Benioff: USA needs 'compassionate capitalism'

SAN FRANCISCO — Marc Benioff is having his way with a plate of scrambled eggs and chicken-apple sausage at a cliffside diner overlooking the Pacific.

Casual in a sweatshirt and baseball cap, he's easy to confuse with the tourists, unless you happen to know that the logo on both items — UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital — is the result of the $200 million the Salesforce.com founder gave to the facility that now bears his name.

"Just look at that," Benioff, 50, tells USA TODAY, gesturing at the majestic view. "We live in a physical nirvana. I'm just saying, let's also make it a business nirvana, a K-12 nirvana, a social justice nirvana. It's a doable thing."

Benioff's big pronouncements and large philanthropic footprint are well known here in the tech-focused Bay Area. But now that the rest of the country knows his name, many may wonder who he is and why he cares.

Last week, Benioff led a group of tech CEOs in opposing Indiana's new Religious Freedom Restoration Act on the grounds that it was both discriminatory toward gays and lesbians and harmful to business-recruiting efforts.

As Republican Gov. Mike Pence struggled to tweak the bill's language — supporters sought legal protection for business owners if they denied services to the LGBT community based on religious beliefs — Benioff urged his customers to avoid the state and offered relocation checks for employees. Other CEOs followed his impassioned lead.

Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote an op-ed essay for The Washington Post. PayPal co-founder Max Levchin rallied dozens of signatures for an open letter to legislators. And Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman penned a blog post saying it would be "unconscionable" to do business in a state that etched discrimination into law.

In a wide-ranging conversation that name-checks Neil Young, Jeb Bush and Larry Ellison, Benioff makes clear that he's both inspired and shocked by how events have unfolded since his first incensed tweet on March 26.

"We've been out there attracting attention and operating on a scale we're not used to, and I have to say it's not a comfortable feeling," he says in a soft voice that belies his towering size. "It's all new territory. We didn't know we were going to get into this hybrid social-business program. So we're all learning, and we're seeing some best-practices forming, whether it's Tim and his op-ed or Max and his letter."

Benioff stops to tuck voluminous curls under his hat.

"I didn't understand this was part of a larger matrix and it was all going to implode, and I also didn't know we'd be so inspiring to other business leaders," he says. "I was just emailing CEOs I have dinner with once a month, saying that they needed to pay attention to this. Some knew about it, others didn't. But it took."

That's because the tech leader is convinced something bigger is brewing, a business-led movement perhaps unprecedented in the country's history.

Think back to the social issues of the 1960s and it's difficult to imagine a leading CEO taking a stand on civil rights or the Vietnam War. But, "in the future, before people do something like this (law in Indiana), they're going to have to look for the business community's support," says Benioff, leaning forward. "And there's a reason. Everyone's been working super hard since 2008 to get the economy turned around, so they're pissed at some level when someone throws a wrench in it."

He pushes his plate aside and bears down. "We CEOs, we're all over the world," he says. "We're talking to the presidents of other countries often, negotiating our own issues with them directly often. So we need to be consulted as an integral part of the ecosystem, not like something on the side called business."

'GENTLE GIANT' NOT SHY ABOUT MENTORING

Part of that is down to the force of Benioff's personality. When he tells you he mentors young tech entrepreneurs, what he really means is he isn't afraid to act like their big brother.

"He's a gentle giant, but he won't adjust his message for an audience and he will beat you over the head with a point of view if you do not have one," says Levchin, 39, now CEO of online financial services company Affirm. "He's a leader and guiding light for many of us, considering we engineers are often fairly introverted."

Levchin says that he was moved to speak against the Indiana law on CNBC due to anti-Jewish persecution he experienced before emigrating from Ukraine in 1991. "I know where these sorts of laws can lead," he says, adding that he wasn't aware of the brewing controversy until he received an email from Benioff.

Stoppelman, 37, is part of those monthly CEO dinners. He calls Benioff, who is 6-foot-5, "the tip of the spear who can rally his friends when he needs to. Marc has a big personality to match his physical presence, and he's fundamentally trying to do good."

Stoppelman credits Benioff with persuading him to have Yelp adopt a version of Salesforce's 1-1-1 giving strategy, where 1% of the company's equity, product and employee time is donated to the local community. (To date, Salesforce Foundation has donated $80 million in grants and 840,000 hours of time, and allowed 24,000 non-profits to run Salesforce's cloud computing platform for free or at discounted rates.)

Benioff shrugs off such admiring compliments. "They're just my friends, and when I am thinking about something, I call them," he says.

Benioff goes on admiringly about Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, who is urging Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, to veto a law similar to Indiana's, saying it "undermines the spirit of inclusion."

"That's unprecedented, frankly, that a business leader would go straight to the governor, but Walmart is like a nation-state without nuclear weapons," he says, allowing himself a laugh. "I tell you one thing, if Doug calls the premier of China, he answers the phone. If (Hutchinson) calls the premier, he is not answering."

Benioff's motivation for getting into the fray comes from his grandfather, Marvin Lewis, a pioneering San Francisco trial lawyer and city supervisor. "Hearing him fight for what he thought was right inspired me to also try and make things better, but that got derailed for a bit when I got into software," he says.

Benioff was precocious, starting a company at 15 and becoming an Oracle vice president at 26 before in 1999 starting Salesforce, which is valued at $36 billion, a tenth of which is the founder's estimated net worth.

FAMOUS FRIENDS WHO INSPIRE

Given that economic stratosphere, it's not surprising that friends include singer and would-be tech entrepreneur will.i.am and musician Neil Young, who even composed a song for Benioff's daughter.

Young and Benioff have a particularly tight bond, one formed over a mutual admiration of each other's sense of creativity, mission and bravado.

"He's out there singing, 'Who's going to save the world?' and those messages are right, you need to pay attention to the environment and education," he says. "I'm just adding, integrate your economic engine."

Benioff is getting revved up now.

"We are a country based on capitalism, but we should just have a more compassionate capitalism," he says. "It shouldn't be just about shareholders but, more broadly, stakeholders, from your customers to the environment. And I think we here in San Francisco can show the world what that looks like. We have some of the smartest people coming here, and it's only 7 square miles. We can do it."

If he sounds like a politician, that's by accident. "I couldn't see doing that," he says. "I was with two this week, (Jeb) Bush and (Sen. Charles) Schumer, and they have their ideas, some of which are good, and some are based on the party's ideology, and that would be hard for me. Something could change, but I don't see that right now."

In fact, he seems eager to keep leading Salesforce for some time, inspired by mentors such as Young and Ellison: "Neil's been singing Old Man for 40 years, and Larry's been, well, singing Oracle since 1977, and I admire that sort of discipline and mastery."

Besides, as was shown last week, business may well be proving itself an increasingly dominant force in the nation's social agenda. A Salesforce pulpit will allow Benioff to spread his gospel well beyond the Bay Area.

"Neil can inspire millions with his music, but here we managed to do that last week through, of all things, business," he says, a hint of genuine surprise in his voice. "That's where I can say it's working. We just need to amp it up."

Just not right now. In a few hours, Benioff will board a jet for Hawaii, his refuge of choice.

"In business and in life, there's a natural regulation, you're going big, then you're going within, and after last week of being all the way out there I need to retreat and be with myself," he says, staring at the ocean. "It's like those waves out there, going out and coming in."

And like them, Benioff will be back in, thundering.

USA TODAY's Change Agents series highlights innovators and entrepreneurs looking to change business and culture with their vision. E-mail Marco della Cava at mdellacava@usatoday.com. Follow him on Twitter:@marcodellacava