Until 1999, Marc Benioff had been with Oracle for more than 10 years.
He had a lucrative salary and addictive stock options.
But since 1996, he wanted to do something of his own. For the last 3 years, he has been thinking about getting out of corporate life.
A sabbatical from work and a trip to India helped him gain mental clarity. He realized that he wanted to build a business through which he could give back to the world.
In 1999, he started his company Salesforce.com.
By 2009, he drove Salesforce’s revenue to more than $1 billion.
In the past, I’ve spent over 30 days exploring his journey to build Salesforce. Here are five of his weird strategies for growing a startup.
1. You need to position yourself as a visionary
Programmers starting their company for the first time have wrong assumptions about customers.
They think that customers only want to buy from established brands. But this is not true.