Salesforce’s Marc Benioff is raising the bar as a woke CEO

You might call Marc Benioff a “woke CEO”: His willingness to use his voice, reputation — and Twitter account — as a megaphone for good and for social impact put him at the forefront of a generation of entrepreneurs who have figured out that business is the best platform for change. And Benioff has quite a platform: This year, Salesforce leaped over the $10 billion revenue milestone, one of only four enterprise software companies to do so.

A 35-year veteran of the software industry — he worked for 13 years at Oracle and, before that, at Apple — Benioff is one of the pioneers of cloud computing, founding Salesforce in 1999 with a cloud-based technology model, a pay-as-you-go business model and an integrated corporate philanthropy model. He instituted a company-wide salary assessment to ensure that men and women were being paid equally for comparable work, and has an ongoing commitment to Bay Area public schools.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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