Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce and one of the people who turned business software from a boxed product into a subscription, was born in San Francisco on September 25, 1964.
He went to Burlingame High School in the San Francisco Bay Area, then studied business administration at the University of Southern California, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1986. As a teenager, at 14 and 15, Benioff wrote games for the Atari 800 and sold them — one, “How to Juggle,” sold for around $75 and became his first commercial software sale.
After college he joined Oracle, where he spent thirteen years and became one of the youngest vice presidents in the company’s history.
In March 1999, Benioff founded Salesforce with Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez, working out of a small rented apartment in San Francisco. The idea was simple to state and hard to pull off: sell customer relationship management (CRM) software not as a disc a company installed on its own servers, but as a service accessed through a browser and paid for by subscription — what would later be called software as a service, or SaaS.
From the company’s first day, Benioff built in the “1-1-1” model: one percent of Salesforce’s equity, one percent of its product, and one percent of employee time given to charity. More than twenty thousand companies later adopted the same scheme through the Pledge 1% movement.
Salesforce went public in 2004 and grew into one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world, and the subscription model Benioff started with in a small apartment became the standard for the entire industry.