Behind the founder: Marc Benioff

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
I want to zoom back to the beginning of Salesforce. One of the most legendary launch events in startup history. Just looking back at that, any lessons from what you did right to get people to pay attention?

**Marc Benioff** (0:09)
I'm throwing everything against the wall. I'm looking at what's going to stick. I am looking to try to find the winning tactic and turn it into a winning strategy.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:16)
Your stock is at an all-time high. I'm curious just what you believe is most contributed to you being able to stay on top and continue to grow.

**Marc Benioff** (0:24)
I actually never look at the stock. I find the stock to be very distracting. The stock isn't the goal. That's not why we're doing this.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:30)
AI is the defining technology of our lifetime and probably any lifetime. When was the moment for you where you started to realize this?

**Marc Benioff** (0:38)
I keep having these kind of existential freakout moments about AI. This is really moving fast.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:44)
As a founder, you're just like, God damn, I just got used to AI and everyone's wanting to work on AI in my company. Now we got to freaking figure out agents.

**Marc Benioff** (0:50)
No, no, no, no, no, no. That's a mistake. You want the mindset of, oh, the next thing is coming. I can't wait for the next thing.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:01)
Today, my guest is Marc Benioff. He's co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, which is the second largest B2B SaaS company in the world, worth around $350 billion at the time of this recording, making $35 billion a year in revenue, and 25 years later, is still growing like crazy and dominating the market. In our conversation, we talk about leadership, AI, domain names, beginner's mind, marketing, product, sales, the hardest moment in Marc's journey of building Salesforce, also what exactly is an agent, and so much more. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Marc Benioff. This episode is brought to you by Cloudinary, the foundational technology for all images and video on the Internet. Trusted by over 2 million developers and many of the world's leading brands, Cloudinary is the API-first image and video management platform built for product leaders, who rely on visual storytelling to express their unique product value, who are building engaging web and app experiences, and who understand that harnessing the power of AI to automate is the only way forward. Gil Grossman, engineering team lead at Fiverr, says that, our users share billions of images, video and audio files, Cloudinary's ability to automate our post-production work at scale amounts to a savings of up to 92,000 workdays per month. Think bold, build big, ship fast, let Cloudinary handle your media needs. Start your free plan today at cloudinary.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Interpret. Interpret unifies all your customer interactions, from gong calls to Zendesk tickets to Twitter threads to App Store reviews, and makes it available for analysis. It's trusted by leading product orgs like Canva, Notion, Loom, Linear, monday.com and Strava to bring the voice of the customer into the product development process, helping you build best-in-class products faster. What makes Interpret special is its ability to build and update customer-specific AI models that provide the most granular and accurate insights into your business, connect customer insights to revenue and operational data in your CRM or data warehouse to map the business impact of each customer need and prioritize confidently, and empower your entire team to easily take action on use cases like win-loss analysis, critical bug detection, and identifying drivers of churn with Interpret's AI assistant, Wisdom. Looking to automate your feedback loops and prioritize your roadmap with confidence like Notion, Canva, and Linear, visit enterpret.com/lenny to connect with the team and get two free months when you sign up for an annual plan. This is a limited-time offer that's interpret.com/lenny.
Marc, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

**Marc Benioff** (4:00)
Excited to finally get connected with you and excited to do this podcast with you too.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:04)
I'm even more excited and I actually want to start with something that I think most people don't know about you, but to me is almost like a microcosm of how far ahead you look and almost how basically how visionary you are. And that's that you've owned a number of epic domain names, for example, build.com, u.com, code.com, appstore.com. First of all, are there others I don't know about?