| 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 marcos@social.com 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. |
>> "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.