EP #10 The Multi-Billion Dollar Purpose Behind Salesforce w/ Marc Benioff

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Peter Diamandis?

  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? Yeah. 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.

• 0:30Peter Diamandis?

  And a massive transformative 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.

• 0:42Peter Diamandis?

  It's a pleasure to share a conversation I had with Marc 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 times, 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.

• 1:27Peter Diamandis?

  He's funding research across the board on health and biotech. Incredible entrepreneur, an incredible CEO. Please join me for this masterclass on philanthropy and leadership with Marc Benioff. By the way, this conversation took place at Abundance 360, my year-long executive summit. If you're interested in learning more, go to a360.com. Aloha, Mark.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  How are you Peter?

• 1:57Peter Diamandis?

  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 the scope of your philanthropy. We had yesterday a team from the Gladstone and I know that you were principally funded Yamanaka's work on IPS cells. I'm curious how that came about.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  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 moon shots 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 are three things we were going to do. One, we're going to create a new technology

• 3:15Speaker 01

  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

• 4:00Speaker 01

  created something called Salesforce.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Uh, org, which has become a, uh, very substantial nonprofit and NGO and probably one of the most exciting things is that it's done five million hours of volunteerism, giving away hundreds of millions of dollars in grants on its own and runs fifty thousand nonprofits and NGOs for free on our, our service. And those three ideas really created Salesforce. Amazing. And, uh, 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. That, this is a really powerful thought for business in that we would focus

• 4:45Speaker 01

  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 twenty billion dollars 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 those decisions upfront. 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,

• 5:29Speaker 01

  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, you know, uh, energy entrepreneurs. Look at the automobile entrepreneurs. So it's different, uh, 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.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  But what is important about it? Is it about trust? 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.

• 6:56Peter Diamandis?

  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 that target. And I am curious about how much of 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?

• 7:24Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Well, this is an opportunity of 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 gonna look back, go, this is what I really wanted. So, do you want to be the richest person on the world?

• 8:52Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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 gonna get, you're gonna have that emotional fitness, the energy, the power, all these things that you're talking about, you're dancing around on the stage, you know, great. And then, but what are you focusing on?

• 9:37Speaker 01

  What are you focusing on? Yeah. 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 of others? Do they have the integrity? You know, do they, do they have the ability to work with me? Do they say what they're gonna do? Trust. Where is trust in the hierarchy? For me, it's up at the top, not for everybody. So, I've talked 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?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Different outside periodicals, or national engineering organizations, or whatever it is. Innovation is extremely important to us. But, you know, like for us, it's a dance. What's more important, customer success or innovation? A lot of people in our company go, we're a tech company. We have to have innovation, has to be first. But I will like push back on 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, you know, 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,

• 11:52Speaker 01

  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 tenants, that you're gonna 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 gonna get into, whoa, how am I gonna create all these things?

• 12:36Speaker 01

  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 kinda 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 gonna do to get trust? Tell me what they are, you know? You're gonna do what? What, what action are you gonna take? Are you gonna build ethical guidelines for your company? Are you gonna build information security?

• 13:19Speaker 01

  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 gonna cost? The reason why that's important is, this is gonna become your operating budget as well, which is a critical part for any entrepreneur. How are you gonna get customer success? You gonna hire some salespeople? Are you gonna hire some customer success managers? Are you gonna operationalize customer success in some powerful way? How much are those things gonna cost you? And three, innovation? You gonna hire some engineers? You gonna hire some product managers? You gonna build some products? What's that gonna cost you? And equality? Okay, you gonna pay men and women the same, for the same work?

• 14:01Speaker 01

  You're gonna, you're gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna come up. These are your obstacles. These are the problems where you're gonna call people, 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.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  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, 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 can 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?

• 15:22Peter Diamandis?

  Hey, thanks for listening to Moon Shots 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/peter. Levels will give you an extra two months of membership. It's something that is critical for the future of your longevity.

• 16:06Peter Diamandis?

  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,

• 16:51Peter Diamandis?

  because if you say you can't, then you're not. There are, you know, four or five that I want to at least touch on. You decide what you want to talk about. The 1 trillion trees, homelessness, ocean plastics, biodiversity. Those are four that I've heard you speak to. Can you, which one do you want to jump into? What are you excited about making a dent in?

• 17:14Speaker 01

  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...

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Uh, 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 uh, the homeless organizations' issues. Yeah. 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?

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Well, the public schools. You know, I've adopted a public school, I've adopted a school district, I, you know, everyone should be adopting a public school. Who are the key stakeholders in your community that you're gonna adopt as an entrepreneur? Now, well, I'm walking, you know, we're the largest employer in San Francisco. So, when I'm walking to our headquarters building, you know, 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?

• 18:55Speaker 01

  You know, are you the other or are 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 gotta do something. So, you know, we can form, we can fund the local NGOs that are 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,

• 19:40Speaker 01

  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?

• 20:23Speaker 01

  Look, at the end of the day, the answer to homelessness is very simple. At 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.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  In a lot of cases, you need the ability to directly address serious social issues with taxes. And in this case, these homeless services needed to scale. So we 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, all, this has 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.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  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?

• 22:03Speaker 01

  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?

• 22:12Peter Diamandis?

  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?

• 22:31Speaker 01

  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, 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?

• 23:13Speaker 01

  I can't tell you the thousands and thousands of time that I do that exercise. And now I'm getting older, you know, I'm 56, I'm not 36. When I started my company, I was 34. You know, I didn't graduate when I was caught, graduated college when I was 21. You know, my values, you know, and, and how I look at the world, it changes as I get older, of course. And now it's, still works. I write down, what do I want? And then I just write down, what is the number one word that is most, you know, clear to me and 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, in Switzerland.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  And we're talking about some amazing vision that he has for biodiversity. He's already published some amazing research on something called 1 trillion trees. He's just an incredible person. And when I'm on the phone with them, 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 listed 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.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  So you can say, oh, this is now I understand this person or this business or this entrepreneur. You know, we have a lot of, 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's 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, you know, either do business with them or, you know, invest in them.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Of course, going to the moon. But what is most important about it? What are the principles that are guiding us there?

• 26:11Peter Diamandis?

  Let's jump into the environment because I, it's, you're, 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, the community about that?

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Well, I just was, uh, had a, you know, one of my mentors is, uh, I was just on a conference with Al Gore, who's 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. Um, and, you know, for someone like me, I'm, 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 should I, 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

• 27:05Speaker 01

  net zero, because clearly it has to, 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 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, you know? How do you go net zero? But I think for each entrepreneur, you know, raise your hand. Are you net zero

• 27:50Speaker 01

  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 to, 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...

• 28:32Speaker 01

  You start looking at carbon, you know, and what is the carbon math? And this is the complicated part, which is, you know, 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 in your screen in the ocean. The ocean is sequestering more carbon than it should. 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 gonna have a carbon capture technology contest for a hundred million dollars, his moonshot. I don't know if he's doing it with you or some other organization.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  You know, the thing is, is that that moonshot, that idea of carbon capture, you pride, if you follow the tweet stream, some folks came in and say, oh, I got the invention here, the tree.

• 29:27Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  The tree is, there's other ideas, but that's one.

• 29:34Peter Diamandis?

  So by the way, just to the numbers, I think 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.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  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, planting, it has to be, it could be farm, it could be, by the way, it could be old growth forests. It can be regenerative farmlands. These things all add up. But the reality is, we need to get back to what is essentially 1 trillion more trees. We have 3 trillions now. We have lost half the trees on the planet. We've gone from 6 trillion to 3 trillion. And as we've burned those trees or they're gone.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  That, 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 sci- I'm not a climate scientist, so I'm not the right person to do this lecture. And 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. You 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.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  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 are, there are 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.

• 32:03Peter Diamandis?

  Mark, are you willing to go to some Q and A with the community now?

• 32:08Speaker 01

  Sure. And I also just want to say, Benny Off-Ocean Initiative, we're running, you know, 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 get, to address ocean plastics, for example.

• 32:24Peter Diamandis?

  Nice. And thank you for the work you're doing. Hey, everybody. I hope you're enjoying this episode. Let me tell you about something I've been doing for years. Every quarter or so, having a phlebomus 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 pleboponomist to my home to measure forty 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

• 33:04Peter Diamandis?

  interested, go to mylifeworst.com/peter to learn more. Let's get back to the episode. Let's go to Sean Vaez for the first question. Sean?

• 33:14Speaker 02

  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

• 33:59Speaker 02

  and being able to outspend their local communities, or even there was a one employee that worked at both Google and Facebook remotely and was busted. So, what do you make of that?

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Well, I think, you know, we're definitely in a new world, which we call the cloud.

• 34:19Peter Diamandis?

  That's a catchy term.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  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, 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, you know, 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?

• 35:02Speaker 01

  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. We, 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/subscribe. It's awesome.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Get my sales pitch in there because we're trying to, the importance of the free press. And they said, you know, Mark, you know, 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 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?

• 36:17Speaker 01

  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 gonna have to call, 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

• 36:56Speaker 01

  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 congruency of your values in the cloud. You can still

• 37:41Speaker 01

  align your methods in the cloud. And when you do that, all those same principles come together and you're gonna 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 gonna 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're a small little city, seven miles square. It's a finite space.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  It's a tidy little space in the, you know, 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 re-normalize 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's 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 that's very popular right now, the cloud.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  Thank you. Thank you, Sean. Let's go next to Jeffrey Branch. Jeffrey? Congratulations on Proposition C. You raised 300 million now through, through it. How do you stay involved and get government to execute?

• 39:17Peter Diamandis?

  Wow, interesting.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  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 a 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 gonna get this, and the mayor can't decide," and this kind of...

• 40:03Speaker 01

  The reality is, it's a collaboration. And then I did something else. I gave 35 million dollars to University of California, San Francisco, to create the Benioff Homeless List Initiative. And 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 Margot Cuswell. 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.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Now we have the resource, we have the intellectual capability, let's get it done.

• 40:55Peter Diamandis?

  Fantastic. Thank you. Let's go next to Pierre Lobes.

• 40:59Speaker 04

  Just one question. Do you take a different leadership profile between leading your company and advancing your nonprofit agenda? And if yes, how do you think this profile differs?

• 41:12Speaker 01

  It's a great question, you know, and it's kind of related to the last question about advocacy and, uh, and, uh, you know, we, you know, we, we did get a call from the state of Indiana, Mike Pence, who was just retired as vice president, was the governor at the time. And he had signed a law that basically discriminate, discriminated against the LGBTQ community and, and many of our employees are 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

• 41:57Speaker 01

  things should get resolved through communication and collaboration.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  I am not two people. I am not Marc Benioff, the philanthropist over here, and Marc 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."

• 42:46Speaker 01

  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 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 one self. So for me, I don't have a nonprofit agenda. My whole life is the same. It's one integrated purpose.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  And if my business isn't helping me to achieve my goals, all my goals, then what's the point? Ninety-nine percent 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 ninety-nine percent making money and then over here, when I get one hour a week, I'm gonna, 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.

• 44:04Peter Diamandis?

  That's beautiful. Great question, Pierre. Thank you so much. Let's go to Joe Honan next. Joe.

• 44:08Speaker 05

  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 fifty-four thousand employees and twenty-one billion dollars of revenue, do you feel a need to reinvent Salesforce in a post-COVID world? And, you know, with, 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?

• 44:50Speaker 01

  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 twenty-one 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? You know, how are we gonna get it? And then I'm like, and I'm doing, 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?

• 45:34Speaker 01

  And then I start writing, writing, writing, writing, and I have that V2M 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, 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 gonna do the same thing. It's a different world, I need a new plan.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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 gonna get everyone in California vaccinated? How are we gonna resolve all the cases? How are we gonna contact trace? How are we going to, you know, do everything necessary to resolve the pandemic? So, 1, 2, 3, new plan, completely new plan.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  As part of that plan, I actually did an acquisition, uh, 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-from-home company.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  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, because 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

• 48:06Speaker 01

  headquarters is this thing called the cloud. That means we're in a new cloud. It's not Cloud 1. When I started my company, it was Cloud 1, which was Amazon and tabs. And it was a basic UI on my computer. Then it was Cloud 2, it was mobile and social and these incredible new capabilities. We're into Cloud 3 now. Cloud 3 is the new work from home world. You know, Cloud 3 is the customers expect everything from me world. And Cloud 3 is also, we're in a stakeholder based world, where our communities expect more from us as CEOs than any ever before. So we better be able to step up, you know, as CEOs, as leaders, as entrepreneurs, and get back, not just create products and sell products,

• 48:51Speaker 01

  but give back as well. And so that's why we really said, okay, we're gonna, we're going for it. We're gonna buy, we're gonna buy Slack, sorry about that. We're gonna buy Slack, and we're gonna make this happen.

• 49:03Peter Diamandis?

  We're gonna go next to Ross Thornley, and then to George Banderian. Ross, and thank you very much for that question, Joe. Hi, Mark. Hi, Peter. Thanks.

• 49:13Speaker 06

  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.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  You're right, you know, people need to be reskilled, retrained, they have to be able to really pivot and shift and move into new positions. They need to be able to quickly skill themselves in 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 reskilling 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.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  And as part of that, we took it one step further 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, our third of our employees were reporting mental health issues, including me. So I'm like, whoa, how am I going to make this happen? Where, 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.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  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. Whoa, 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

• 51:40Peter Diamandis?

  for free.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Very important going forward.

• 51:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yep. Amazing. Thank you very, thank you very much, Ross. Next go to George Mandarian.

• 51:49Speaker 07

  Hey, Mark. This is great. So far, the last two questions I want to just kind of double click off of. So emerging VC here in LA 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 you know, I would love to get your perspective on, you know, what would you advise me to look at as far as investing?

• 52:19Speaker 01

  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, and it's become a far bigger thing that 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 Gerard at Upstart, Brian Chesky at Airbnb, about to see some very exciting new entrepreneurs, very exciting entrepreneur in New York, who's starting an amazing company

• 53:01Speaker 01

  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 are at the beginning of a digital health revolution, there is no question. Another one, you know, Peter 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

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Labs or Astra. I think space is an exciting category, I think that 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. 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.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  So, those are really my big three categories that I'm, I am most, most excited about right now.

• 54:33Peter Diamandis?

  Wonderful. Thank you, George. Let's go to David Chu, one of our Platinum 2020 members.

• 54:38Speaker 08

  We want to thank you for all your visionary philanthropy over the years. You mentioned San Francisco as a small city, it turns out I was, my office was at 62 First Street, catty corner 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 are also well-known for twisting the arms of a lot of the wealthy folks and forcing them to contribute. 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?

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Well, Shinya Yamanaka is obviously one of the great, you know, visionary scientists of our time, winner of the Nobel Prize, he is half-based at UCSF in San Francisco. Half based in Kyoto University Kyoto probably being you know 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 stem cells turn them into uh 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 uh demacular demacular generation so. We're not that's he's a visionary beyond visionaries and he's like focusing on really exposing the mechanisms

• 55:58Speaker 01

  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. You better go take probiotics. Which probiotics? Which ones actually work? Which? How do I do that? How do I reboot my biome? What is a synthetic biome?

• 56:39Speaker 01

  Basic research. I just funded some basic research at UCSF in 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 I'm not your best person to talk to because I'm much more thinking about the really the beginning of it all.

• 56:59Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you, David. Appreciate that. Mark, if I can squeeze one last question in from Judy Fairburn. Judy.

• 57:06Speaker 09

  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. Um, it's direct. So I'm a co-CEO of a purpose driven business, the fifty one and women led capital investing in diverse innovative startups. So my question to you is in this time, this terrible chat, but opportunistic time. How are you energizing and double dies down double down on the women in your organization to really make a difference, given all they have on their plate?

• 57:33Speaker 01

  It's a great question. And I'll tell you that this is something that's been, you know, a major focus in our company now for several years. And when we think about um. Women in our company, there's probably a number of critical issues. Uh, one of course is opportunity and providing equal opportunity. Um, 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. It, this is another level of complexity where, you know, we've tried to be as flexible as we can on, uh, work hours and times and teams.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  And, you know, we're still, I think, at the beginning of understanding, how do we balance all of this together? And I'll give you, 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 4:00 PM. 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.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  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. Do I know, you know, did I hear about equal opportunity? Maybe that was the bumbling beginning of that in the eighties, 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, and that, and encouraging, uh, women venture capitalists to make sure that we have impact funds set up specifically to address and impact women.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  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. Very, that's very exciting, you know, from my, my standpoint.

• 1:00:00Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you so much Judy for that great question. Mark, grateful for your time. I know you have a hard 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.