is as i always struggle with with my employees do you have any ideas around that i struggle too and i have adhd i'm very you can see i could be very just easily distracted and if i'm on my phone or i have like if i'm on zoom on a computer and i've got email and other things going it is a nightmare for me i'm much better like with these two moderators here in person talking if we were trying to do this digitally i would not be able to really communicate as effectively i would say the last 18 months for that reason have been actually incredibly difficult for me even though we've done a lot of things together and digitally so i think it's a real issue i you know for me things are better in person i'm trying to find new ways to come together that's important and i'm looking for that so but that will be a major issue going forward there's no question intrusive face timing works for you the number one thing that works for me is my mindfulness practice so i do meditate every morning i think it's very important for me to you know come down and i have you know i do meditation i've taught meditation to people who have had issues like that i think that it can be a way that we can deal with these things and uh but it's a tough thing and arc actually i just want to ask one kind of follow-up i mean would you mandate certain you know behaviors in the workplace like people coming together and putting their phone yes side in every thing and not sound like you know i'll give you dictators i'll give you a short story even though she's not gonna let it go too long which is that one of my spiritual teachers someone named tiknot han who's a zen monk too he okay great perfect and so he unfortunately he had a stroke and um when he had a stroke i called him and said do you really have all the attention you need because he was like outside of bordeaux france and my dad had gotten sick there and i knew the hospital systems were not very good and i said kind of want to fly you to ucsf to our stroke rehab center we have this great neurology team run by andy josephson and let's get you so he moved in with me i know for six months i know and 40 monastics came with him and my wife said to me well this is really now the side of your spiritual eccentricity isn't it because you know we're turned our house into an ashram or something that's going on here and i'm like this is a great opportunity to learn how to meditate so i i think that uh you know at that point his monastics would go down to salesforce tower which we were building and then they came back they're like we have to meet with you mark and i'm like okay let's meet so they all sat me down around the table and they're like we need to talk to you about something very important i'm like okay what is it they're like look you're building this building all you we want is one floor it's the silence floor you get off on the silence floor everyone will be silent like it's not going to work for me you know we have all kinds of different people they just throw the phone in the basket when they get off the elevator sorry but i'll give you a meditation room on every floor as my negotiation and on every floor of every salesforce tower worldwide is a meditation room where you go in and tr try to chill out and get your ability to focus back and i think it is important that we integrate mindfulness into the enterprise lifestyle and i think that that's one way to do it that you take some part of your physical space at home or in the office and as part of that to counter the huge amount of mental illness that we saw in our own employees during the pandemic we've done a huge amount of mindfulness training and we published it all publicly on youtube so you'll find a whole series from salesforce on how to stay healthy in the business life because it is so important featuring everybody from people at ucsf to monastics margarita has a plane to catch but very quick and you be short oh very quick sure rick cutter cloud for utilities in 2020 you guys acquired velocity uh vertical market focus do you see that having a good impact on your revenue and next question does that signal the death of on-prem vertical market applications wow are you saying it's the end of software i would say that it's an old joke anyway it's you know yes verticals are extremely important like i said the health cloud that's a vertical app for the health industry but now it's actually a horizontal app all of a sudden it was just patient relationship management for for um every medical center you know in the world now it is patient relationship management because we're all now in the health industry so i think in certain key verticals like health health financial services and a public sector and other key areas we've done a great job of building out these verticals and it will be a critical part of the future of salesforce thank you for the question all right we're going to get going mark all right thank you you are the best coach thank you that's true you

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Length: 51min 10sec (3070 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021