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It was not the place that Marc Benioff had imagined would be the scene of what he now describes as “an incredible awakening”. Incense hung heavy in the air as the sound of singing filled the room. He was in a remote city in India and was sitting in front of a Hindu spiritual guru named Mata Amritanandamayi, revered by his followers as “the holy embracer”.
Benioff, a Silicon Valley pioneer, has already had great success. Millionaire by 25, he was the youngest vice president of the software giant Oracle, drove a Ferrari and seemed to have it all.
But in his heart he knew that something was missing.
He had taken a three-month gap year from Oracle to travel the world. “It was like a scene from a movie,” he recalled. ‘We are in the middle of nowhere in this little Indian town and they are all dressed in white and orange and there is incense floating around.
I am with an Indian friend. Is saying [the guru] about the challenges in his life and his struggles and about this business that was going to start. I thought I was going to ask him to invest, he was quite aggressive.
“Then he looked directly at me and said, ‘In your quest to change the world, don’t forget to do something for someone else.'”
Today, 55-year-old Benioff (pictured with his wife in 2017) is worth £ 5.5 billion thanks to the success of the company he founded shortly after that meeting, Salesforce, which employs 50,000 people worldwide. , including over 1,500 in the UK
It was a comment that would change his life forever.
Today, Benioff, 55, is worth £ 5.5 billion thanks to the success of the company he founded shortly after that meeting, Salesforce, which employs 50,000 people worldwide, including more than 1,500 in the UK. His firm is the world leader in ‘customer relationship management software’ that uses the cloud to help companies organize information about their customers and has an annual revenue of £ 13 billion.
He is also one of the best philanthropists in the world thanks to the encounter with the woman he simply calls ‘Amma’ (‘Mother’). “It was she who presented me with the idea and the possibility of giving back to the world by pursuing my professional ambitions,” said Benioff. ‘I realized that I didn’t have to choose between doing business and doing good. It could do both.
Last week, a consortium led by our sister newspaper Daily Mail, which includes Salesforce and UK asset management firm Marshall Wace, created a charity called Mail Force Charity to address the urgent shortage of personal protective equipment ( PPE) at Covid- 19 emergencies in Britain.
The tech mogul has already donated £ 1 million of his fortune to support the charity along with another £ 1 million from Salesforce. In total, he has spent around £ 20 million supplying and supplying PPE to hospitals around the world.
HERE IS HOW TO DONATE
Mail Force Charity was launched with the aim of helping support NHS staff, volunteers and healthcare workers to fight Covid-1 in the UK.
Mail Force is a separate charity established and supported by the Daily Mail and the General Trust.
The money raised will fund essential equipment required by the NHS and care workers.
This equipment is vital to protect heroic personnel as they do their fantastic job of helping the UK overcome this pandemic.
If we raise more money than necessary for Covid-1 vital equipment, we will apply all of the funds to support the work of the NHS in other ways.
Click on the button below to make a donation:
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But his generous contribution is only the tip of the iceberg.
The man the New York Times calls “the hyperconnected billionaire” has used his personal friendships at the highest levels in the global business world to succeed where governments and bureaucrats have failed; to obtain and then transport high-quality PPE to those who need it most, including here in the UK.
Benioff, who along with his wife Lynne donated £ 200 million to build two children’s hospitals in his native San Francisco, called friends such as Daniel Zhang, the CEO of Alibaba, the giant e-commerce market, and Amazon’s equivalent in China, who immediately offered to help.
He also called long-term business partners, such as Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, whose son Richard helped arrange transportation of PPE at a discounted rate.
“We have two dozen dedicated employees who have researched the world for PPE and created a database using our technology,” he said. “We know where to get everything and we have all kinds of transportation.”
Benioff spoke to The Mail on Sunday via Zoom from his home overlooking San Francisco Bay, where he was locked up during the pandemic with his wife and two children.
Like most of us, corporate clothing has disappeared and has been replaced by a casual blue sweatshirt and baseball cap.
A man’s giant bear, measuring 6 feet 5 inches, couldn’t be more different from the traditional image of a Silicon Valley billionaire nerd.
He is quick to laugh, personable and charming, and clearly passionate about the work he is doing during the lockdown, and in particular the work of Mail Force Charity.
“I think the world is being shown a new set of values that we can live by.” It is an evolution to the truth, an evolution at a level of unity for humanity, ” he said.
‘This virus does not discriminate. It doesn’t matter what religion you are, or gender, or sexual orientation or the color of your skin.
‘The virus persecutes all humanity with equanimity, so it is unifying us to realize that we are a community.
‘I am here in San Francisco and I am perched on a cliff and when I look at the air it has never been clearer, the water has never been bluer, there is animal life landing here on California beaches that we have not seen for a long time weather. We are presented with a new level of harmony with the planet and asked: ‘Can we achieve a new balance in our lives and what will that mean?’
‘At the same time, we have our hearts open to the tremendous suffering that is happening in the world. Many families have been affected, so many people have lost their lives and that is the main reason why we are doing this work with PPE, due to human suffering. ‘
Indian spiritual leader Mata Amritanandamayi (center), popularly known as ‘Amma’ (The Mother) or also ‘The Holy Embracer’, embraces a woman during a 2016 gathering of followers
At least 50 Salesforce employees have been affected by the coronavirus, making this fight personal.
For Benioff, philanthropy has shaped her beliefs since that meeting with the guru in India (she remains a friend to this day, along with some even better-known spiritual advisers, including the Dalai Lama).
When he founded Salesforce in 1999, Benioff put the notion of giving back at the center of his business, a revolutionary idea back then.
He created what he called the 1-1-1 model, where Salesforce promised to donate 1 percent of its income, 1 percent of its product, and 1 percent of its employees’ time to the community and charitable events.
To date, the company has awarded £ 263 million in grants, employees have donated five million hours of volunteer work, and the company has delivered products to 46,000 non-profit organizations.
More than 10,000 companies in 100 countries have joined its 1-1-1 philanthropy model. “I think business is the best platform for change,” he said.
‘When you do business with all of these relationships (customer relationships, employee relationships, suppliers, partnerships), you can do amazing things.
‘The Mail Force Charity is a great example of this. You start putting things together and things happen. ‘
Benioff has always been a person who makes things happen. He credits his father Russell, who ran a series of six women’s clothing stores called Stuart’s Apparel in Northern California, for instilling his work ethic.
A quiet boy who “became obsessed” with computers at the beginning of the Internet age, buying his first computer with the money saved from a part-time job cleaning a jewelry store.
At age 14 he wrote a simple computer program called ‘How to Juggle’, he was paid around £ 50 for it and was hooked.
The following year he started writing video games.
The EPP medical equipment mail force shipment is displayed in Shanghai as it is loaded aboard a mail chartered aircraft to London on Tuesday.
Mr Benioff’s first experience in the UK was at the age of 16 when his parents allowed him to travel alone to Scotland to investigate Glamis Castle, Queen Elizabeth’s childhood home, Queen Mother and Macbeth’s setting . ‘I wanted to include it in a game, so arrangements were supposedly made. I went there but the castle was closed, ” he said.
Even at 16 he was determined. ‘I started talking to this person and they agreed to open the castle and guide me through it.
“I spent the night in Scotland, I took a long train back to London and my mother lost track of me.”
In fact, his mother, Joelle, had arranged for her son to stay with friends in Leeds.
When Mr. Benioff disappeared, he frantically called Scotland Yard: “They found out where I was and I reappeared, so everything was fine.”
After college, he joined Oracle, the software company, and quickly rose in rank.
Then came his moment of personal crisis. In his book Trailblazer, published last year, Mr. Benioff wrote: ‘I had the best job I could have imagined at Oracle, one of the fastest growing software companies in the world.
“I was promoted to vice president, the youngest person in that position. He had the multimillion-dollar salary, stocks, and benefits that went with it.
‘Supposedly he was living the American dream but he was lost. I was neither happy nor satisfied. ”
He took three months off and traveled to Hawaii, among other places, where he swam with dolphins and came up with the idea for Salesforce, which started in a rented one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco.
The company’s headquarters is now the tallest building in the city, the 326-meter Salesforce Tower.
While most companies would have executive offices on the top floor, Benioff created a cafeteria and display area for everyone to enjoy.
His philanthropic efforts are mind boggling. A charity committed to planting a trillion trees inspired by one of its heroes, the English chimpanzee expert and environmentalist, Dame Jane Goodall, has started. And he works closely with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, whom he “greatly admires”: “I am so impressed with what Prince William is doing for the environment, they are both inspiring for the amount of philanthropy they are doing” .
You have never regretted your decision to put values before dollars.
Like the business titans of earlier times: the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Rothschilds, and the Gettys, who used their vast personal fortunes to create lasting legacies in the form of museums, hospitals, and education funds, Benioff says he is proud of building a business focused on giving back and inspiring other business leaders in the process:
“CEOs must have permission to focus on other things than their earnings per share,” he said. ‘At the end of his life, when his obituary is written, no one will mention the shareholder returns they had during their time as CEO.
“They are going to talk about the things they have done for other people and for their family and who they were in the world.”
“I think moments like this are a good time to remind people that life is finite and that you will not be here forever and that it is important to help other people.” That is still the most important thing in the world.
‘Traditional capitalism was: the business of business is business. Our focus is: The business of business is improving the state of the world, and the Mail Force Charity is an example of that. ‘
The Complete Kit: Nurse Miss Burns wore the new PPE from head to toe after she arrived at Milton Keynes University Hospital
He became aware of the global shortage of PPE in March when Sam Hawgood, the chancellor at the University of California, San Francisco, an organization to which Benioff and his wife donated £ 200 million for two children’s hospitals in 2010, raised the alarm.
“They were running out of PPE in the emergency rooms,” he said. “So we started getting involved and when the situation exploded in New York, we made some aggressive efforts and rented planes from China and brought millions of parts to the United States.”
He mentioned his efforts in a text message to Lord Rothermere, the owner of this newspaper and longtime friend: “I said, ‘Well, this is what we have been doing,’ and immediately responded again, saying that the UK needed the Same type of focused effort from the private sector.
‘I was able to call a friend of mine named Daniel Zhang, the CEO of Alibaba. It is probably the most connected retailer in all of China. He knew where all the PPE was and said, ‘Don’t worry, Marc, I’ll take care of this.’ And he made all these things happen and that’s why I say business is a great platform for change.
‘Our relationship with Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday is a great example of that. I am very proud of the fact that we all come together to support Mail Force Charity, which is doing a great job. ”
How would you like to be remembered? “That he loved my family and he loved my business and he loved my community and I did what I could to make things better.”
