Quotes from Marc Benioff

Most of all, I discovered that in order to succeed with a product you must truly get to know your customers and build something for them.

In business, we say that people overestimate what you can do in a year and underestimate what you can do in a decade. This is true in philanthropy as well.

When I look out from my own business career, I tried to learn from some of the best people, regardless of the industry.

Social embedded business processes that solve concrete needs are key to enterprise social collaboration.

I think a lot of people don't understand how deep AI already is in so many things.

A lot was happening in A.I. But I also realized it wasn't clear what Salesforce's role in A.I. was. That's when we started acquiring quite a few artificial intelligence companies, maybe a dozen.

You have chosen the wrong path if it's not fun. And you are probably not taking enough risk if it's not hard and rocky sometimes.

Whether you're starting a business, managing a team, or running an entire company, trusting your instincts can be essential in bringing a vision or idea to life. I now understand that trusting yourself is only half the story. To be effective as a leader, you need a reservoir of trust to draw from. And once you use it all up, it can take years and years to replenish.

In your quest to succeed and make money, don't forget to do something for others.

There is a Japanese belief that business is temporal, whereas relationships are eternal.

After all, the better the developers you have, the better the product you build.

The more developers you have, the more products you can build. Essentially, recruiting is the engine that drives distribution

There's no way to put a dollar value on values. And yes, there will be times when prioritizing values, especially trust, will come at the expense of profits. In the short term, that is. But the money your company makes in any given quarter will never be more valuable than the trust you stand to lose over time.

My summers at Apple had taught me that the secret to encouraging creativity and producing the best possible product was to keep people fulfilled and happy. I wanted the people who built salesforce.com to be inspired and to feel valued.

Later, as we neared the $1 billion in revenue mark, we didn't focus on $1 billion in revenue, but what we needed to do to get to $10 billion in revenue.

We began to get more exciting press activity, mostly online at first. I believe that the coverage opened Caryn's eyes that we had something important to say, and OutCast Communications took us on as a client. Having the right agency would be pivotal to our image and success.

the power of each customer exchange. If the exchange was executed as well as possible—if we made the customer truly successful—we had the opportunity to transform him or her into an Apple loyalist and evangelist. This opened my eyes to the importance of customer success.

build a new technology model (on-demand, or delivered over the Internet—now called cloud computing), a new sales model (subscription based), and a new philanthropic model (integrated into the corporation).

A genuine culture built on fundamentals like trust and aimed at the goal of business for good is more than enough, but only if it genuinely outweighs the traditional business motives of driving revenue, growth, and profit.

open communication, in tandem with quickly fixing the problem, is the only way to build and retain trust.

I was learning from the best.

Our public schools need people to show up and care more than they need the donations of benefactors. They need people who can contribute professional expertise mentoring students, assisting teachers, or even applying a fresh coat of paint.

Recruiting Is Sales

But let me be clear: What Indiana ultimately showed me is that no one person is in charge of the moral compass of a business. The phone calls and messages from my employees proved that if the leadership won't act, they'll have to face the bayonets poking up from below. Gone are the days when companies can recruit and retain top talent without upholding a commitment to values.