San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The Chronicle interview | Online learning The key to creating new forms of work
Marc Benioff is worried — about the environment, about San Francisco’s homeless families, about its dirty streets, about the technology industry’s “crisis of trust,” about whether his software will be used for good or for bad. Everywhere he looks, there’s a problem to be solved.
But the Salesforce chief is optimistic — that technology can be harnessed to solve these problems, that networking everyone will be a net gain for the planet, that there will be jobs for everyone and housing.
Benioff ’s focus on things that some executives might view as do-gooder distractions is drawing plaudits from fellow corporate chiefs. “He’s one of the great leaders,” Unilever CEO Paul Polman said. (Benioff credits Polman with shaping his ideas about sustainable business.) “I haven’t found a CEO who has a broader vision of these issues.”
Last month, Benioff, 53, passed on much of the responsibility for running Salesforce, the San Francisco software company he co-founded almost 20 years ago, to co-CEO Keith Block, the company’s vice chairman and president. Block has taken charge of execution and operations, leaving Benioff to oversee the company’s technology, marketing and culture.
The management shift comes as Salesforce has become San Francisco’s largest private employer, with 8,400 employees, and the company prepares for this month’s Dreamforce, its annual weeklong festival of cloud computing that is now the world’s largest software conference. The Chronicle sat down with Benioff at the World Economic Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in the Presidio — he’s also chairman of that — to talk about the future of jobs, the planet and the city.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Q: You’ve talked a lot about the Fourth Industrial Revolution. What is that? The first one was steam power, then electricity.
A: I like to think of the third one as client-server computing. The fourth one is connecting everyone and everything together. That’s the Fourth Industrial Revolution. All boundaries between us are being erased, and we’re being connected like we never have before. That’s what’s happening, and it’s very powerful.
Q: Last year, you spoke of “digital refugees” being displaced by these waves of change. Are you pessimistic or optimistic about this revolution?
A: You can see this in our industry: We are in a full-on crisis of trust. Can we trust social media, what’s happening on these social networks? Are we going to be manipulated by bots? Are we going to be united or divided by the Fourth Industrial Revolution?
Can the Fourth Industrial Revolution help us heal the climate? Our oceans? Our world is at many levels at risk. We’ve been given these incredible
technologies. Will we use these technologies to make the world better?
Is the business of business business? When I was in business school at USC, that’s what we were taught, you know, that it’s about shareholder value, earnings, profits. Today, we have no choice but to be focused on improving the state of the world. You can see that with little issues with how technology negatively impacts our democracy, or how it can be too addictive.
Q: A historian of industrial revolutions pointed out to me that industrial revolutions have been fueled by warfare. Should that be a concern in how we think about this?
A: That’s already happening. You can see how nation-states are attacking each other using Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies. You can also go back and see in the last several years that these technologies are accelerating because they’re being used for nefarious purposes.
Look, technology is never
good or bad. It’s what you do with the technology that matters.
Q: You’ve created an Office for the Ethical and Humane Use of Technology within Salesforce. Your employees have brought up a pretty specific concern about doing business with the Border Patrol. Was the creation of the office in response to concerns like that?
A: Absolutely. On the big level, these technologies are the most powerful we’ve ever had. Look at how many technology leaders are scrambling around artificial intelligence and asking big questions like, “Will artificial intelligence destroy humanity?”
Our employees have that same anxiety: Are we using our technology for good or for evil? And I hope we’re pivoting to good. That our employees have to ask that question really surfaces the issue that we are in a different time.
We have to be crystal clear with our employees, our customers, our stakeholders, that we are trying to be a model, we
are trying to be a role model for other companies, and we have been in many cases, but this is a huge part of who we are.
Q: Will this office have the power to say “no” to a customer or contract?
A: Yes, they have the ability to fully advise the management team and the board of directors. Ultimately we have to make the decisions.
You probably remember, it was only a few years ago when an employee asked us about Indiana.
Q: That was the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which prompted you to cancel meetings in Indiana over concerns about antigay discrimination.
A: When that happened and I received letters (from employees), I called every single person back. I had videoconferences with our employees and our customers. I couldn’t delegate this if we were to create a culture going forward that really aligned with my values.
Q: You’re now the largest private employer in San Francisco. How does that change your responsibilities?
A: San Francisco is my first priority in everything I do philanthropically. I’ve given away, oh, I think about half a billion so far and I’m rapidly accelerating to a billion dollars in philanthropy personally. On a corporate level, we’re rapidly accelerating. The vast majority of that is going into San Francisco. And we need it.
We’re a city in crisis. We’re a city in a homelessness crisis. We’re a city in a cleanliness
“Today, we have no choice but to be focused on improving the state of the world.”
Marc Benioff, Salesforce chief
crisis. We’re a city in a crisis with our public schools. And a crisis of affordability in housing. So how are we going to overcome all of these issues? This is going to take everybody working together.
We have a great new mayor, Mayor Breed. We need all our Board of Supervisors to engage on these issues, our business leaders, our philanthropists, every citizen of San Francisco, to get involved. These are nontrivial issues.
On some areas, we can see we’ve made progress. Probably the best one is homeless families. We have 1,200 homeless families in San Francisco. We did a documentary and found families with young children living in the forest. San Francisco, the wealthiest city in the country and children living in the forest. When are we going to say that’s not OK?
We know we can get a family off the street, in a home, for $35,000 to $50,000. A third are off the streets. Within two years, every single family will be in a home.
Q: We’re very rich in jobs in the Bay Area, and we’re very short on homes. How do we thread that needle?
A: We need more housing.
Q: Full stop.
A: And affordable housing. It’s a critical part of it.
Q: Let’s loop back to this idea of digital refugees. The homeless individuals are the most visibly displaced. There are people who have moved out of the area, there are retail shop owners who say, “I can’t hire anyone because they can’t afford to live here.”
A: I think you have to pivot to schools if you’re going to talk about who can’t afford to live here. Public school teachers make an average salary of $35,000. How are our teachers going to afford to live in our city, the most expensive city in the country?
We need to invest in those places. We want kids to stay in school, to become core to our infrastructure in our city, like our police, our firefighters, our teachers. We want them to be the core of our future. That’s why we’ve invested in our public schools — it’s on its way to $100 million. We’re also doing it in Oakland.
Q: If these students are in middle school now, after they go to high school, college, will there be jobs waiting for them, or will artificial intelligence automate away all the things they might do?
A: In theory, artificial intelligence will consume many of the manual jobs we have today. But in practice that hasn’t happened yet. It’s something we have to be mindful of. As artificial intelligence disintermediates new jobs, it’s our responsibility to create new ones.
We know there are jobs waiting for them now. We know that our unemployment rate is at the lowest it’s ever been. We need trained people today.
I know that we’re hiring at Salesforce.