 Good morning class of 2015 My name is Natasha Chowdhury, and I'm the vice president of the senior class council I'm graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Peace and Conflict Studies and a minor in Luso-Brazilian Language and Literature On behalf of the senior class. I am honored to introduce our keynote speaker today As many of you know, Mr. Mark Benioff is the founder and CEO of Salesforce since its inception in 1999 Salesforce has served as an inspiration for growing software companies by creating new models for technology business Corporate philanthropy and management They are currently the fastest growing top 10 software company in the world and the number one customer relationship management platform As its leader, Mr. Benioff has been recognized as business person of the year by Fortune magazine one of the best CEOs in the world by Barons and Also received the Economist Innovation Award Mr. Benioff's entrepreneurial spirit took shape when he was 15 and founded his first company Liberty Software a Bay Area native he attended Burlingame High School and funded his college education at USC with his company's earnings But he didn't stop there. Mr. Benioff continued to manage his company out of his dorm room and worked two summer jobs with Apple while earning a Bachelor's of Science in Business Administration During his first internship at Apple, Mr. Benioff was inspired by the culture created by Steve Jobs As he says in his book behind the cloud, it was like getting paid to go to Disneyland To the same effect, I was inspired by Mr. Benioff's advice to gain real-world experience through my focusing on building relationships with customers After reading his book, I solidified my post graduation plans to stay in work and sales in the Bay Area After his graduation from USC Mark Benioff returned to his Bay Area roots by accepting a full-time job with Oracle While at Oracle, Mr. Benioff's career rose quickly and he became the youngest person to hold the title of vice president within the company As the CEO of Salesforce, Mr. Benioff has used his influence to advocate for social justice issues This past March, he cancelled all of Salesforce's events in Indiana as an active protest against the state's religious freedom Restoration Act, which allows businesses to deny services to same-sex couples Within his own company, Mr. Benioff has worked to provide equal pay for women and has created a program to elevate more women to leadership roles The perseverance and values that Mr. Benioff has demonstrated throughout his career Aligned with the principles that we as UC Berkeley students value most Without further ado, it is my pleasure to welcome our keynote speaker for the class of 2015, Mr. Mark Benioff All right. Well, hello Golden Bears and good. What an incredible day it is here Well, thank you Chancellor Dirks and esteemed professors and alumni and Parents and grandparents and family members and thank you Natasha for that great welcome I am delighted and honored to be here today with all of you and To our seniors assembled here today recovering from your final exams Late nights at Kipps and all-nighters at Moffitt Library Congratulations on graduating from UC Berkeley the number one public university in the world You've achieved something special and now I hope you will be part of the amazing tradition and values of UC Berkeley graduates who have made a difference in the world and Who have made the world a better place? Not to put any pressure on you But as you might know Berkeley faculty alumni and researchers have won 72 Nobel Prizes 7 Fields medals 18 Turing Awards 11 Pulitzer Prizes and 20 Academy Awards, of course you Don't need to win a prestigious award to make a difference You don't need to win awards to make the world a better place But as Chancellor Dirks Just told me it wouldn't hurt So I'm looking forward to hearing about the results of the class of 2015 Look it was nearly 30 years ago that I graduated from another California University a little bit south from here But you'll be happy to know was not Stanford We can agree on that point My family has very deep roots here on this campus both of my grandmothers graduated right here at UC Berkeley Thank you. I was just with my grandmother who will turn 103 this year as Well as one of my uncles my many cousins, so I absolutely consider myself a part of the Berkeley family But my alma mater does have a great football team as you all found out this season So I'm happy to root for the Bears as long as they're not playing the USC Trojans My post graduation celebration was quite brief Just two days after graduating I was working for a young company a few miles from here called Oracle And some of you may have heard of it now, but I actually hadn't at the time Early on I knew that I wanted to be part of the software industry as Natasha mentioned in her Introduction during high school and college. I programmed and sold video games Fantasy adventures with crazy names like escape from Volkans Island and King Arthur's air that ran on computers from ancient times long ago Unfortunately the supercomputers we all have in our pockets were more than 20 years in the future Now I was also lucky to work at Apple during my summer breaks and that was an amazing experience as Natasha mentioned and when I Joined the team at Oracle the company had just gone public as had Microsoft And it was also the same the year that Sun Microsystems, which was founded by Cal grads went public Oracle's revenue was just about 50 million dollars and within three years it grew more than tenfold It was a rocket ship and my own career was taking off But after 13 years I wanted to start my own company You know, I felt strongly in my heart There must be more to the values of business than what I was experiencing at Oracle. I Came to the realization that companies can do much much more Than just build and sell products They can be platforms for change They can tap into much higher values and they can improve the state of the world So when I started my company in 1999, I made a commitment to three things one a new technology model now known as the cloud to a new pay-as-you-go model with a single-minded focus on making customers successful and three a New philanthropic model deeply integrated into our company focused on improving the state of the world That day that we started sales force We took 1% of our equity 1% of our employees time and 1% of our product and put it into a 501c3 public charity called sales force foundation Of course creating a charitable foundation didn't mean much at the time. We had no product We had no employees and there was no equity It turned out to be the best decision I ever made in my career Today sales force is the fastest business software company ever to reach five billion revenue And our dream and commitment is to be the fastest to ten billion as well And with that success our foundation has also been a rocket ship It has been able to give 25,000 nonprofits and NGOs including I just heard Patrick Free licenses to our software our employees have volunteered close to a million hours in our Communities and we've distributed nearly a hundred million dollars in grants We integrate our foundation work into everything we do and when new employees show up for their first day of work We show them where their deaths are Yes, we even introduced them to their colleagues and we even show them where the kitchen is and Then we take them out and we spend the afternoon outside of our office Volunteering in a homeless shelter a soup kitchen a K-12 school a children's hospital or doing something for someone else Now thank you Do we do this? Why do we do this? Well, it's who we are It's core to our cultural values We know that as a business from our early days when we struggled even to find customers until now It's the right thing to do we can only do well by good doing good And I know that the best and brightest like you Who are graduating here today are looking for more than a paycheck Though one would not hurt You want to have meaning in your work You want to work for companies that value all stakeholders not just shareholders concerned with earnings per share But every employee every customer every part of our community and even our environment All of these things are the stakeholders that are critical to the success of business. I Can assure you that global warming failing school systems lack of equal pay and Our way too low minimum wage are not good for business We have 16,000 incredible employees around the world who volunteer their time to make the world a better place And if you haven't landed a job yet and want to change the world you can email me at CEO at Salesforce or tweet me at bennie off and We've been already lucky to hire a hundred Cal grads So we'd love for you to join us too Now here we are in Berkeley beautiful here with its great history of civic engagement its chancellor steeped in the values of India and of course civil disobedience In the 1960s The free speech movement took on this university as the country was struggling to pass civil rights Act Which would end a discrimination based on color race religion sex or national origin? one thing I didn't mention when I started our Company 16 years ago, and I couldn't even imagine this was even possible Was that Salesforce would be embroiled in a national debate on equality and civil rights? But as Natasha mentioned just two months ago. We landed right in the middle of one In 2013 a couple years ago. We bought a company for two and a half billion dollars Which made us the biggest tech employer in Indiana a long way from Berkeley I Received a call from the head of our team in Indianapolis with concerns about a bill making its way through the Indiana Legislature the governor Pence Was considering whether to sign the religious freedom restoration Act into law? as written it would be allow businesses to discriminate against gay Discriminate against lesbians discriminate against bisexuals and discriminate against transgender peoples a Coffee shop could not post a sign No gays no lesbians served here That was amazing to me now of course I here I am my office is in San Francisco the summer of love The home of gay rights, I cannot imagine that we would have an office in the city With a sign in the window that said no gays and no lesbians served here that to me was like turning the back clock back 60 years You don't have to watch the movie Selma to see what discrimination looks like in this country You can see it all too often in our country in our government leaders and around the world And I knew and I liked Governor Mike Pence. I never thought there was a chance. He would sign that darn legislation It was unfathomable to me that those were his values But I didn't know it was in his heart So imagine my surprise a week later when I was driving home to San Francisco From an event at the computer history museum. I lined I learned he signed that bill into law. I Was incensed I? Was in the back of this car driving down to 80 and I just got so pissed I just tweeted we are forced to dramatically reduce our investment in Indiana based on our employees and customers Outrage over the religious freedom bill and the next morning. I tweeted again today We are canceling all programs that require our customers employees to travel to Indiana to face discrimination. I couldn't imagine Asking my customers are asking my employees to go to a state that would discriminate against him It was incredulous to me needless to say those tweets got some attention Later that night. I emailed some of my friends in Silicon Valley to let them know about the issue I have a few friends it turns out And When they learn more about it, they were just upset as I was and they started tweeting sending emails They even went on TV and saying this cannot stand. I Had no idea where all this was going. This was not familiar territory to me It was not what I learned in business school, but something big was unfolding in real time I was just doing what was right for our employees and our customers I was just trying to protect them from this misguided law But more than a hundred tech leaders responded to the situation nationwide they called for LGBT non-discrimination protections and dozens of very large companies like Apple and Levi's Marriott Microsoft Nike Eli Lilly Cummings engine they all stood up in opposition to the law It was an unstoppable force a powerful campaign aimed at overturning the law and when within a week Within a week Governor Pence signed an amending law. He changed the law He had to he had to take a step forward and he had to protect the rights of the LGBT community in Indiana this experience showed me that when companies and When businesses and when leaders and when individuals engage in civic issues They can be powerful platforms for change They can give voice to those who cannot be heard and a few weeks later I became aware of another important issue affecting our employees It was brought to my attention that there was a possibility that some women in our company were being paid less than men That goes completely against our values who we are and why we started our company to begin with I knew this was a problem in general for our society that there's some unconscious bias That favors men in business, but I didn't consider that could possibly happen in our company So now we're going salary by salary for all of our 16,000 employees to sure that every woman at the company Is fairly paid and has the absolute same opportunity as every man one man booed Like Indiana This is an example of how we can not accept anything less than a quality for all Equality for all It's how we need to question every assumption we make I've learned that companies can be platforms for change Platforms for change in their culture and values platforms for change through technology Platforms for change through improving education through protecting our environment and through doing good deeds But that's not all I also learned that it wasn't just companies as platforms for change It was every employee. It was myself It was every teacher every worker every government leader and that all of us need to realize our role in improving the state of Our world by using my voice and my values I was able to affect change and so can you and That's my message for you today graduates each one of you has received an amazing education the best in the world You're leaving with a highly prized degree from this incredible university and in fact It's not winning one of those awards or accolades. That's important It's the values of this university that are important the things that took root here in the 60s The values of disruption of change of advocacy for equal rights of giving back It's applying our knowledge experience our energy To make the world a better place We live in the most amazing time with incredible progress and said science and technology And at the same time we have lots of perils in the world societal perils like income inequality and global conflicts Environmental perils with our oceans getting polluted with plastics and getting clear-cutted and too much carbon in our atmosphere creating global warming and Technological perils with coming rapid advances and artificial intelligence with unknown outcomes But I am confident that we have a bright future That we can overcome these challenges because each of you our future leaders Instilled with the values of this great University UC Berkeley will be a platform for change class of 2015 You are the people who are gonna change the world for the better make it happen. Thank you and go bears