The past few months have been spectacular for billionaire Marc Benioff and his 16-year-old company, Salesforce.
Benioff has long been known as one of the most flamboyant, philanthropic, larger-than-life personalities in the tech industry.
Things have been really going his way lately. His company is currently on fire. And he's begun to use his clout as a vehicle for social change far beyond the tech sphere.
He helped invent a $106 billion market
Marc Benioff is regarded as a visionary. He helped create a whole new category of tech called "software-as-a-service."
That's a form of cloud computing where companies rent their software over the Internet, instead of installing it on their own computers.
Businesses are expected to spend $106 billion on SaaS in 2016, according to a Goldman Sachs study.
He kept his dream alive by force of will
Marc Benioff is considered a marketing genius, too.
The concept he helped invent, software-as-a-service (SaaS), almost died at birth. Shortly after Salesforce.com launched, the Internet bubble burst, and the idea was declared a loser.
By force of will, and plenty of gorilla marketing tactics, Benioff made this market happen. Today every major software company is chasing him, including huge companies like Oracle, Microsoft and SAP.
He's about to lead Salesforce to a major milestone
Marc Benioff is breaking records with the growth of his company.
Salesforce ended its last fiscal year with $5.37 billion in revenue. Over $5 billion in revenue is a big milestone for a 100% cloud-computing company.
Now he's promising that Salesforce will soon double that and become the fastest enterprise software company EVER to deliver $10 billion in revenue. He says he has $9 billion already under contract.
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