San Francisco Chronicle

Benioff uses connection­s to buy protective gear

- By David Gelles

Sam Hawgood, the chancellor of UCSF, was getting concerned.

It was March 19, coronaviru­s cases in California were rising at an alarming rate, and the university, one of the Bay Area’s major medical providers, was already running perilously low on personal protective equipment.

The usual suppliers in the United States were short on masks and face shields, and there was no sign that the state or the federal government was coming to the rescue. “The supply chain had really dried up,” Hawgood said.

So Hawgood called Marc Benioff, the hyperconne­cted billionair­e CEO of Salesforce.

In some ways, it was the natural call to make. Benioff gave the university $100 million to build a children’s hospital in 2010 and remains a major benefactor. But there was no reason to think Benioff, who runs an enterprise software company, could quickly muster a supply chain for personal protective equipment, especially during a global pandemic.

Nonetheles­s, that phone call set off a frenzied effort by Benioff and his team that drew in major companies like FedEx, Walmart, Uber and Alibaba. In a matter of weeks, Benioff ’s team spent more than $25 million to procure more than 50 million pieces of protective equipment. Fifteen million of them have already been delivered to hospitals, medical facilities and states, and more are on the way.

The relative ease with which Salesforce acquired so much protective gear stands in sharp contrast to the often chaotic government efforts. While states have had to compete against each other for scarce supplies, and the strategic national stockpile of protective gear is depleted, Benioff and his team simply called up their business partners in China and

started writing checks.

Other Silicon Valley executives, including Tim Cook of Apple, have also tapped their connection­s to help get needed supplies to hospitals. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey pledged $1 billion to fight coronaviru­s. And many individual­s and companies with vested interests in China have begun similar campaigns.

After Benioff got off the call with Hawgood on that Thursday, he called Daniel Zhang, CEO of Alibaba, the enormous ecommerce marketplac­e. Last year, Salesforce and Alibaba announced a partnershi­p meant to give Salesforce customers better access to the Chinese market, and teams from the two companies had been working closely.

Benioff told Zhang that UCSF, an institutio­n he cared deeply about, was in need. Zhang said he would help.

In San Francisco, Benioff tapped Ryan Aytay, one of the CEOs of Quip, a Salesforce productivi­ty tool, to lead the effort. When Aytay reached out to his contacts at Alibaba that same day, they had already received the message from Zhang.

Within hours, the teams from Salesforce and Alibaba began collaborat­ing, with the Alibaba employees identifyin­g trusted suppliers who might be able to fulfill Salesforce’s requests.

Aytay got in touch with

Hawgood, who said that UCSF needed masks, gowns, face shields and swabs. With Benioff ’s approval, Aytay realigned his 25person team to focus exclusivel­y on the effort and brought in colleagues from other Salesforce department­s.

Buying the gear was one thing, but getting it to the United States would be another. “Initially, I thought we were going to be able to use the U.S. military to bring it in,” Benioff said. “That was naive on my part.”

Realizing he would need to charter planes and trucks, and hoping to speed things along, Benioff reached out to Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, who put the Salesforce team in touch with his son, Richard Smith, a highrankin­g FedEx executive.

In San Francisco, Aytay and his team decided to buy only from companies that someone they knew well could personally vouch for. “Setting up a trust network was very important,” Aytay said.

By March 22, the Salesforce team identified the first promising tip. The Jointown Pharmaceut­ical Group, a large Chinese company, had 500,000 surgical masks in a warehouse in Los Angeles.

But when Aytay called the Jointown office in China, no one there spoke English. Aytay had a member of his team who spoke Mandarin call back and negotiate the deal, and they soon agreed to buy all the masks for $300,000. The money was wired directly from Benioff ’s family office that day.

Three days later, on March 25, the masks arrived at UCSF on trucks that FedEx provided at a discounted rate.

Once it was apparent that the Salesforce team could obtain and deliver supplies, they took steps to formalize their efforts and set a lofty target.

“We did the math when we started, and thought we were going to acquire a billion pieces of PPE,” Benioff said.

It was a typically ambitious goal from Benioff. This year, he led an effort to plant 1 trillion trees.

The Salesforce team set up a website, www.1bppe.com, (the b is for billion) to obtain leads and give Aytay a new email address, since his Salesforce inbox was overloaded. They set up a daily meeting with UCSF to monitor progress. And they gave their team a name: Maskforce.

On March 27, Benioff joined a weekly call organized by the Business Roundtable, a lobbying group. With about 100 other chief executives on the line, he described his efforts and said that if anyone wanted to help, or knew of hospitals that desperatel­y needed supplies, they could call him.

Soon after that, Benioff got a text from Ginni Rometty, former CEO of IBM, who said that hospitals in New York were in dire need of equipment. Aytay and his team had been buying more gear in China, and within days, a 747 was on its way to New York, full of medical supplies.

But when the plane landed, Aytay’s contacts at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and in New York said that instead of going directly to hospitals, the equipment should be sent to a warehouse in Albany where New York state officials were coordinati­ng distributi­on.

There were other setbacks. On March 26, the Salesforce team secured 2 million surgical masks from a source in Shenzen, China. But on their way from the warehouse to the airport, 1.5 million went missing.

“They were sold right off the truck,” Aytay said.

(The supplier ultimately fulfilled the order.)

Once, Aytay got a call from a friend who had found 9,500 KN95 masks made by 3M in the Bay Area. Within hours, the masks arrived at Aytay’s house.

He wrote a personal check for about $40,000 to pay for them, and he hired a driver who sometimes takes him to the airport to pick them up and distribute them to local hospitals.

By March 29, 10 days after Hawgood called Benioff, Salesforce had found more than 50 million pieces of protective equipment, with millions already delivered.

Their work was being noticed.

On March 31, Aytay spoke with Gov. Gavin

Newsom and shared his list of suppliers. The next week, President Trump thanked Salesforce for its donations during his daily press briefing.

At one point, Aytay was in his garage talking to an Irish supplier when the supplier asked him to hold. When he came back on the line, he had patched in Bono, the U2 frontman, who wanted to collaborat­e.

The gear continued to arrive. A 747 loaded with protective masks and other equipment landed in San Francisco on April 2. The next week, Uber Freight donated four trailer trucks to help transport equipment from multiple locations to UCSF.

The supplies allowed UCSF to institute a mandatory mask policy. “It’s made a huge difference,” Hawgood said.

On April 12, two planes landed in Chicago carrying 1.3 million pieces of protective gear that Salesforce, Walmart and State Farm had bought in China. Aytay’s team had been in touch with FEMA to identify emerging hot spots.

When the planes arrived, Walmart trucks picked up the gear and drove it to Michigan and Louisiana. “We wanted to get gear to underrepre­sented communitie­s,” Aytay said.

In the last weeks, it has become apparent that early social distancing measures have worked in the San Francisco area, and UCSF is unlikely to need all the supplies that Salesforce delivered.

Now, faced with a surplus, the company and university are sending excess gear to hospitals and medical institutio­ns with more acute needs.

 ?? Matt Edge / New York Times 2018 ?? Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff put in motion a private sector effort to procure 50 million masks, gowns and swabs.
Matt Edge / New York Times 2018 Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff put in motion a private sector effort to procure 50 million masks, gowns and swabs.
 ?? Nicholas Albrecht / New York Times ?? UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood called Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, when he was worried about supplies of personal protective equipment.
Nicholas Albrecht / New York Times UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood called Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, when he was worried about supplies of personal protective equipment.

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