Talented people have the urge to make a difference in this world and create a name for themselves from quite an early age. One such genius who jumped into the entrepreneurship race from the age when he was just in high school is Marc Benioff. Influenced by his father, a Hindu guru, and a former secretary of state Marc Benioff is best known as founder of Salesforce – a cloud computing company.
Marc Benioff, son of Joelle and Russell Benioff, was born on September 25th 1964 in San Francisco and was raised in the Bay Area. Marc got his first exposure into the business world through his father’s local departmental store in San Francisco. In one of the interviews he went on to credit his father and said, “I learned my work ethic from him”. He studied high school from the Burlingame High School and during his time there he developed and sold his first software called “How To Juggle” for the TRS-80 Model 1 Computer. This trade gained him $75 from the buyer computer magazine.
The next major successful turn came into Marc’s life when he was 15. This was the year when he founded his single-man company named Liberty Software dedicated to develop games for the Atari 800 computer. Under this company’s banner Benioff developed games such as “King Arthur’s Heir”, “The Nightmare”, “Crypt of the Undead”, and “Escape from the Vulcan’s Isle”. His venture of developing games became his primary source of income and by the next year Benioff was making $1500 per month which he would later use to pay for his higher studies. He graduated from High School in the year 1982 and enrolled himself into University of Southern California to pursue Bachelor of Science in Business Administration degree.
The USC days were of great opportunities for Benioff. He landed an internship as a programmer with the tech-genius and the greatest visionary ever lived Steve Jobs at Apple’s Macintosh division. It was here when he learned that revolutionary ideas were not just a dream but they can be pursued and achieved too. Benioff had made his mind to make his career in programming but one of his professor at USC had something else in mind. He suggested Benioff to take business. And, thus, was born an entrepreneur who would revolutionize the online world.
Marc started his career immediately after graduating from USC and joined the database giant Oracle as a customer support. Benioff had an exceptional oratory skills and this helped him to gain the “Rookie of the Year” title at the age of 23. Three years later he climbed up his career ladder so fast that he reached the Vice President position and became the youngest person to be on that post. This also gained him a fat salary of $300,000.
Benioff’s success caught an eye of the top-line people and the founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, himself called him in. Benioff and Ellison quickly became close friends and spent a good amount of time together attending parties, going on vacations, etc. After 13 years of job at Oracle, Benioff decided to work on something of his own project. And he started working on the idea of cloud computing and gave the company a name which today is known as “Salesforce”. Ellison supported Benioff’s idea by funding the project with $2 million and took a seat on board of directors.
As the time passed by, Benioff found out a potential competitor to Salesforce and it was none other than Oracle itself. This led to the start of downfall between Ellison and Benioff’s relations. While the business war’s continued Salesforce managed to survive the huge dot-com bust blow-off in early 2000s. The survival made the company even stronger and brought it in the list of biggest companies in modern cloud computing market. The company went public in 2004 and raised $110 million. Today, the company is valued at $40 billion and has also been awarded multiple awards including the “Best Place to Work at” for 8 consecutive years.
Starting from selling a software for $75 to making a billion dollars company Marc Benioff stands at number 16 in the Forbes 500 most influential CEOs list. Besides his business work, Benioff has also written a business book “Behind the Cloud”, a memoir on Salesforce in 2009. He is actively involved in philanthropical works and donates a huge sum to charitable trusts and organizations. Benioff currently lives in San Francisco, California with his wife Lynnie Benioff and two children.
Harshal Pawar is an avid reader, a TV show addict, and a writer. He has a personal blog brainwork.wordpress.com where he jots down his articles and poetry about love and life.
He is currently pursuing film-making and wishes to bring the words written on a paper to the screen. More of all he is a scorpio.