Marc Benioff

Marc Benioff is Chair, CEO, and Co-Founder of Salesforce and a pioneer of cloud computing.

Under Benioff’s leadership, Salesforce is the #1 provider of customer relationship management (CRM) software globally and one of the world's fastest-growing enterprise software companies.

Benioff founded Salesforce in 1999, and it is now a Fortune 150 company with 75,000 employees, guided by four core values — trust, customer success, innovation, and equality. The company has been recognized as the Most Innovative Company by Forbes, a Best Place to Work by Fortune, and the 10th Most Admired Company in the World by Fortune.

Benioff was named “Innovator of the Decade” by Forbes and is recognized as one of the World’s 25 Greatest Leaders by Fortune, one of the 10 Best-Performing CEOs by Harvard Business Review, and as the CNN Business CEO of 2020. For his leadership on equality, Benioff has been honored by GLAAD, the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative, and Variety Magazine with its EmPOWerment Award.

Building a different kind of company, Benioff created Salesforce to not only develop great products, but also to have a positive impact on the world. On day one, Benioff created the 1-1-1 model of philanthropy, which leverages the resources of Salesforce to improve communities around the world. Today, more than 12,000 companies have adopted the 1-1-1 model through the Pledge 1% movement.

Benioff and his wife, Lynne, have focused their philanthropy on healthcare, the environment, public education, and homelessness. The Benioffs have given more than $250 million to the University of California, San Francisco, to build UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland. The Benioffs have also established the Benioff Ocean Initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, the UCSF Benioff Initiative for Prostate Cancer Research, and the UCSF Benioff Center for Microbiome Medicine, and they have provided the initial funding for the Stanford Microbiome Therapies Initiative.

A member of the World Economic Forum (WEF) board of trustees, Benioff co-founded 1t.org — the global movement to conserve, restore, and grow 1 trillion trees — and the WEF Friends of Ocean Action. He also serves as the inaugural chair of WEF’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in San Francisco.

Benioff is the owner and co-chair of TIME, and the founder of TIME Ventures — a leading investment firm with over 200 investments. Benioff is author of the New York Times bestseller “Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change.”

Before launching Salesforce, Benioff spent 13 years at Oracle, where he was the youngest vice president in company history. When he was 14 years old, he sold his first piece of software, “How to Juggle,” for $75. He founded his first company, Liberty Software, which created video games, at the age of 15.

Benioff received a B.S. in business administration from the University of Southern California, where he is on its board of trustees. In 2014, USC awarded Benioff an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.