Salesforce CEO sharing duties with colleague
President will be promoted to co-chief executive position, taking on growth and operations tasks
Salesforce’s co-founder and Chief Executive Marc Benioff is taking a step back from some of his duties, shifting them to a newly appointed co-CEO.
The San Francisco-based pioneer of subscription-based business software said late Tuesday that the company has promoted Keith Block, its president and vice chairman, to the role of cochief executive alongside Benioff.
Under the new co-CEO structure, Benioff “will lead Salesforce’s vision and innovation in areas including technology, marketing, stakeholder engagement and culture,” according to the company. He will also remain as the company’s chairman.
Block, who has been with the company since 2013, will take on Salesforce’s “growth strategy, execution and operations,” the company said.
Rob Enderle, director of tech consultancy the Enderle Group, said that by bringing on Block as co-CEO now, Benioff may be trying to set Salesforce up to avoid the issues that other companies have faced when going through a change at the top.
“One of the huge problems we have in tech right now is succession,” Enderle said. “This coCEO structure is designed to address this problem, but it still relies heavily on the CEO to actually mentor his partner, otherwise they still don’t pick up the (executive) skills.”
Benioff, the face of Salesforce, co-founded the company in 1999 and is considered to be one of the first software executives to embrace selling software on a subscription model. Under Benioff’s direction, Salesforce was also an early adopter of selling software over the cloud.
In addition to running Salesforce, Benioff is known for his philanthropic work and efforts to improve social change on a number of issues around the Bay Area. In May, Benioff used the dedication of the new Salesforce Tower in San Francisco to call for a renewal of programs and efforts to combat homelessness in the city.
The co-CEO leadership structure adopted by Salesforce is a rare one in American business. One of the more notable companies to employ such a setup is Oracle, where Mark Hurd and Safra Catz have shared the CEO position since September 2014.
Benioff began his career at Oracle and worked there for 13 years before founding Salesforce.
“Co-CEOs can work, and given Benioff’s strong leadership and ability to delegate, I see no reason why this should not be a successful move,” said Tim Bajarin, president of tech research firm Creative Strategies.”Benioff will still be the head of Salesforce and its guiding light, (and) I suspect he has a lot of other projects he wants to spend more time with given his strong interest in philanthropy.”
The move comes about three weeks before Salesforce is scheduled to report its fiscal secondquarter results.
While announcing Block’s promotion, Benioff said the company remains on track to reach its goal of $23 billion in annual revenue in its 2022 fiscal year.
For its 2018 fiscal year, which ended Jan. 31, Salesforce reported revenue of $10.48 billion. The company has forecast fiscal year 2019 sales in a range of $13.075 billion to $13.125 billion.