For one week every fall, San Francisco turns into a gridlocked mess. About 135,000 guests of the cloud computing company Salesforce.com (CRM) flood into downtown for its annual user conference, the ebulliently named Dreamforce. Hotels are sold out, sidewalks become practically unnavigable, and the city closes a major street in the tech startup-packed South of Market district, jamming the Bay Bridge even more than usual. While this year’s Dreamforce attendees heard a keynote from Hillary Clinton and partied at outdoor concerts by Bruno Mars and will.i.am., the rest of San Francisco sat in traffic.
Strangely enough, the ringmaster of this annual circus, Marc Benioff, is doing more than any other American chief executive to rethink the obligations companies have toward the cities where they operate. In the past few years, Benioff and his wife Lynne have helped build a state-of-the-art children’s hospital in San Francisco, funded a variety of initiatives to help the hungry and homeless, and, via his company’s Salesforce Foundation, parceled out $73 million in grants to nonprofits. At the same time he’s done something even more audacious: publicly urged other tech leaders to do their part. “Now is the time to give a strong message to entrepreneurs that this is a city and an industry that expects you to give back,” he says.
Benioff’s exhortations to his peers couldn’t come at a better time. The industry’s reputation has taken a beating, particularly in progressive San Francisco, home to the gay rights movement, the Summer of Love, and an historic mistrust of big business. Because of the tech boom and an influx of young, wealthy workaholics, housing prices and rents are way up, and lower- and middle-class residents are getting pushed out. In January 2014, venture capitalist Tom Perkins elicited a wave of condemnation by comparing attacks against the wealthy elite to Nazism. In October a video went viral of workers for the cloud storage company Dropbox waving a city park permit and trying to kick residents off their neighborhood soccer field. (The company later apologized.) And of course there’s Uber, the company with the popular taxi-hailing app and an accompanying image problem, which hasn’t met a bullet it couldn’t shoot into its own foot.
Benioff has waded right into this mire of urban transformation and socioeconomic anxiety. He’s 50 years old and 6 foot 5, with a cherubic face, thinning hair, and the tech industry’s customary inclination toward displays of arrogance and grandiosity. He also has an uncanny talent for drawing attention to deeply unsexy subjects—first it was business software, now it’s corporate philanthropy. “Our industry has a history of stinginess,” he says from one end of a 20-foot-long conference table in his colonial-style home in San Francisco. “We have done a phenomenal job creating value for the world through our technology, but we are not really an industry known for giving that wealth back.”
In March, worried about growing frictions between the local tech community and its neighbors, he organized an initiative called SF Gives to raise $10 million for regional antipoverty programs. Benioff got on the phone himself and successfully pushed executives at Box, Google (GOOG), Jawbone, Zynga (ZNGA), and 15 other tech companies to join Salesforce in the cause. “During the severe backlash, there was a willingness by some companies that weren’t as involved to do something,” says Daniel Lurie of the nonprofit Tipping Point Community, which Benioff conscripted to run the program.
“Our big message is that we live in this nirvana,” Benioff says of the campaign, which he hopes to expand to 100 tech companies in the year ahead. “But don’t think we’re not going to ask you to give. We want you to give, and we want you to make it part of your company.”
(Bloomberg Businessweek)
