As a teenager, Marc Benioff cleaned a jewelry store, and he did not enjoy it. Across the street was a Radio Shack with a computer in it. He taught himself to write a program there called How to Juggle, and he sold it for $75.
That was the first money he made from software. At 15 he founded Liberty Software to make games for the Atari 8-bit, including King Arthur's Heir. By 16 the royalties were reportedly $1,500 a month, enough to help pay for college. Before that he had repaired antennas and CB radios for neighbours.
One account puts the first office in a rented apartment on Montgomery Street.
He was born in San Francisco in 1964, grew up in Hillsborough, and studied business at the University of Southern California, graduating in 1986. He took a summer internship at Apple after talking to Guy Kawasaki, then joined Oracle. He was Rookie of the Year at 23 and, about three years later, its youngest vice president, earning more than $1 million a year.
Then, at 31, he took six months off. He travelled to India and Hawaii, and the trip pushed him toward yoga and Eastern religions and toward the idea that software should be rented over the internet. Larry Ellison, his boss, let him take the break.
On 8 March 1999 he founded Salesforce with three developers, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez. One account puts the first office in a rented apartment on Montgomery Street. Ellison and CNET founder Halsey Minor were early investors, although the sums quoted online vary and I could not verify them.
The timing was bad. The dot-com crash arrived and Salesforce laid off 20 percent of its staff in the early 2000s. Benioff hired actors with signs saying the end of software to heckle Siebel Systems at its own conference. The company listed in June 2004, raising $110 million.
Revenue passed $1 billion in 2009, and by 2022 Salesforce had overtaken SAP as the largest enterprise applications company by revenue. The price of size came later. In January 2023 about 8,000 jobs, roughly 10 percent, were cut, with Benioff blaming pandemic over-hiring. He later called it a bad idea. For the year ended 31 January 2026 revenue was $41.5 billion.
What stays with you is the order. A kid who disliked cleaning a shop found a computer across the road. Salesforce began as that same move, grown up: go where the machine is.