Marc Benioff Biography | Inspiration Quotations | Motivation Quotes

Marc Benioff Biography

Marc Benioff is an American internet entrepreneur, philanthropist and author. He is the Chairman and CEO of Salesforce, an enterprise cloud computing company. He was born on September 25, 1964, San Francisco, California.  In 1982, he graduated from the Burlingame High School. In 1986, Benioff obtained a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Southern California. At the age of 15, he started his first company, Liberty Software, which created video games. He also worked as an assembly language programmer in Apple Computer’s Macintosh Division. Before launching the Salesforce Company, he worked for 13 years at Oracle Corporation

He founded Salesforce Company in 1999. As of March 2016, he owns approximately $3 billion worth of Salesforce shares. Salesforce is the fastest-growing top ten software company in the world and the largest CRM Company. Forbes Magazine named it as one of the World’s most innovative companies seven years in a row. It was one of the most admired companies of the world in the software industry five years in a row and the best company to work for nine years in a row, as per the Fortune Magazine.

Benioff is recognized for his visionary leadership and pioneering innovations. In 2016, Fortune was given the name as one of the ‘World’s 50 Greatest Leaders’ to him.  He was also named ‘Businessperson of the Year’ by Fortune readers, one of the ‘Best CEOs’ in the World by Barron’s, ‘Innovator of the Decade’ by Forbes Magazine and received The Economist’s Innovation Award, rated as  among the ‘50 Most Influential People’ by Bloomberg and one of the top ‘20 Best-Performing CEOs’ by Harvard Business Review.

Benioff is also a great philanthropist; in 2000 he created the model namely “1-1-1 model”, whereby the company contributes 1% of product, 1% of equity, and 1 % of employee hours back to the communities it serves globally. Today more than 3,000 companies have adopted the 1-1-1 model through the Pledge 1% movement. He and his wife Lynne have focused their personal philanthropy on improving children’s health through UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital, at the University of California, San Francisco, as well as encouraging public education and helping for homelessness and other social issues.

Benioff is the author of three books, including the national best seller “ Behind the Cloud”.

Marc Benioff Biography Motivation Quotes:

• “The only constant in the technology industry is change.”

• “The world is being re-shaped by the convergence of social, mobile, cloud, big data, community and other powerful forces. The combination of these technologies unlocks an incredible opportunity to connect everything together in a new way and is dramatically transforming the way we live and work.”

• “Presentation skills are key. People who work for you represent your brand. You want them to present themselves - and represent you - in a certain way.”

• “Most of all, I discovered that in order to succeed with a product you must truly get to know your customers and build something for them.”

• “You must always be able to predict what's next and then have the flexibility to evolve.”

• “The future of communicating with customers rests in engaging with them through every possible channel: phone, e-mail, chat, Web, and social networks. Customers are discussing a company's products and brand in real time. Companies need to join the conversation.”

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• “There are a lot of politicians who are just obstructionists.”

• “Most of all, I discovered that in order to succeed with a product you must truly get to know your customers and build something for them.”

• “Journalists immediately think of me as a resource for a quote or comment because they know that I will be available to offer fresh insight and meet their deadlines.”

• “If someone asks me what cloud computing is, I try not to get bogged down with definitions. I tell them that, simply put, cloud computing is a better way to run your business.”

• “You can do things in every part of the world. You can do things in every discipline. You can do large things, you can do small things. But it takes a while to figure out what you actually want to do. And it changes. As you change your interests and desires in philanthropy change, I think you have to be open to that change.”

• “I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I started my own software company in high school and went to college to study entrepreneurship.”

• “In business, we say that people overestimate what you can do in a year and underestimate what you can do in a decade. This is true in philanthropy as well.”

• “I love software and I love technology.”

• “In school all I wanted to do was build technology. That's what I loved.”

• “My approach to politics is that I'm not a Democrat or a Republican. I'm an American and I always support candidates I think are great for the country.”

• “Although I loved working on technology - I've always been a computer geek at heart - my professors encouraged me to get a real-world job working with customers.”

• “I have failed a lot in my philanthropy, where I will make philanthropic contributions and they just won't be effective.”

• “I think the most surprising thing about giving is it takes a while to find out what you're really interested in and what you really want to do.”