Marc Benioff

Marc Russell Benioff was born on September 25, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He began programming and selling software as a teenager, selling a program called 'How to Juggle' at age 14 and founding Liberty Software to produce Atari 8‑bit games at about age 15. Benioff earned a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Southern California, where he later served on the Board of Trustees. After college, Benioff joined Oracle Corporation, where he worked from 1986 until 1999 and rose to become the youngest vice president in Oracle history, gaining deep experience in enterprise software sales, marketing, and product development. In 1999, Benioff left Oracle and founded Salesforce, launching the company with a mission he summarized as 'The End of Software' and pioneering software‑as‑a‑service (SaaS) CRM delivered through the cloud. Under his leadership, Salesforce expanded from CRM into a broad enterprise platform, acquired companies including Tableau, MuleSoft, and Slack, grew into a Fortune 150 company, and became one of the largest enterprise software firms globally. From Salesforce’s first day, Benioff established the 1‑1‑1 philanthropy model—committing 1% of equity, 1% of product, and 1% of employee time—which he helped scale via the Pledge 1% movement adopted by thousands of companies. Benioff has been active in public policy and social causes, acquired TIME magazine in 2018 and co‑leads TIME Ventures, authored best‑selling books, and has been recognized with multiple awards and honors for business leadership and social impact.