[tiffanyh]

Just remember ... the CEO role of a major company is radically different than any other job.

What Marc calls "work", you and I can't relate too.

He's spending a disporportionate amount of time talking to investors, talking to customers, talking to his Board.

I wouldn't be surprised if he's traveling 100 business days a year as a result.

Which if you're not at home because you're traveling for work, or if you are at home but just talking phone calls - that's a very different type of "working remote".

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EDIT: why the downvotes? Please comment if you disagree with something I said so that we can have a health discourse.

[mpeg]

Yes, when he says he doesn’t work well in an office people here are reading he wants to work from home.

In reality, he’s probably thinking he’d rather be on the road than stay in his SV ivory tower.

Two stories about Benioff you might find interesting; when we were selling our startup there were two bidders on the table, Google and Salesforce.

Google sent out minions, Larry and Sergey were only reachable via email/call.

Benioff flew over to wine and dine our founders, they found common ground and he charmed them with his vision of where he saw our product going. He won with a lower bid than Google.

After the acquisition closed, he flew over to London too to visit my business unit, we met with him in the office and the senior management team were again taken out for some 1:1 time with him over dinner. Any skepticism they might have had was washed away after that evening, they all came back “brainwashed” into the Salesforce way — he even gifted us one of the domain names from his personal collection to use for our product (my email was [e-mail] for a while, which I did find really cool)

The second story, he once logged into an all hands call using a shitty satellite connection from his yacht in the middle of the Mediterranean. He could have delegated while he was on holiday, but I don’t think Benioff ever switches off, hence why working from anywhere is his default mode of operation.

[tiffanyh]

Thanks for sharing that story, really enjoyed reading it.

>> "He won with a lower bid than Google."

Off topic: why would a company every sell to a lower bidder? If you have any investors in the company (not bootstrapped), don't you have a fiduciary responsibility to always sell to the highest bidder.

[mpeg]

Good question, not always; I suppose. The founders had quite a good share of stock which probably helped but ultimately it came down to vision.

My understanding was that Google didn’t really offer us a future plan, and the competitor they ended up acquiring (Wildfire) quickly disappeared — another fun little story is that Arielle Zuckerberg was working for Wildfire at the time, so she ended up at Google — while the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is stronger than ever after more acquisitions, even where the individual products disappeared.

All in all it still was extremely lucrative for founders and investors, the official number was $689m but there were also extra bonuses and employee retention incentives and such so the real number was higher.

I didn’t really gel with the FAANG style culture at the time so I left after I vested most of my stock, but I know some people made long careers out of it.

[somsak2]

Salesforce is 1/10 the size of Google. SF should have much more time for an aquisition of the same size.

[mpeg]

I know this, and I know logically it makes sense but I can also understand as a founder it's partly an emotional choice and you prefer to join the company that is courting you better.

Just like in any kind of b2b sales, the decisions are never fully data-driven.