Outside a rival's conference in the early years, a handful of actors stood holding signs. They said the end of software. Salesforce, a small San Francisco company with a bold slogan, had hired them to heckle Siebel Systems, the giant of customer-relationship software, at its own event.
The man behind the stunt was Marc Benioff. He was born in San Francisco in 1964 and grew up in Hillsborough. As a teenager, he started a small software company that sold Atari games. He studied business at the University of Southern California, graduating in 1986, and then spent 13 years at Oracle.
As a teenager, he started a small software company that sold Atari games.
In 1999 he left to start something that sounded odd: business software that lived on the internet, rented by subscription. On 8 March 1999 he founded Salesforce with three developers he recruited, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez, with Harris building the product. One account puts the first office in a rented apartment at 1449 Montgomery Street, next to Benioff's own Telegraph Hill home. Two of the earliest investors were Oracle's Larry Ellison, his former boss, and Halsey Minor, who founded CNET. One account says Ellison insisted that Benioff formally leave Oracle first, though the amounts quoted online vary and I could not verify them. The first prototype was ready that November.
The timing was awful. The dot-com crash arrived within a year or two, and Salesforce laid off 20 percent of its staff in the early 2000s. Yet the idea held. The first Dreamforce conference in 2003 drew about 1,300 people. In June 2004 Salesforce listed on the New York Stock Exchange and raised $110 million.
The turn, if there is one, is that customers got comfortable. By 2009 revenue passed $1 billion, and Salesforce kept buying its way up: Tableau for $15.7 billion in 2019, Slack for $27.7 billion in 2021. In 2022 it surpassed SAP as the largest enterprise applications company by revenue.
The price came later. Executives left in late 2022, and the stock sank. In January 2023 about 8,000 jobs were cut, roughly 10 percent, with Benioff blaming over-hiring during the pandemic. He later called that a bad idea. In 2025 he said support headcount had fallen from about 9,000 to about 5,000 as AI agents took on half of support chats. There were also data theft campaigns, though Salesforce said its platform was not itself exploited.
For the fiscal year ended 31 January 2026 revenue was $41.5 billion with net income of $7.5 billion. Market value was about $183 billion on 6 November 2026.
The lesson is how Benioff used his own history. He left the biggest company in his field, took money from its founder, and then made its slowness his advertising. A good enemy is cheaper than a good ad.