At the age of 55, Silicon Valley’s Marc Benioff has accumulated a wife, multiple homes, 36,000 employees, a net worth of nearly $7bn and a ridiculously long list of accolades. The founder of the Salesforce software company has been named the decade’s top innovator (by Forbes), one of the world’s greatest leaders (Fortune) and one of the best-performing chief executives (Harvard Business Review).
But back in 1996, Mr Benioff was lying in bed in San Francisco with no will to get up, feeling lost. He had a brilliant job at the Oracle software giant, where he was the group’s youngest ever vice-president. He drove a fast car. He had a big salary. But he was so out of sorts that his boss, Oracle’s co-founder, Larry Ellison, told him to do something baffling: take three months off on a sabbatical.
“I didn’t really know what the word ‘sabbatical’ meant,” Mr Benioff wrote in his new book, Trailblazer. He took off to India where he came up with the seeds of the idea for his own company. By 1999, he had started Salesforce and begun his relentless march to tech triumph. That puts Mr Benioff in an interesting club of successful people I keep coming across who, at a reasonably important point in their careers, have left their striving peers behind and headed off to see the world.
