Marc Benioff: AI Copied 400 Companies | Talk with Tim

We are in Honolulu, Hawaii, on the island of Oahu, and we are up in the botanical gardens. On my right, the amazing, the extraordinary, Mark Benioff. Hi, I'm Mark Benioff, I am the chairman and CEO of Salesforce. What I look for most in an entrepreneur is a mindset that is flexible, that is open, or as the Japanese say, a beginner's mind. In the beginner's mind, you have every possibility, in the expert's mind, you have few. The best founders are the ones who have Shoshin, the beginner's mind. Mark is the founder and CEO and chairman of Salesforce, and Salesforce has become one of the greatest companies in the world today. Thank you. And not only is it an extraordinary company itself, but all the companies that run off of Salesforce are much more efficient because of it. Anyway, Mark has also started his business in the Silicon Valley and moved to Hawaii. Yeah, six years ago. And he has figured out, turns out people are willing to come visit you here. Yeah, no, it's exciting to work and live here in Hawaii, and to everybody here at Aloha, and thank you for inviting me over here, you know, to the neighbor island. We're happy to come over and visit you. And we are building, you know, we are building some new healthcare here in Hawaii, and one of the new hospitals is actually a big investment in a new hospital right in downtown Waikiki with Straub. So we're very excited with Hawaii Pacific Health. Yeah, that's a, yeah, that's going to be a hundred million dollar investment that we're making to improve healthcare right down, right downtown here. Fantastic. And, and you also funded some helicopters so you could go back and forth. Helicopters going back and forth because we don't have the same great healthcare on the big island, even though we do have a new hospital in Hilo. So we do bring a lot of folks over here for all kinds of advanced work at Straub and also at Queens Punchbowl and so forth. So tell us a couple of things. First I'll start with just Salesforce. How did that get started? What made you do it? And, and what was the vision when you were just getting started? Yeah, I was spending actually a lot of time here in Hawaii and I've been coming here since 1974. I have always been very attracted to the Aloha spirit and, and the values of the Hawaiian people. And I was actually doing something that we're not really allowed to do anymore. Everyone here knows we're not allowed to go swim with the dolphins anymore in the ocean. But back in the day we used to kind of go out and the dolphins would come and they would swim around and they'd say something to us like, and so then, wow, that's a good dolphin. Thank you. Thank you. I do a variety of animal sounds and I am available for birthdays and also bar mitzvahs. Yeah. So we were out there swimming with the dolphins, which we'd be doing. And, you know, there's a lot of very kind of people who are extremely interested in the spirituality of Hawaii. So they're in there doing their dolphin thing. And then I just had a vision that, you know, the world was going to change in technology like it's changing now. And that I wanted, though, to leave the company that I was at. I was at Oracle for 13 years. So I started my own company called Salesforce. And today Salesforce will do, we have about 83,000 people all over the world. And we were the number one supplier of enterprise software. And a lot of it came from the visions that are available here in Hawaii. So we encourage everyone to come here to Hawaii. So all of you out there and all of you in TV land learn to speak dolphin. So, OK, so. I do other sounds, too. I'll do a variety of them during the. Yeah, good. I'm whatever you want. I know you do a couple of sounds, don't you? Well, what do you do? What's your best animal? I think it's elephant. Yeah. Yeah, we're two elephants, so we're happy to do more sound because it's going to. As time goes on, we know what the show is all about. That's it. This could just be the sounds. That is that that's the social media moment right there. All right. OK, so we got the sounds down. OK, now you OK, you built this incredible company and you decide you move your family, your world, everything to Hawaii. Yeah. Tell us about that move and tell us about like how you separate. I mean, when I'm here, it's like the Asian. Yeah. Right. And then occasionally it's like, oh, I got some work to do. How do you do that? How do you have like a hard work? I've just been coming here for decades and then decided not to go back. OK, I asked you something and you gave me a good answer. How you separate the work from the family and the play and all that stuff. And you said, well, we we put up an office and you go to that office and then you bring your board over, you bring your management over and you do regular meetings with them. Sure. And then the rest of it is just Zoom calls, right? It's you know, I I you know, I'm working 24 seven. You know, I think that once you actually decide to start a company, you're working 24 seven, especially today. And so but you're living 24 seven wherever you are and then you can decide to be wherever you are. And of course, I'm still going all over the world. I love traveling and we have offices all over the world, customers all over the world, employees all over the world. So I need to be all over the world. So it's all fine. But I always get to come home here to my ohana. That's the Hawaiian word for family. Right. Yeah, absolutely. I'll tell you, though, Mark does work 24 seven, because when I send him a text or an email, it's almost immediate that he gets back to me. So if you really want to be a huge success, you move quickly, efficiently, effectively like Mark Benioff. OK, one pretty serious question. Thank you. Yeah. Like one serious question is A.I. This is sort of an interesting factoid. We have a company that just did a press release that said our A.I. has just copied every one of the Y.C. companies, 400 portfolio companies all. And he's created the exact same software in 400 times just with A.I. within about a week from when they were all launched. So that's going to change some things. So how's Salesforce going to change? What's going to happen there? Well, I think to that point, you know, we're we're kind of entering a new world of A.I. A.I., of course, as you know, Tim, because you've been in the industry for decades. This is not your first rodeo. It's not your first Paniolo Hawaiian rodeo either. I would say that, you know, you know, over the decades of A.I., we've seen these incredible models and we've seen them do unbelievable things. But now there's one specific thing that's happening that's really pretty awesome, which is kind of, you know, the idea that we have the ability to code, that these are now coding agents. And that is really exciting, because I think up to that point to, you know, to like what you just said, if you didn't have an engineer, you weren't coding. And I think now if you have an A.I. model, you are coding. The second point is it's an agent revolution. You know, it's incredible what is happening. Software is really, you know, becoming not just software, but agentic ware. The idea that it's about humans and agents working together. The models are only so accurate. So it's still very important that the humans are in the loop. But in all cases, agents can make things so much better. So it's customer service. Yes, it's your customer service humans, but also these A.I. agents that are working in tandem with them. Your sales folks. Yes, it's your salespeople, but it's also A.I. agents who are out there doing qualification and prospecting for you, maybe even closing deals. And I think in all cases, it's going to be agents supporting you and helping you. All of us have had the experience of working with a chat GPT or an anthropic or a Gemini at home. And that's kind of our agent kind of helping us along. You know, these agents are going to be a little bit more loose, a little bit more autonomous. They're kind of supporting us in the wild. It's a very exciting moment in software, something that we haven't really seen this kind of revolution and in quite a few years. So I was just interviewed. Some press person asked me the question, Willer, is A.I. smarter than you are? And I said, yeah. And then I said, but A.I. works for me. Yeah, for now. Hey, I'm trying. I'm actually trying to get A.I. to replace me when A.I. can do a better job of choosing and and motivating and driving and helping entrepreneurs. Yeah, well, I think Peter Schwartz is our futurist. Then I'll just be I'll be here in Hawaii. I'll be riding the waves. Yeah, well, that you can make that decision anytime you want. But I would just say, you know, Peter Schwartz, who's our A.I. is our futurist at Salesforce, and he wrote like a movie and was responsible writing a movie quite a few years ago called Minority Report. Oh, and we all remember Minority Report. And he wrote another movie, War Games. And these movies are kind of about, you know, what is an A.I. future look like? We're not exactly in that world yet. You know, we're still in this intermediate stage. And we have to kind of keep our mind while we've been all convinced that we're in the world of A.G.I. now. OK, we've all seen the movies and we know we're not in the A.G.I. world, but we are in a world where these models are providing a little more intelligence, a little more capability. So we have the ability to do things we just did not have before. And I think some of the little examples that I gave are are very good examples of what was possible, maybe not even just a few years ago. And I think especially with coding. So because these are large language models, coding is very much a language type of activity. We have the ability now to do things we just couldn't make happen. And when we see the software coding itself, that's very exciting. You know, you remind me of War Games, and I feel like breaking out my A.I. and have it play itself in tic-tac-toe, which was how they solved the how they had it blow its mind. Right. Yeah. I was thinking, hey, has anybody done that? Somebody out there do that. And then let me know at the end of the show. You're ready to get minority report was a little scary because they were arresting people before. Really? Yeah. Before they got the precogs. Yeah. The precog said, you have a 90. You're kind of like a precog, though, aren't you? You're like the modern precog. And hopefully they don't arrest you for being a precog. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I mean, this week we announced the new version of Slack. I don't know. Hopefully every company is using Slack. That's starting here. Great way to communicate. Great way to get the foundation operating system for your company. And now Slack has Slack Bot, as well as the primitives to kind of help you manage your customers and service and support with Slack CRM. But the new version of Slack is amazing. I run my company on Slack and I encourage people to look at Slack as providing that kind of operating system for their startups. Now, also, you are also an investor. Is there a company that you're really excited about now and you want to tell the world and go use it? New company, I mean, that we're a new company that we're invested in. We have Salesforce Ventures, which is very exciting. We you know, one of the companies that we're invested in is a company called Anthropic, which does coding agents. So that's very exciting. And we also have Time Ventures. You know, you know, I own Time Magazine and Time Ventures has a great new company called Artera, which has a whole kind of democratization of the you mentioned UCSF. We've, you know, obviously have invested a huge amount in the prostate cancer center there, but we've been able to democratize that technology and bring it to everyone through Artera, which is AI meets prostate cancer. So every urologist has the best cancer certifications and diagnostic capabilities, as you would at UCSF, for example. OK, I've got a question. So this is a follow on question on there. We've noticed that a lot of the entrepreneurs were going for 10 years ago, they were going for chemotherapies and they were going to spend 15 years and two billion dollars to get a drug through FDA. And now we're seeing something that we're calling bio cures, where you take your blood out, they play with it, they shove it back in. All of a sudden, you're five years younger. What what do you think of all that? And is all your experience with UCSF, are they are they doing that kind of thing? Well, I mean, you're kind of that idea called parabiosis, the idea that the regenerative properties of your body or in your plasma, what we call platelet factor for other things. It's it's definitely all right there. And we're just at the verge of, you know, being able to regenerate a lot of our our body in real time. And I think that's a very exciting moment in biotechnology. Yeah, they're growing new body parts. They're doing all sorts of interesting. I don't need to go there, but OK. Which body part would you want to? I think when you get over 50 knees is your knees, right? Yeah. And you have what your hip. Is that the one that you want? So no, my hips. Fine. Yeah. Well, kidney kidneys. I need a new kid. We'll regenerate your kids. Yeah. Because they took one out anyway. OK. Yeah. I'm. Yeah. So any of you guys creating something to do that? Let me know, because I'm adopting you to be drapers. Perfect. Because there's the name of the show is Meet the Drapers. Right on. Do I get in your will with the Bitcoin? Absolutely. Absolutely. You're in my will. But it's it's probably not. It'll be a little disappointed. Well, if it if it's after Q Day, I'm going to be very.