Marc Benioff: Co-founder and CEO of Salesforce
Business Owner · Information Technology
Marc Benioff sold his first program at 15, rose to Oracle's youngest vice president, and founded Salesforce in a San Francisco apartment in 1999 with the promise of 'The End of Software'.
About Marc Benioff: Co-founder and CEO of Salesforce
Marc Russell Benioff (born September 25, 1964, in San Francisco, California) is an American internet entrepreneur and philanthropist, best known as the co-founder, chairman and CEO of the software company Salesforce and the owner of Time magazine since 2018. He is the grandson of Marvin Lewis, a California trial attorney and member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who championed the creation of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system. He grew up in Hillsborough, graduated from Burlingame High School in 1982, and earned a business degree from the University of Southern California in 1986. Benioff was a young programmer with an eye for the market. While still in high school he sold his first application, How to Juggle, for $75, and in 1979, at 15, he founded Liberty Software, creating and selling Atari 8-bit games such as Flapper and King Arthur's Heir, whose royalties helped pay for college. At USC he interned at Apple, writing assembly code for the Macintosh, and after graduating he joined Oracle Corporation in a customer-service role. He worked there for 13 years in sales, marketing and product development, was named Oracle's Rookie of the Year at 23 and became the youngest vice president in the company's history. He founded Salesforce in 1999 while working from a San Francisco apartment, defining its mission with the slogan "The End of Software", a campaign that preached delivering software over the web rather than in boxes. Salesforce went on to become one of the world's leading cloud software companies, and Benioff also became a prominent philanthropist. Sources: English Wikipedia (Marc Benioff, accessed September 2026).
Basic Information
Co-founder, Chairman and CEO, Salesforce; owner, Time magazine
Company Details
Salesforce
Cloud Software, CRM