[News Inside] A Remarkable Beginning... Becoming an Innovator in Silicon Valley

Pioneer in Cloud Computing Industry
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce

▲Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce

[Asia Economy Reporter Kwon Jae-hee] Founded a gaming company at age 15. A promising prodigy recognized by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Oracle founder Larry Ellison. An innovator named by global media such as Forbes and Fortune.

This is the story of Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce.

Salesforce, a business-to-business (B2B) company, is not well known to the general public but holds a dominant position in the cloud computing industry.

Cloud computing services are broadly divided into Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which rents infrastructure, and Software as a Service (SaaS), which rents software. While Amazon Web Services (AWS), led by Jeff Bezos, is a representative player in IaaS, Salesforce, led by Marc Benioff, is the undisputed number one in SaaS.

According to Gartner, Salesforce holds a commanding lead in the global CRM market with a 19.5% market share (as of 2018), more than double that of the second-place SAP (8.3%).

Founded in 1999, Salesforce provides customer relationship management (CRM) software for enterprises via the internet. Previously, companies had to spend large sums to purchase and install enterprise software for customer management and other functions. They also had to maintain experts in-house for maintenance and employee training, which was a significant burden in terms of cost and time. However, Salesforce changed this industry paradigm, which had no alternatives and was reluctantly accepted.

With Salesforce, companies only need to store their data on the Salesforce cloud without installing any software. As long as there is internet access, work can be done anytime and anywhere, and Salesforce handles service maintenance online. The pay-as-you-go model allows companies to significantly reduce costs.

Benioff is called a 'pioneer' for providing cloud services seven years before Bezos and introducing the concept of cloud computing to the software industry.

His success story began even before founding Salesforce. Known as an 'all-around perfect child,' he was a promising prodigy.

At just 15, he founded a gaming company and used the profits to pay for college tuition. During college, he interned at Apple and formed a connection with then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

After graduating, he joined the global software company Oracle, where his exceptional skills were recognized. In his first year at Oracle, he was named 'Rookie of the Year,' and by age 26, just three years after joining, he became the youngest vice president of marketing. He was also known as one of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's most favored employees.

After working at Oracle for 13 years, he suddenly took a sabbatical when he faced the fundamental question, "Why do I live?" This later became the catalyst for founding Salesforce.

During his leave, he traveled to India and met Mata Amritanandamayi, known as the "Hugging Saint," who advised him, "Don't forget to do something for others as you succeed and make money." Benioff later said that this advice was the turning point that led to the creation of Salesforce.

Salesforce's approach, which shook a market that ignored customer inconvenience despite the essential nature of the software, originated here. He emphasized community service as a core value when building Salesforce.

He lives by the motto, "The best platform to change the world is business," and continues activities that have a positive global impact beyond providing good services and products. The "1-1-1 model" of social philanthropy popular in Silicon Valley was created by him. This model dedicates 1% of company equity, 1% of product, and 1% of employees' time to volunteer activities. In 2000, a year after founding Salesforce, he and his wife Lyn Benioff established the charitable organization Salesforce.com Foundation to engage in formal philanthropy. The foundation has donated large sums in various fields, notably $250 million (about 290 billion KRW) to the University of California, San Francisco, where Salesforce's headquarters are located, to establish the Benioff Children's Hospital. Last year, it also donated $30 million (about 3.5 billion KRW) to address homelessness, the largest private donation ever made for this cause.

Meanwhile, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Marc Benioff ranks 209th among the world's wealthiest, with assets totaling $9.66 billion (about 10.67 trillion KRW). He earned $2.59 billion just this year alone.