Olina Qian

I received an interesting email this morning. It is from Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce offered to answer some questions of the Startup School community. I got really aspired by it’s 1-1-1 model and it’s company culture. It made me thought a lot.

It is interesting that the other day when I talked to another friend who is also working on a startup. He said: At first, we had a big dream, so we decided to start a company. Then after we started that company, all our goals become survive this startup and keep it runing. It is a little passive way to put it, but it is true that building a startup can be a long long long process. Sometimes we got tired, sometimes we feel dull, sometimes we lost ourselves. Don’t be afraid, it is all normal process of Entrepreneurship.

This beautiful morning, let’s take one step back and look at Entrepreneurship, regarding mentor, regarding your vision, regarding social impact, regarding which kinds of culture you want to build for your company. Marc walked your way through his experience and sharing with us his viewing point on how to build a successful startup!

1. How important are mentors for aspiring entrepreneurs from your personal experience?

I have been very lucky to have had some incredible mentors in my life. I had a fantastic run at Oracle for 13 years, and I consider Larry Ellison a mentor and a chief executive whom I admire for great vision and endurance. General Colin Powell has had a profound influence on my career, and has played a huge role in helping me define the values that have shaped salesforce.com. Powell told me that the “business of business is not just business.” He said that businesses have to have a real sense of social responsibility and give that goal a central place in its values. That led to our 1-1-1 model of integrated social responsibility: one percent of our equity was set aside in a charitable foundation; one percent of paid employee time to community causes; and one percent of our product is used to run non profit organizations. Without the influence of mentors like Powell and Ellison (and many others), salesforce.com would not be the company that it is today.

2. You are hiring at a really fast pace. How do you maintain and improve the organization dynamics & culture at the same time?

It all starts with with having a clear vision and the right values.

At salesforce.com, we use a management process that I created many years ago called V2MOM, an acronym that stands for Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures. We refine the V2MOM every year, and use it to measure the progress we are making on key initiatives. From there, my top executives write their own V2MOMs, and the process cascades down to every employee. Everyone at salesforce knows exactly where they fit in the overall corporate plan. This works as both a communication tool and a management tool.

As you may know, one of the defining aspects of our company’s culture is our 1-1-1 model of integrated corporate philanthropy. We committed to this because it’s the right thing for the community, but we’ve seen a secondary gain in that it has enormous benefits for our employees as well. Every employee has the opportunity to work on a salesforce foundation project during his or her first week at work. Sometimes they serve meals at a homeless shelter. Sometimes they help clean up a neglected community park. Sometimes they repaint a local school. No matter what the task, participating in this effort sends the signal that integrated corporate philanthropy is a core value for us. We’ve seen that the effect of those first few hours of volunteering stays with most employees for a long, long time. I know this because they continue their involvement with our foundation and their interest, along with the work of our foundation team, has helped the foundation grow and scale around the world.

3. How has your philanthropic philosophy served you in the early years of Salesforce?

My co-founders, Frank Dominguez, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff and I agreed to set aside one percent of employee time, one percent of our equity, and one percent of our product when we started the company. It was easy at the time, because, we had no employees, our equity was worth nothing, and we had no product! But if we had waited even a year or two later, we would have said “we’re too busy” or “we’ll get to it after five years”. It was important to do it at the outset. I am very proud of the fact that not long after we had established our model, we had the chance to introduce it to a room of students at Stanford, which included Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google. They were interested in our model and eventually adopted it for their company, creating a billion-dollar foundation when their IPO hit the market. Sharing this model might be one of our most important legacies.

Over the years, it has impressed me at how our approach to philanthropy has helped differentiate us in the market for key talent. It really sets us apart. And, it helps us determine if candidates are a fit with our values and culture. We work very hard in this company, and our foundation and the activities that flow from it give us a valuable perspective and keep us connected to our communities around the world. I think integrating philanthropy into our business model is one of the best decisions we’ve ever made.

4. Would you consider the path to your success as entrepreneur as easy & fun or as hard & rocky?

Yes to all. You have chosen the wrong path if it’s not fun. And you are probably not taking enough risk is it’s not hard and rocky sometimes.

We were just getting started when the “dot com” bubble burst in 2001, taking our many of our customers with it. It really tested us as a company, but we came out of that period much, much stronger. We have always competed with much larger companies than us. We’ve had many challenges, but we have never lost sight of our original vision of making business software that is as easy to use as amazon.com and Google. Good companies will always draw competitive fire, so we tend to see temporary challenges as an indication that we are on the right path.

5. Are you still determined to the mission of ending Microsoft?

Our mission is “The End of Software” and with every day, we become a little bit closer. When we started salesforce.com, we set out to make business software that was as easy to use as amazon.com, Google, or eBay. No updating. No patching. No software. It was exciting and challenging at the same time. No one had done this before. It was a new technology model and a new business model.

Once our idea caught on, other companies adopted the models for themselves, often pitching themselves as “the salesforce of XX”. We took this as a compliment. It was important validation. I’ve always seen other companies that enter our space as “karmic partners.” You never want to be completely alone at what you do. Competition is good for everyone. In our case, it helped us spawn a giant industry that became know as cloud computing.

As cloud computing applications caught on, the movement grew broader. Amazon developed EC2 and S3 and Google rolled out AppEngine. And of course, we introduced Force.com. This was a new category: cloud platforms, or platforms-as-a-service. I think this category got huge validation when Microsoft announced that it would develop Windows Azure, which brings their operating system (and all its complexity) to the cloud.

I could not be happier that what started out as our simple mission grew into a phenomenon that is much bigger than salesforce.com. After all, when Microsoft says that it’s “The End of Software”, you know it has to be true.