Patagonia founder’s move to give away his firm offers ‘a model for everybody’, says Salesforce boss

This year’s Dream­force claims to be the most sus­tain­able yet. At Sales­force’s annu­al flag­ship con­fer­ence in San Fran­cis­co, pork and beef are off the lunchtime menu, the esti­mat­ed 40,000 atten­dees have been issued with recy­clable badges and lan­yards, and inter­na­tion­al vis­i­tors can off­set their trav­el-relat­ed car­bon emis­sions.

Ear­li­er this year, the cloud ser­vices com­pa­ny ele­vat­ed sus­tain­abil­i­ty to one of its core com­pa­ny val­ues, along­side trust, cus­tomer suc­cess, inno­va­tion and equal­i­ty. Co-CEO and chair Marc Benioff says he wants the busi­ness to “be an exam­ple to oth­ers”.

“We want to show what’s pos­si­ble, but also demon­strate the prac­ti­cal things that we can all do to cre­ate a net-zero world, which is our ulti­mate goal,” he tells atten­dees.

One of the bar­ri­ers to reach­ing this ambi­tion is the cur­rent divi­sive nature of polit­i­cal dis­cus­sion. Speak­ing after his keynote speech along­side fel­low co-CEO Bret Tay­lor, Benioff men­tioned that he had to care­ful­ly con­sid­er how he com­mu­ni­cat­ed the sus­tain­abil­i­ty chal­lenge, “while not cre­at­ing a sit­u­a­tion that makes peo­ple feel that it’s polit­i­cal or is some­how out­side of what we can all do”.

This was unusu­al for the out­spo­ken busi­ness leader, who has pre­vi­ous­ly weighed in on polit­i­cal issues rang­ing from gun laws and abor­tion bans to the need to increase tax on the wealth­i­est – all of which remain con­tentious issues in the US.

How­ev­er, the tech bil­lion­aire – who has made dona­tions to both Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans in the past – has sought to be more guard­ed in shar­ing his polit­i­cal lean­ings since acquir­ing Time mag­a­zine in 2018. Benioff was also crit­i­cised at Salesforce’s annu­al meet­ing of stock­hold­ers on 9 June, for “using the com­pa­ny as his own polit­i­cal advo­ca­cy tool,” by one stock­hold­er.

“I think it [the polit­i­cal cli­mate] is too charged today, espe­cial­ly here in the US,” Benioff says. “We need to find a way to cre­ate a mid­dle path, to inte­grate every­body into this [sus­tain­abil­i­ty] dis­cus­sion with­out them feel­ing that they’re tak­ing sides on what could, poten­tial­ly, feel like a par­ti­san issue.”

Becoming an ecopreneur

One com­pa­ny founder who has always worn his envi­ron­men­tal­ism on his sleeve is Yvon Chouinard. Last week, the Patag­o­nia founder gave his com­pa­ny away to a char­i­ta­ble trust ded­i­cat­ed to com­bat­ing cli­mate change and the fash­ion brand now lists the Earth as “its only share­hold­er”.

Benioff describes Chouinard’s actions as “amaz­ing”, adding that he pro­vides “a mod­el for every­body” to fol­low. How­ev­er, the Sales­force co-founder envi­sions a dif­fer­ent strat­e­gy for his com­pa­ny to fol­low in its efforts to tack­le the cli­mate cri­sis.

“He [Chouinard] obvi­ous­ly did that in a moment in his life when he was ready to,” he says. “At Sales­force we have anoth­er oppor­tu­ni­ty, besides cre­at­ing a foun­da­tion or cre­at­ing wealth, which is to actu­al­ly help our cus­tomers under­stand the issue.”

Sales­force already pledges 1% of its equi­ty, time and prod­uct to char­i­ta­ble organ­i­sa­tions and has claimed to be net zero across all emis­sions scopes since 2021. It also pro­vides tech­nol­o­gy solu­tions to help busi­ness­es reach net zero. Its Net Zero Cloud helps busi­ness­es mea­sure and track their green­house gas emis­sions, while the new­ly announced Net Zero Mar­ket­place pro­vides a plat­form for the pur­chas­ing of car­bon cred­its.

Benioff believes these are two areas where busi­ness­es are strug­gling to under­stand their impacts. He says: “When I go around the world to talk to peo­ple about sus­tain­abil­i­ty, they don’t under­stand car­bon maths, what the num­bers are and in which areas they can take action to make a dif­fer­ence.”

Pursuing ‘tree diplomacy’

Out­side Sales­force, Benioff’s oth­er com­pa­ny Time launched CO2.com yes­ter­day (20 Sep­tem­ber), which he describes as “the easy but­ton for reach­ing net zero for small and medi­um-size com­pa­nies”. The new com­pa­ny divi­sion, led by Time pres­i­dent of sus­tain­abil­i­ty Simon Mulchay, will act as a guide for busi­ness­es seek­ing to reduce their car­bon foot­print with­out rely­ing on car­bon off­sets. Off­sets are often crit­i­cised for mere­ly shift­ing the prob­lem, rather than pre­vent­ing it at source.

Through his work with the World Eco­nom­ic Forum, Benioff and his wife Lynne have helped to fund the envi­ron­men­tal organ­i­sa­tions Friends of Ocean Action and 1t.org, an ini­tia­tive that aims to con­serve, restore and plant 1 tril­lion trees by 2030. It is esti­mat­ed that such an effort could sequester 200 giga­tons of car­bon (for per­spec­tive 1 giga­ton is equal to 1 bil­lion met­ric tons).

Such ven­tures have led Benioff to describe him­self as an ‘eco­pre­neur’ and he believes that trees in par­tic­u­lar could play a key role in address­ing the grow­ing par­ti­san­ship in rela­tion to com­bat­ing the cli­mate cri­sis. “Trees are some­thing that peo­ple can real­ly come togeth­er around — we can have tree diplo­ma­cy,” he says. 

Con­tin­u­ing along the bipar­ti­san polit­i­cal lines, Benioff went on to express his grat­i­tude to for­mer US pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump for sign­ing the coun­try up to the tril­lion trees ini­tia­tive in 2020, as well as cur­rent pres­i­dent Joe Biden for his actions on cli­mate change under­tak­en through the fed­er­al bud­get and the Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act.

Ulti­mate­ly, Benioff believes that “if we don’t all come togeth­er on the cli­mate then we’re going to have a very unfor­tu­nate sit­u­a­tion on our hands.”