Speaker 1: I'm Emily Chek and this is the podcast version of
Speaker 1: the Circuit my show on Bloomberg Originals. There's one building
Speaker 1: that rises above the rest of the San Francisco skyline.
Speaker 1: It's home to a software giant whose story begins somewhere
Speaker 1: more tropical.
Speaker 2: I heard something.
Speaker 1: Did you really come up with the idea for Salesforce
Speaker 1: while you were swimming with dolphins? And?
Speaker 3: Fright? Did I did I do a great dolphin imitation?
Speaker 3: Did you know that? Can you?
Speaker 2: How do they respond?
Speaker 1: This is Mark Benioff, CEO and founder of Salesforce, the
Speaker 1: world's number one customer relationship management or CRM software provider.
Speaker 1: They sell cloud based business tools for sales, marketing, e commerce,
Speaker 1: all that good stuff. It might sound niche, but their
Speaker 1: clients include the likes of Apple, Boeing, Amazon, and more
Speaker 1: than one hundred and fifty thousand companies. Benioff has been
Speaker 1: called a master networker, a force of nature, mister disruptor,
Speaker 1: and the fresh of software. Let's just say subtlety isn't
Speaker 1: really his thing. At its core, this is a story
Speaker 1: all about software. A self taught teenage programmer turned visionary
Speaker 1: tech billionaire, and believe it or not, it all starts
Speaker 1: with a customer service job. In nineteen eighty six, you
Speaker 1: could find Benioff answering customer calls at a not so
Speaker 1: little future competitor called Oracle, under the wing of longtime
Speaker 1: CEO Larry Ellison. Benioff's snack for sales took him straight
Speaker 1: to the top. Today, Benioff is all in on the
Speaker 1: AI boom with a new product, AI Agents, a digital
Speaker 1: workforce to autonomously complete tasks. He isn't the only one
Speaker 1: betting big on agentic AI, but true to form, he's
Speaker 1: all in.
Speaker 2: Good to fore you.
Speaker 1: Thanks for having us here. We are back in the
Speaker 1: Ohanna room.
Speaker 2: Welcome back, Thank you, Ohanna.
Speaker 3: I'm so happy to have you. I know you know
Speaker 3: what jwhana means great? How do you know that it means?
Speaker 3: How do you know what ohana means?
Speaker 2: I'm from Hawaii.
Speaker 3: You're Hawaii? Are you a native Hawaiian?
Speaker 2: I'm a Kamma.
Speaker 3: Were you born in Hawaiian?
Speaker 2: I was born in Hawaii, born and raised. And you
Speaker 2: love Hawaii?
Speaker 3: I love Hawaii too.
Speaker 1: But next time, if we do this, I want my
Speaker 1: ties on the Big Island.
Speaker 3: Let's do it.
Speaker 2: Deal.
Speaker 3: Come over.
Speaker 1: I've interviewed you many times from your false cloud days,
Speaker 1: many many dream forces. But I want to go back
Speaker 1: a bit to young Mark growing up in San Francisco.
Speaker 3: Yes, Young Mark, right.
Speaker 1: So, your parents ran department stores. You grew up your
Speaker 1: first job was cleaning.
Speaker 3: Jewelry Beniof's department store.
Speaker 2: Benioff's department stores. Who was Mark Benioff before Mark Benioff?
Speaker 3: Do I even exist? Is this an existential thing? Should
Speaker 3: I bring in some spiritual.
Speaker 1: But seriously, tell me about you as a kid.
Speaker 3: I was born right there, yeah, literally about six blocks
Speaker 3: away at Mount Zion Hospital, UCSF, now right onto Visadero Street,
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty four, sixty years ago, and I grew up
Speaker 3: right there for two years. Then I moved right there
Speaker 3: for a while, and then I went to college right
Speaker 3: down there. So this is your hood and this is
Speaker 3: where I, Yeah, I feel very comfortable here.
Speaker 1: You basically invented the SaaS industry software as a service
Speaker 1: and made it possible for everything from Netflix to Spotify
Speaker 1: to businesses at Google and Microsoft.
Speaker 2: What sparked the entrepreneur in you?
Speaker 3: I don't know what sparked the entrepreneur because certainly my
Speaker 3: family was entrepreneurial in the Benioff Department stores. On the
Speaker 3: other side of my family. My grandfather was a supervisor
Speaker 3: and worked right there in City Hall, and he also
Speaker 3: was an attorney at six ninety Market Street right there,
Speaker 3: and we used to walk right back and forth there,
Speaker 3: and he was doing civic leadership, and my father was
Speaker 3: a retailer selling clothing, so it was two different worlds.
Speaker 3: And then what happened was I was just fifteen years old.
Speaker 3: I was cleaning jewelry cases not so far away from here,
Speaker 3: in a jewelry store, doing a lot of very hard work,
Speaker 3: like cleaning the floors. I remembered really well polishing the cases.
Speaker 3: And I walked across the street to a radio shack store,
Speaker 3: which doesn't really exist anymore, and I found a computer,
Speaker 3: and in that computer I became fascinated as a fifteen
Speaker 3: year old, and I taught myself how to program, and
Speaker 3: from then I bought other computers kind of based on
Speaker 3: this income from this jewelry store. And my grandmother would
Speaker 3: say to me, listen, I'll match you, and which was
Speaker 3: very exciting. Yeah, the computer was four nine oh of dollars,
Speaker 3: so I made two hundred and fifty dollars. She matched
Speaker 3: two hundred and fifty dollars I bought the computer. I
Speaker 3: sold my first piece of software when I was about fifteen,
Speaker 3: called how to Juggle, to a little software reseller in
Speaker 3: Santa Barbara, and then I leveraged that into an Apple
Speaker 3: Too computer. I didn't like that. I sold that to
Speaker 3: a friend of mine who's now our chief technology off
Speaker 3: are here, who I've worked with for forty five years,
Speaker 3: and that was that.
Speaker 2: The rest is history. You founded the company now twenty
Speaker 2: five years ago.
Speaker 1: So you've seen the rise of mobile and social and
Speaker 1: the cloud and now AI.
Speaker 2: How has the CEO job changed for you?
Speaker 3: Well, the CEO chop is really changing fast because it
Speaker 3: used to be I felt very alone at the top.
Speaker 3: But now like I just finished writing the business plan
Speaker 3: for this year, and I always do that with someone else.
Speaker 3: I take one of our executives, And for the last
Speaker 3: three years, I've also found a new partner in AI,
Speaker 3: and I bring AI in and I have an AI partner.
Speaker 3: So I have an AI partner, I have a human partner,
Speaker 3: and it's the three of us who are writing the
Speaker 3: plan together, so it's a little less lonely at the top.
Speaker 1: You said you'll have a billion agents on salesforce before
Speaker 1: the end of the year.
Speaker 2: Yes, are you on track? What are they doing? I mean,
Speaker 2: will they be doing?
Speaker 3: Remarkably on track because we now have about five thousand
Speaker 3: customers deploying this and it's amazing how many agents we
Speaker 3: see getting spawned every year. We're tracking very closely how
Speaker 3: these conversations are growing, so week by week we're looking
Speaker 3: at how are the conversations growing, and it's amazing. So
Speaker 3: I think it's going to be incredible. I mean, by far,
Speaker 3: it's the fastest growing, most exciting thing we've ever done.
Speaker 1: You've thrown around this term AI nirvana.
Speaker 2: What is that? When do we get there? And how
Speaker 2: do we know? What won't feel like?
Speaker 1: Hell?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, nobody exactly knows what's going to happen
Speaker 3: when we get to this next level of AI. I
Speaker 3: can tell you in the current level of AI, between
Speaker 3: this combination of large language models and these new reasoning
Speaker 3: models and where we are, we're able to provide this
Speaker 3: kind of digital labor revolution. It's an opportunity for our
Speaker 3: customers to improve productivity without hiring more employees, and to
Speaker 3: let them redeploy existing employees into functions that need more attention,
Speaker 3: more growth. I'm doing it myself. It's amazing, and that's
Speaker 3: really important because it's hard to hire right now, isn't
Speaker 3: as many people available. Unemployment is remarkably low. Interesting, so
Speaker 3: you know, we have a point where we're going to
Speaker 3: be able to add in digital labor in addition to
Speaker 3: physical labor, so productivity itself will improve.
Speaker 1: You bought the name Einstein, he's the face of your AI,
Speaker 1: but how smart are these agents really?
Speaker 3: Ten years ago we had the vision that AI would
Speaker 3: surround us, and we bought that Einstein name, or really
Speaker 3: licensed it. You know, you can't really buy his name,
Speaker 3: but we licensed it for artificial intelligence because we really
Speaker 3: believed that this is where we were going to end up,
Speaker 3: in this incredible place, which is why this week we'll
Speaker 3: probably do about a trillion Einstein transactions for all of
Speaker 3: our customers around the world just this week. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: now it's evolving into agent force, this idea that it's
Speaker 3: these agents, these digital laborers, digital employees who are out
Speaker 3: there doing this work, servicing the customer, selling the customer,
Speaker 3: marketing to the customer, partnering with me to help run
Speaker 3: the company, partnering with me to do the analytics partnering
Speaker 3: with me to help do the marketing, the branding. So
Speaker 3: that's exciting.
Speaker 1: So what do you think Einstein would think? Would Einstein
Speaker 1: be proud?
Speaker 3: I think Einstein would be using AI in his work,
Speaker 3: There's no question. You know, he could have his insights,
Speaker 3: his capabilities and then probably would validate them using AI.
Speaker 3: Yesterday I was with a Nobel Prize laureate who has
Speaker 3: received this incredible Nobel Prize for his work in proteomics,
Speaker 3: and then he's envisioning now how he's designing new drugs
Speaker 3: using AI. I mean that is a leap that we
Speaker 3: didn't think any of us a lot that we would
Speaker 3: get there as quickly as we are, and now we
Speaker 3: can see that scientists have all types. So yes, Einstein
Speaker 3: or whoever is going to have the ability to go faster,
Speaker 3: be more productive. Because of this capability, you're just able
Speaker 3: to do more.
Speaker 2: How secure is all this?
Speaker 1: I mean there's malicious code, there's hallucinations.
Speaker 2: What are the risks for businesses?
Speaker 3: Well, those are two different things. I think security and
Speaker 3: hallucinations are just slightly different. So security, there's no finish line.
Speaker 3: We're in a world of cryptography and changes to cryptography
Speaker 3: and the security issues, and you can never have extreme
Speaker 3: confidence on security, you have to be completely paranoid. Hallucinations
Speaker 3: is a different story. That is because of the nature
Speaker 3: of the models that we're using right now. They're called
Speaker 3: large language models, combined with these reasoning models, these two
Speaker 3: things together and kind of the current state of the
Speaker 3: art of AI is not one hundred percent accurate. And
Speaker 3: you know that because anyone who's used any of these things,
Speaker 3: so wait a minute, that's not well, like everybody probably
Speaker 3: puts their name in and goes, wait, that's not me,
Speaker 3: or that's not my exact bio.
Speaker 2: Doesn't it get messier.
Speaker 3: It could get a lot more accurate. It could get
Speaker 3: more accurate because the models themselves are stacking their intelligence,
Speaker 3: so hopefully they're honing what the truth is, and that's
Speaker 3: the hope. Right now, it's not one hundred percent accurate.
Speaker 3: In our own work. We're doing hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 3: conversations just ourselves and our company with our customers, and
Speaker 3: we have about ninety three percent accuracy. Even for a
Speaker 3: large brand or a large company that we work with,
Speaker 3: like Disney, it's about ninety three percent. It's not one
Speaker 3: hundred percent.
Speaker 1: Ninety three percent though, that's not good enough, is it.
Speaker 3: It's pretty good. You're able to do a lot, but
Speaker 3: you have to be realistic that we're not at one hundred.
Speaker 3: You'll never see me saying that we're at one hundred percent.
Speaker 3: But I think for a lot of the other vendors
Speaker 3: maybe they're at much lower levels because they don't have
Speaker 3: as much data and metadata and they're not able to
Speaker 3: kind of put as much information into the model to
Speaker 3: get to a higher level of accuracy.
Speaker 1: You started out as a coder at Apple in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty four. Thank you were an intern in the Mac division.
Speaker 3: Well, hey, you've done your homework.
Speaker 1: I have done my homework here in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: though you've said you won't hire any more coders, Well.
Speaker 3: You're right. When I was fifteen, I was writing that
Speaker 3: software on that Tierrasad. Then it became an Apple too,
Speaker 3: and become an Atarian Hinder, Then it became a Commodore
Speaker 3: sixty four, then it turned into a Macintosh, and I
Speaker 3: wrote like ten, twelve, fifteen different pieces of software that
Speaker 3: I ended up selling commercially. And I was just a kid.
Speaker 3: I didn't know what I was doing, and I was
Speaker 3: self trained. I didn't really have any formal computer science education.
Speaker 3: It was cool to work at Apple in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 2: I was a sophomore in college, such an iconic time.
Speaker 3: Steve Jobs was walking around, but all of the original
Speaker 3: players and the Mac team were there. I mean, it
Speaker 3: was an imprint in my subconscious of what that cool
Speaker 3: company was and who that cool leader was. And I'll
Speaker 3: never forget that. I am so deeply grateful that I
Speaker 3: had that experience. I'm deeply grateful to Steve Jobs. He
Speaker 3: had a huge impact on my life. He had a
Speaker 3: huge impact on Salesforce. When I started Salesforce, he would
Speaker 3: call me all the time and give me advice. And
Speaker 3: I actually wish I had taken more of his advice.
Speaker 3: I mean a lot of the things he was saying
Speaker 3: I did not understand, but he was right.
Speaker 1: So you said you won't hire anyway MOK coders at Salesforce,
Speaker 1: and you've said today's CEOs will be the last to
Speaker 1: manage all human workforces.
Speaker 2: What does this mean for businesses?
Speaker 3: Well, I just had a meeting with my head of
Speaker 3: engineering and we're looking at productivity levels thirty to fifty
Speaker 3: percent this year, and key functions like engineering, coding, support.
Speaker 1: You're saying service AI is doing thirty to fifty percent
Speaker 1: of the work.
Speaker 3: AI is doing thirty to fifty percent of the work
Speaker 3: at Salesforce now, and I think that that will continue.
Speaker 3: I think that all of us have to get our
Speaker 3: head around this idea that AI can do things that
Speaker 3: before we were doing and we can move on to
Speaker 3: do higher value work.
Speaker 1: So Salesforce is seventy five thousand employees now, is it
Speaker 1: half that in the future.
Speaker 3: I'm not willing to make a projection exactly like that.
Speaker 3: I do think probably will rebalance. There's no question that
Speaker 3: we have this opportunity to take advantage of the technology
Speaker 3: to get to a new place, and I think every
Speaker 3: company is going to be able to do that. Look
Speaker 3: at our own support. Just four months in we have
Speaker 3: help dot Salesforce dot com, which is our agent force
Speaker 3: doing our support. We have nine thousand human support engineers.
Speaker 3: They're still involved, they're still doing their work, but they're
Speaker 3: just starting to do different kinds of work. Because we've
Speaker 3: already done more than five hundred thousand conversations soon a
Speaker 3: million through agent force. That's just for us, and then
Speaker 3: when you extrapolate that with all the agents, you know,
Speaker 3: the billion agent dream. That's a big idea that all
Speaker 3: these companies can do all these incredible things. Like I
Speaker 3: was saying this idea of Disney or Lenar, the nation's
Speaker 3: largest home builder, one of them, They're able to do
Speaker 3: all their sales and service and support with agents. Or
Speaker 3: you take another exciting customer, there's like so many of
Speaker 3: them open table Like I'm going to make am going
Speaker 3: to go to an open table and make a reservation
Speaker 3: for Saturday night. I do all the time. And this
Speaker 3: week we've been working with their employees now for six
Speaker 3: months with agent Force now it runs on the concer
Speaker 3: side as well. So that is just very exciting that
Speaker 3: we're able to impact our customers in a positive way,
Speaker 3: making them more productive and helping to change that balance
Speaker 3: of work.
Speaker 1: So Salesforce is marketing it's AI tools on their ability
Speaker 1: to replace human labor. Do you have any ethical qualms
Speaker 1: about that?
Speaker 3: Well, it's a digital labor revolution. That is, we're probably
Speaker 3: looking at three to twelve trillion dollars of digital labor
Speaker 3: getting deployed, and that digital labor is going to be
Speaker 3: everything from AI agents to robots. We've seen all the
Speaker 3: kind of robots that are coming We've seen the movies
Speaker 3: for a long time. Right now we're seeing it deployed.
Speaker 3: And I think it's really just technologies marching forward. It's
Speaker 3: getting lower costs, it's getting easier to use. And I
Speaker 3: do think to your point, CEOs have to make sure
Speaker 3: their values are in the right place and that values
Speaker 3: bring value. But we're becoming more automated.
Speaker 1: Could an agent replace you one day?
Speaker 3: I hope so you could already say to my point,
Speaker 3: which is that some of my job is already be
Speaker 3: done by AI. I mean, I'll be honest with you.
Speaker 3: I'll write my plan, my business plan, and then I'll
Speaker 3: say to the agent. Now, I mean, I've been doing
Speaker 3: this now for almost three years. Hey, great it What
Speaker 3: do you think of my plan against my competitor. I
Speaker 3: won't tell you which competitor, but against this competitor, which
Speaker 3: you know, how do you think I'm doing it? And
Speaker 3: I'll say, oh, Mark, I think you know it's about
Speaker 3: a B plus And I'll say, well, what does it
Speaker 3: need to do to get to an A? And I
Speaker 3: think that idea of knowing how to talk to the
Speaker 3: AI and communicate with the AI. And I've been training
Speaker 3: a lot of my friends on how to do that.
Speaker 3: I just had a friend of mine who left the FDA,
Speaker 3: you know, took one of these Trump leaves, and he's
Speaker 3: thinking about what does he do next? How does he
Speaker 3: think about it? And he hadn't really worked with an AI,
Speaker 3: and so I'm working with the I and I'm saying
Speaker 3: to him, Hey, ask the AI these questions, you know, hey,
Speaker 3: what about this? And he's using very technical terms that
Speaker 3: I don't even know what The technical terms are based
Speaker 3: on certain biological substances that he understands and chemical substances.
Speaker 3: But the AI understood a lot of what he's talking about.
Speaker 3: And then I watched him interact with the AI for
Speaker 3: about fifteen minutes, and together they came up with a
Speaker 3: company idea named it brand It built a slide deck.
Speaker 3: And he walked away kind of shaking his head, going, yeah,
Speaker 3: that is a new potential future for me.
Speaker 1: So why do you hope an agent replaces you one day?
Speaker 3: Well, I think that this idea that AI can do
Speaker 3: a really good job and a lot of these functions.
Speaker 3: So I mean, of course, I'm partially kidding you know that,
Speaker 3: But I'm like, I do think, Look, how long will
Speaker 3: it be where there's an AI also interviewing me with you.
Speaker 3: You know that is we could be talking. It knows
Speaker 3: my whole background and knows all of my interviews, and
Speaker 3: then you know, I want.
Speaker 1: The real thing that agent I don't want AI.
Speaker 3: Mark, Agent Emily. Okay, and Emily both are interviewing me,
Speaker 3: and you could turn to Agent Emily and say, Agent Emily,
Speaker 3: what question did I not ask Mark? Like you've probably
Speaker 3: asked me a thousand questions, and then say, hey, what
Speaker 3: question should I ask him? Now? Based on all of
Speaker 3: the history that I've had with Mark, it might have
Speaker 3: a really unique answer. I was at a conference yesterday
Speaker 3: and there was a political leader there and we were
Speaker 3: having this dialogue with him, and at the end of
Speaker 3: the conference, they said, hey, we've had AI listening to
Speaker 3: this conference and just listen to all of your questions,
Speaker 3: and we are going to have now AI ask you
Speaker 3: the last question. It was able to sum all of
Speaker 3: the questions that we had already asked, plus that person's
Speaker 3: whole individual history, and then ask that final question.
Speaker 2: Sam Altman's you open.
Speaker 1: AI recently told me it's going to get really weird
Speaker 1: when we're walking down the street with a pack of
Speaker 1: humanoid robots how do you see robotics and AI agents
Speaker 1: coming together?
Speaker 3: First of all, I'm just trying to like help this
Speaker 3: come along right now in the present moment. And I
Speaker 3: think that it's not a huge leap to think that
Speaker 3: that's going to be a weird idea. I mean, we've
Speaker 3: seen the movies, so we can kind of envision some
Speaker 3: of this is going to happen, and we can see
Speaker 3: where the robots are and where the software is. But
Speaker 3: no robot is walking home with you today. But you
Speaker 3: might get in a weaimo, and maybe a weaymo is
Speaker 3: not that far away from a robot taking new home.
Speaker 3: Is that weird?
Speaker 2: Maybe maybe not? I could get used to it.
Speaker 1: I yeess.
Speaker 3: I mean it's the car that's just driving itself around
Speaker 3: San Francisco. I think a lot of people haven't driven
Speaker 3: in an autonomous vehicle. And when they come here, they're
Speaker 3: hanging out with me. They're staying with me in my house.
Speaker 3: I'm like, I'm going to call a weimo for you,
Speaker 3: and a lot of people are like, I don't know,
Speaker 3: can I get in there? And I put them in
Speaker 3: and whisk them away and said okay, bye bye. It's
Speaker 3: that experience. It's a robot on wheels.
Speaker 1: So I don't know if you know this, but our
Speaker 1: last interview at Dreamforce, someone spoofed it, and Salesforce has
Speaker 1: kind of become a meme. There's these jokes out there.
Speaker 1: People who use it say it can be confusing. They
Speaker 1: joke that some people don't even know what it is.
Speaker 1: How do you feel about your company being both a
Speaker 1: lifeline and a punchline.
Speaker 3: I love it, And also like even Elon Musk texted
Speaker 3: me and said, hey, I don't understand what does Salesforce do?
Speaker 3: And I'm like, what is this the meme? And he's like, yeah,
Speaker 3: you also have slash, Yeah we also have Slack, you
Speaker 3: have Tableau, Yeah we have Tableau. You also have MuleSoft.
Speaker 3: Yeah we also have all these other products. It's like,
Speaker 3: why do you call this company Salesforce? I'm like, what
Speaker 3: should we call it? Agent Force? So yeah, that's all right.
Speaker 1: You've been throwing some shade at Microsoft lately. You've said
Speaker 1: Copilot is the new Clippy? What's the beef? What did
Speaker 1: Clippy ever do to you?
Speaker 3: As we've gotten ready to kind of change the conversation
Speaker 3: around AI for enterprises to agents, which I think we've done,
Speaker 3: and you were there when it first happened. We had
Speaker 3: to make it clear. The difference between what we were
Speaker 3: saying to what Microsoft was saying, and what Microsoft was
Speaker 3: saying was, hey, this is a copilot revolution. We're all
Speaker 3: going to have this copilot. It's about the copilot. And
Speaker 3: then customers were not connecting with that. They weren't using it.
Speaker 3: It wasn't giving them value. Maybe developers were getting some
Speaker 3: value of it with coding, but even that's been eclipsed
Speaker 3: by Cursor and surf wrighter and these things. So this
Speaker 3: idea that yeah, co pilot was kind of clippy too
Speaker 3: oh for them. It's like, wasn't really doing for customers
Speaker 3: what they wanted. And then we said, no, look at this,
Speaker 3: this is the agent force vision. This is what AI
Speaker 3: was meant to be. That these are agents who are
Speaker 3: making you more productive or reducing your costs, making things easier.
Speaker 3: And yes, they can augment you as an employee like
Speaker 3: it's doing for me as a CEO, but it also
Speaker 3: can give you more productivity, like helping you answer your customers' questions.
Speaker 1: Google and Meta are on trial for being monopolies. Is
Speaker 1: big tech too big? Should it be broken up?
Speaker 3: It probably has been too big and it probably should
Speaker 3: be broken up. And there probably is too much power
Speaker 3: in these companies, and especially when you get to AI,
Speaker 3: you're looking at the mass of even more power. So
Speaker 3: these companies they make their own models, they control entire industries,
Speaker 3: they control all of advertising, or they control this social
Speaker 3: network or they control this, it's going to augment their power.
Speaker 3: So yes, that power has to be looked at. And
Speaker 3: the reflection of AI and everything that we just talked
Speaker 3: about that everybody power dynamic changes and for companies that
Speaker 3: control or have monopolistic aspects of their business, it has
Speaker 3: to be looked at. I mean, you remember Microsoft also
Speaker 3: had a consent decree because they became monopolistic. We ended
Speaker 3: up buying Slack because Microsoft was doing things that ended
Speaker 3: up in a EU justification against Microsoft. So companies need
Speaker 3: to be kept in check, and I think that that
Speaker 3: is a key part of the government's role when it
Speaker 3: comes to competition in capitalism, that there has to be guardrails.
Speaker 3: And that's definitely one of the guardrails of capitalism.
Speaker 1: Salesforce has bought a lot of companies, big companies. Is
Speaker 1: that era of deal making kind of dead?
Speaker 3: Well, a lot of the companies that we bought were
Speaker 3: small at the time and have become big.
Speaker 2: Like you mentioned the twenty seven billion dollar acquisition.
Speaker 3: Yes, but the company itself was doing less than I
Speaker 3: think a billion dollars in revenue or so, like it
Speaker 3: wasn't very much revenue. It's grown. These companies have grown
Speaker 3: because we've been able to grow them. And yeah, it's
Speaker 3: important to be able to do these deals. And we
Speaker 3: put together a great company. We gave guidance that we're
Speaker 3: going to do forty point nine billion in revenue this year,
Speaker 3: and we gave guidance so we're going to do fourteen
Speaker 3: and a half billion in cash flow.
Speaker 2: So are you still buying? Then? Are you still are
Speaker 2: you looking at We.
Speaker 3: Have continued to buy companies. We just bought another great
Speaker 3: company called the Own Company and it's an amazing company
Speaker 3: built in our ecosystem that helps our customers back up
Speaker 3: their data. And so yes, we're continuing to buy. Even
Speaker 3: Agent Force was built on the platform of a company
Speaker 3: that we acquired more than a year ago of a
Speaker 3: former employee where we had bought his company. He was
Speaker 3: here for a while, he left, We invested in his company,
Speaker 3: then we bought it back.
Speaker 1: What do you think of Oracles moved back into the zeitgeist,
Speaker 1: and there's this actually suggestion that Salesforce and Oracle should merge.
Speaker 3: Well, you know that I love Larry. Larry is my mentor.
Speaker 3: I've worked with him now since nineteen eighty six. That
Speaker 3: is a long time. I mean it's part and parcel
Speaker 3: with my consciousness in terms of how business runs. And look,
Speaker 3: I can't say enough great things about him. He's an
Speaker 3: incredible entrepreneur and how he keeps creating and recreating and
Speaker 3: recreating his business. And when I saw him at the
Speaker 3: White House and he's got Stargate and he's got this,
Speaker 3: and he has that, and he has his friend who
Speaker 3: I'm also very close with, Masissan. I mean it was
Speaker 3: very cool. You know. I remember when he first met
Speaker 3: Masassan and we're at the top of SoftBank's tower and
Speaker 3: we're in Tokyo and the conference room in the sun
Speaker 3: is going down and it's a real spiritual moment and
Speaker 3: Larry's like, look at that. It's like God, it's right there.
Speaker 3: And it was awesome.
Speaker 1: It wasn't always sunshine and roses with Larry. I mean,
Speaker 1: you were his protege at Oracle. But then I think
Speaker 1: he kicked you out when he found out you were
Speaker 1: starting a competitor. Is this a keep your friends close
Speaker 1: and enemies closer situation?
Speaker 3: Well, I think we've always been really close and I
Speaker 3: feel incredible feeling too family when I'm with him, and
Speaker 3: you know, he's taken very good care of me and
Speaker 3: I am. I think we'll always have that friendship no
Speaker 3: matter what.
Speaker 1: Throughout your career, you've been an advocate for social justice.
Speaker 1: You've stood up for your employees in various states through
Speaker 1: politic shifts, but more recently you've stepped back from some
Speaker 1: of the diversity and equality initiatives within Salesforce. You've been
Speaker 1: criticized for cheerleading for the new administration. How do you
Speaker 1: navigate the intersection of politics and running a global company.
Speaker 3: It's two different things. I think one thing is equality
Speaker 3: is a core value at Salesforce, and as someone who
Speaker 3: grew up in San Francisco, that's in my heart, you know,
Speaker 3: I guess my heart has rainbow colors. And in terms
Speaker 3: of making adjustments at Salesforce, I think that you know,
Speaker 3: when we can look at it in the reflection of
Speaker 3: the current administration, what's going on. Even in the world,
Speaker 3: there are certain things that we were doing that just
Speaker 3: were too extreme, and so it gave us an opportunity
Speaker 3: to look at, hey, how do we slightly adjust what's
Speaker 3: going on while maintaining our core values. And then I
Speaker 3: think on the second side of that, I would say
Speaker 3: that it's a funny thing. You know, I own Time Magazine.
Speaker 2: You just interviewed President Trump.
Speaker 3: Donald Trump is on the cover of Time last Friday.
Speaker 3: Time Magazine got a call we want you and your
Speaker 3: video crew and your photographers in the Oval office on Tuesday.
Speaker 3: So our CEO, our editor in chief, our photographers, our
Speaker 3: entire team went and so that comes out today. And also,
Speaker 3: we have one hundred year history that the president who's
Speaker 3: elected that year becomes Person of the Year. Well, if
Speaker 3: we put him on the cover and if we make
Speaker 3: him Personal of the Year, even though there's one hundred
Speaker 3: year history of Time, we're all of a sudden siding
Speaker 3: with the administration. It's a funny thing because you get
Speaker 3: a huge blowback from the right that were two left,
Speaker 3: and then you get a huge blowback from the left
Speaker 3: that were two right. And kind of that's what I
Speaker 3: really want Time Magazine to be is right down in
Speaker 3: the middle and to reflect both sides, and I think
Speaker 3: it's great that he's on the cover. And by the way,
Speaker 3: lots of people are on the cover, and that's the idea.
Speaker 1: Well, I think there's this perception that your own politics
Speaker 1: have flipped, like, is there a sincere change in your
Speaker 1: politics or ideals or is this business savvy and opportunism.
Speaker 3: Well, the funny thing is about my politics is that
Speaker 3: I have to remind people. I was in the George
Speaker 3: Bush administration, I was the chairman of the p TECH.
Speaker 3: I was a lifelong Republican, and then at the end
Speaker 3: of that administration, I basically said, I think I'm becoming
Speaker 3: more independent and I want to be able to work
Speaker 3: with every administration. And then I also said at the
Speaker 3: end of that administration that I would never take another
Speaker 3: job inside government. I'm happy to be an advisor to
Speaker 3: a president, happy to be advisor to an ex president,
Speaker 3: but I don't want any more political jobs. I realized
Speaker 3: that that's an industry I just did not really understand.
Speaker 3: Some of my friends are very good working in that industry.
Speaker 3: I'm not one of those people. I don't know how
Speaker 3: exactly to do it. I can kind of do what
Speaker 3: I'm doing, but I don't feel like I should be
Speaker 3: at that level operationally.
Speaker 1: You've had a couple of co CEOs who people thought
Speaker 1: would replace you it didn't happen. Maybe you thought they
Speaker 1: would replace you. Why has it been so hard to
Speaker 1: pass it?
Speaker 3: It's a good question, I mean, maybe you have a
Speaker 3: good analysis.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: I thought I've been on a succession plan several times
Speaker 3: where there was a successor in place. I feel like
Speaker 3: I always want to have a successor in place. I
Speaker 3: have one now, I had one before. I don't think
Speaker 3: I should talk about it anymore as one of the
Speaker 3: things I learned, because all of a sudden, it like changes,
Speaker 3: maybe through nothing I'm doing, or maybe it is something
Speaker 3: that I'm doing. But you can tell me privately what
Speaker 3: you think what I should be.
Speaker 1: Well, so is it them or you? Why are you
Speaker 1: sticking around?
Speaker 3: Listen? Number one, I've never been happier, more excited about Salesforce.
Speaker 3: You know, I just finished my management meeting and then
Speaker 3: came right here. I didn't even have time to do
Speaker 3: my normal makeup and do my hair whatever. I don't
Speaker 3: even know how I look.
Speaker 2: You're good, but.
Speaker 3: I was just, you know, did my management meeting for
Speaker 3: three hours and it went by like a snap, you know,
Speaker 3: because I just am so excited. Yesterday I was at
Speaker 3: an all day conference actually in this building from nine
Speaker 3: am to nine pm. Again, it was like five minutes,
Speaker 3: and I'm like, there's so many exciting things happening in
Speaker 3: this industry. It is so fun. It's like that first
Speaker 3: minute that I walked into radio shack all that computer.
Speaker 3: Of course, you know how life is. There's ebbs and
Speaker 3: flows there. You feel like there's moments where you are bored,
Speaker 3: and you aren't bored that you're excited or you're depressed.
Speaker 3: But right now I'm like, Wow, this is great and
Speaker 3: it's amazing what's happening. I'm sure you see it yourself everywhere.
Speaker 1: You've got how many more dreamforces do you have in you?
Speaker 3: I think I have to walk away from that thought
Speaker 3: and I have to just let it come through me
Speaker 3: and look if that changes, that changes. But I'm totally
Speaker 3: trying to be as healthy as I can be, as
Speaker 3: happy as I can be, spend as much time with
Speaker 3: my family as I can spend, work as hard as
Speaker 3: I can work. And we talked about two amazing companies today,
Speaker 3: Salesforce and Time. Both of them have this incredible role today.
Speaker 3: Plus I'm advising and working with so many of these
Speaker 3: startups and mentoring these kids. And I have invested in
Speaker 3: more than two hundred private companies. Salesforce also has invested
Speaker 3: in hundreds of companies. I mean, that's another exciting part.
Speaker 3: And to influence them and to kind of give them
Speaker 3: some of the ideas that we have, which is that, hey,
Speaker 3: you know what, business is the greatest platform for change.
Speaker 3: You could take one percent of your equity, profit and time,
Speaker 3: just like we did. We've had this great outcome. You know,
Speaker 3: we've done ten million hours of volunteerism. We run fifty
Speaker 3: thousand nonprofits for free. We've given away about a billion dollars.
Speaker 3: You can do the same thing, you know. That's the
Speaker 3: fun part, you know business, or like you probably know,
Speaker 3: we're about two blocks away from Benioff Children's Hospital here,
Speaker 3: and there's another one you know in Oakland, and the
Speaker 3: last time we talked about and there's something in Hawaii.
Speaker 3: There's three hospitals in Hawaii now. And that's the fun part.
Speaker 3: It's all of it together that makes a life.
Speaker 1: So what is one habit or ritual that makes you
Speaker 1: a successful leader.
Speaker 3: Well, we've talked about this in exhaustion. You know it
Speaker 3: is that I think it's cultivating a beginner's mind. It
Speaker 3: says the Japanese say, show shin sho shin. It means
Speaker 3: the beginner's mind. To find that beginner's mind, to tap
Speaker 3: into that energy that's in you right now. I've had
Speaker 3: dinner last night with five amazing entrepreneurs and one incredible
Speaker 3: adventure capitalist, and this idea that you can find that
Speaker 3: beginner's spirit in you, whether it's meditation or it's something
Speaker 3: else that you're doing, but to recapture the beginner's mind,
Speaker 3: because in the expert's mind, you have a few possibilities,
Speaker 3: but in the beginner's mind, you have every possibility.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening to this edition of the Circuit.
Speaker 1: You can catch the full episode on Bloomberg Originals. I'm
Speaker 1: Emily Chang, follow me on x and Instagram at Emily
Speaker 1: Chang tv.
Speaker 2: And you can watch new episodes.
Speaker 1: Of the Circuit on Bloomberg Television or streaming on the
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Speaker 1: host and executive producer our Senior producer is Lauren Ellis.
Speaker 1: Our associate producer is Heather Glover Huang. Our editor is
Speaker 1: Alison Casey. Thanks so much for listening.