Behind the founder: Marc Benioff

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Visit enterpret.com slash Lenny to connect with the team and get two free months when you sign up for an annual plan. This is a limited time offer. That's interpret.com slash Lenny. Mark, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Excited to finally get connected with you and excited to do this podcast with you too. I'm even more excited. And I actually want to start with something that I think most people don't know about you, but to me is almost like a microcosm of how far ahead you look and almost how basically how visionary you are. And that's that you've owned a number of epic domain names. For example, bill.com, u.com, code.com, appstore.com. First of all, are there others? I don't know.

There's a lot. Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com. That all came from, you know, I'll tell you, it's a good story, actually, because, you know, what happened was I was working at Oracle for 10 years from 1986 and 1996 rolled around like it was a snap of the fingers. And all of a sudden I realized, whoa, what has just happened to the last decade? It just this decade just flew by. It was crazy. And it was a big moment for me in my career. And I had a, you know, it was a huge acceleration. I went from being, you know, a kid right out of college to working for Larry Ellison. And but after 10 years, I was pretty trashed.

And so I said to Larry, hey, I need to go and, you know, take some time off. And so I went to Hawaii and rented a little house on the beach. And I had done some angel investing. And it was kind of a cool moment where some of my companies started to go public, including Siebel Systems and others and Saba Software. and people I had met at Oracle like Tom Siebel and Bobby Azdani. And then I was just fascinated at that point with the Internet. I had been working on it at Oracle for a couple years, so I started buying a bunch of domain names of companies that I thought companies. They weren't companies yet.

Now they are companies. But ideas that I thought the names would be great companies one day and reflected where I thought things were going. And, yeah, it's a long time ago now. You know, it's a really long, long time ago, I think almost 30 years.

at the center of so much of this him helping you you helping him just wanting to help each other it's he's a very generous person and um i'll tell you that he never turned down anything that i asked him to do and um i have so many stories but one one story was i was i was thinking about buying this house. And I wasn't sure, should I buy this house? Should I not buy this house?

Whatever. And so he went, he said, I'll go look at it for you. You know? And so he went and he's looking at this house and then he calls me and he goes, well, I don't know if you should do this or that, but this might be good. Maybe it is good. Maybe it is a good idea. And then I'm, you know, emailing with him after that. And, you know, he's very sick and it's all very sad. And then he sends me an email and the last email he sent to me was he said, I said, wow, well, that this, this, this, this has worked out better than I thought. And he goes, Mark, everything has worked out so much better than we could have ever imagined.

And it was just a beautiful thought and incredibly sad all at the same moment. And that was my last correspondence with him. I feel like we could do Steve Jobs stories all day. Oh, I know. I have. I could do hours. I have a lot of Steve Jobs stories. oh man but um yeah anyway those are a couple of them by the way i also love that he had like b2b sass advice like here you need a big customer you need to hide that he hated those he hated sass and he hated that i was doing enterprise software he's trying to talk me out of being an enterprise software executive he's like now mark what are you going to do you're going to go home and tell your kids that you're working on enterprise software who do you sell to cios have you had met them how can you be doing this what i can't imagine a more horrible career I'm like, I love it, Steve.

No, Mark, you cannot love this. This is not great. It was really a funny thing. He really disliked that, but yet he was incredibly supportive of me. He would call me all the time. It was really amazing, actually. It feels like a place he was wrong in the end here, which is cool to know. I want to go in a different direction. He was rarely wrong. He was rarely wrong. If he had to be sassed, $350 billion of value, he would have only existed. um speaking of that so i want to zoom back to the beginning of salesforce and when you launched salesforce it's crazy to think back to that when basically you had to you were trying to convince people the future of software was not desktop software it was going to be in the cloud it was sass you had all these end of software logos you had mascots walking around there's no software thing you hired fake protesters at i think it was siebel's conference like it was very hard i think I think you read one of my books, Lenny.

I know the history of a lot of these things. It's one of the most legendary launch events in startup history. So I've heard of it many times at this point. It was a crazy moment. I mean, Sebulb, who was really the enterprise software company doing CRM, was doing kind of a user conference. And I was looking for an opportunity to kind of launch our product. So we hired a bunch of actors. And they were doing this event. in San Francisco and, you know, San Francisco is very woke. So, you know, nobody, you know, people expect a protest, a good protest. So we had a, got some picket signs at Home Depot and made some signs, you know, that said the end of software is near, you know, and all kinds of other, no software and all these things.

We had a lot of funny things on signs and we ran a, we were running a protest outside of Siebel that they were in the software business, but we were like, oh no. you know we've got to get out of software we got to create the end of software and so we have picketers outside of the streets anyway he comes out himself out of the building and is really gets super upset and right then we hit a button and we have other actors in a van who come out and they are staging a, uh, themselves as news crew. So they are like K NMS, no more K, no more software. And we're like, they're interviewing the protesters. So now he thinks that it's a media thing.

He calls the police. He got very upset. He's a great guy, by the way, I love Tom Siebel. He's, you know, we're, I think he's also one of the great entrepreneurs of our generation. And he's just fuming and he doesn't know what's going on he doesn't exactly know it's us and we're just having the best time and that night we had our huge launch event um at one of the top theaters in san francisco and we hired um a great band and uh it was really we just had so much fun it was just it was just a really great time that was all happened i remember very well it was february 22nd of 2001 or 2000, 2000, February 22nd, 2000.

I love this. I haven't heard that interview, the reporter part of that story before. It was kind of crazy. I love it. And it sounds frivolous potentially, but I think the genius of this that I want to touch on is... Frivolous is a good word. It probably was frivolous. So what I imagine is you were trying to get people to even know Salesforce exists, to differentiate, to get the name out. And I feel like that's something a lot of founders struggle with. They don't really know how to get their name out,

experimentation and we can't be too arrogant. I think another thing that's extremely important is, you know, I have a pretty deep meditation practice for three, four decades, which is we have to be cultivating our beginner's mind. We have to kind of use our mindfulness in a way to kind of clear everything out and then kind of get back to what is my beginner's mind.

you know in the beginner's mind i have every possibility but in the expert's mind i have few and in some cases maybe none so i've been doing this a long time i've been writing software since i'm 15 i'm now 60 that's 45 years i don't want to have an expert's mind i want to have a beginner's mind and how do i have that beginner's mind because those ideas will come at me if i can go what are, what could work rather than saying, oh, I know what is going to work, or this is the one thing that is going to definitely work, or we have to do this. As soon as you start using words like that, you know that you're going to completely implode and fail. You have to say, here, we have to do all these things. Like in my company right now, like we just did this all hands call. I was like, there's six things I really want to get done. But like, one thing is I didn't get everybody focused on agent force and like really watch the energy number two is i need to find more fuel in the company to fuel this idea because this is a clearly a breakthrough product so how do i get everyone focused on it number number three where i think it's really important we need more distribution capability we don't we don't sell through franchises we're not selling you know

through dealers you know resellers we sell direct so i know i need more account executives and number four is i need to be telling lots of customer stories so number one customer zero me and number two is i need to tell you all the stories like you can see the story of disney i'm doing a huge amount of ai work for them and agent force work let me tell you the story about disney and i need to tell you that story and then we have this whole ecosystem of people around the company called trailblazers millions of them who know our platform they all have to become agent blazers. And the last thing is I just shipped the product into all 135,000 Salesforce customers.

So it's their nascent and they need to flick it on. I need to motivate them to turn it on. Like these are the six things I'm thinking about all the time. So it's not just one thing. I'm trying to figure out what it is and I need a beginner's mind to kind of assess how do I, how do I move forward? How, how do I evolve? How do I inspire? How do I motivate? How do I energize? This episode is brought to you by Coda. I use Coda every day to coordinate my podcasting and newsletter workflows. From collecting questions for guests, to storing all my research, to managing my newsletter content calendar, Coda is my go-to app and has been for years.

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Head over to coda.io slash Lenny and sign up to get six free months of the team plan. That's coda.io slash Lenny to sign up and get six months of the team plan. coda.io slash Lenny. I love this idea of beginner's mind. I imagine it's very difficult to operationalize, especially for a company at 25 years old at this point. other than obviously, like obviously you meditate, you put a lot of effort and focus into building this. It's hard to do that within a company. Is there anything you do with meetings, with leadership, with the way you operate that kind of spreads this way of thinking within the org?

Well, Salesforce is now the second largest software company in the world, but also the second largest software company in Japan. And that's a country where I put a lot of time and energy into. I love going there and I love going to Kyoto. And when I go to Kyoto, I like to go to some of these amazing Zen temples. And by the way, that's one of the things that Steve Jobs loved to do. And he used to go to these great sushi restaurants. There's a great one in Kyoto named Sushi Iwa. And if you go in there, you'll see he's signed something for them. It says, all good things, Steve Jobs. And I said, what did he do?

He would go to this great sushi restaurant, and then he would go to Ryoenji, the rock garden temple. Incredible metaphysical temple. and I go, I've gone there, I've gone there for decades. I brought a lot of friends of mine there and yeah, you got to clear your mind and let, let it come in, you know, you got to receive it. You need to listen. I remember I even brought Neil Young there. The musician, you know, is one of my favorite people in the world. And obviously I love his music. This is his soundtrack. This is the soundtrack of my entire life. And we were sitting there and he was so deep in meditation shit. And then he started walking around and the temple was closing. And then like he was in the zone and I didn't want to bother him, but I'm like, you know, I think we got to go. Anyway, it turned out he had written a whole album while we were there in his head. And he was, you know, basically transcribing it all. It was incredible creative process. Look, we're all writing an album in our head. We're all, you know, what album are you writing? What music are you writing?

How are you getting into that zone yourself? If you're in a great aunt, you want to be a great entrepreneur. You want to be a great CEO. You got to clear your mind and you got to be ready, okay, to write that music. And that music could be your business plan, your product plan, you know, your product launch plan, like we're talking about for my agent force product. But that's what we're all trying to do. And I use a place like Kyoto as a place to do that also, because geography is important. Where you are matters. You know, I know you're in Marin, So Marin County, maybe you go out to the top of Mount Tam, you know, maybe you go to Spirit Rock with Jack Kornfield, you know, and go kind of clear your mind there.

But you got to find the place to do that and create the location. It may not be in the office. It may be somewhere else. By the way, you have the most amazing friends list. All these folks you mentioned. Okay. I don't know how long this goes. They are cool. I am lucky that I've met a lot of cool people. Yeah. I don't know how I got so lucky to meet some of these people. I want to zoom out a little bit and talk about every month or so, I hear about a startup. I do a bunch of angel investing that's trying to basically disrupt Salesforce, come after Salesforce. They bash your, don't kill me for saying this, user experience.

They're like, oh, it's so complicated. It's been around for 25 years. We are too complicated. I agree. Okay. I'm curious just what you believe has most contributed to you being able to stay on top and continue to grow. like we're recording this today and your stock is at an all-time high basically even wow i didn't even know that roughly i actually never look at the stock okay i find the stock to be very distracting and i encourage my employees also don't look at the stock because you know the stock is just a reflection money isn't the isn't isn't isn't the isn't the goal right it the stock isn't the goal it it's it's coming at the end of the journey you know it's like that's not why we're doing this. You know, the journey is the reward. That's also something Steve Jobs would say all the time. Another bow to Steve Jobs here. I think that this is like really important. And you know, I look at myself as a startup. I am a startup CEO. I am a startup entrepreneur.

This is, I'm still at the beginning of Salesforce. And no matter what I'm doing at Salesforce, whether I'm the CEO, I'm sometimes the chairman of the board. Like last week, we had a board meeting, sometimes a product manager. This is a startup, and we're a 25-year-old, 75,000 person, $38 billion, $300-something billion market cap startup. But we're a startup nonetheless, and we have some great products, but we are just starting. And as an example, Lenny, we are just starting the digital labor industry, and we have a product called Agent Force, and we are just starting. We are just at the beginning. I want to bounce around a little bit, but let's talk about agent force. I know this is, as you've said, the thing you're most focused on right now. It's a big bet you all are taking. When people hear this word agent, I think a lot of people are kind of embarrassed to even ask, what does that even look like? What is an agent other than beyond what LLMs are today? Is there an example you could give of something you've seen that maybe blew your mind of what an agent can do? Yeah, I saw it in the movies. I saw it in Minority Report, which was a movie that was co-written by our futurist, Peter Schwartz.

And, you know, Tom Cruise runs into the Gap store and, you know, all of a sudden it says, hey, hey, Tom, you know, have you thought about this new shirt? Look at these jeans. You bought this last time. Now you could try this. You could try that. You know, what about this? What about that? And it knew his history. It understood him. It knew what was going on this 20 years ago. and, you know, this whole store changes digitally to reflect, you know, his interest, his ideas, and is starting to talk to him and work with him, that is an agent. You know, it isn't just the agent that we saw in the Matrix, you know, Mr. Smith or whatever it is. It's someone that's working with you, someone. That's an interesting for you in Slip. It's something that is working with you. Could be your piece of software in your phone. Could be a robot that's going to be in your home, could be a car that is, you know, knows you, understands your preferences, has an institutional memory of you, and now is helping to advise you.

And I'll give you an example that, you know, I'm going to have, I go into UCSF all the time as my, I'm actually just getting through an Achilles rupture right now. So I've had a lot of interactions and, you know, the hospital or you're getting your healthcare, getting your labs done, getting your physical done, getting your scans done, whatever it is. and there's always these pre-operative and post-operative or pre-procedure and post-procedure things, and you're getting these phone calls. And every time I get a phone call, I'm like, oh, that probably just cost them a hundred bucks. And we probably could do that a lot cheaper and a lot easier with an agent. And then when I talk to my doctors and nurses at UCSF, they're all burnt out post-pandemic because they're scheduling pajama time to go through all their digital messages at night. It's like a lot of this could be done a lot easier with agents and AI, and we're going to make their lives a lot better, a lot easier, simpler. And some of those things that they're doing, they don't need to talk to me about what my cholesterol number is because I got my labs and the cholesterol number is this number or that number. You know, a lot of this can be done

with technology and then save the parts that are important for them. Like when I come to see them or I want to have a real deeper, you know, more empathetic conversation face-to-face with, you know, a deeply experienced doctor. That's a whole nother opportunity for me. That is an agent or the agent is like, here's an example. Like I had a CT scan and you have to drink this contrast. And then all of a sudden the contrary, you don't drink it, but they give it to you through an IV and then they're taking better pictures, but then you have to drink water to flush the contrast out of your body. And do you think anyone called me and said, Hey, do you drink the water? No, nobody calls me to drink the water. You know, you have to remember you're on your own in healthcare in the U.S. So the agent's going to call you and say, hey, did you drink the water?

Did you take your meds? You know, do you need to have a repeat lab? You need to go see your doctor again. So the agent is going to be there by your side. So that's a healthcare example. There's a lot of examples that we can probably have. There was just a story in the New York Times, which isn't about agents specifically. It was about comparing ChatGPT to a doctor where they tested a doctor's ability to diagnose versus a chat GPT directly or a doctor plus chat GPT. And by far, the best was just chat GPT, removing the doctor from the equation. Yeah, they wrote up a clinical study where they actually did kind of looked at in a semi kind of peer reviewed way that chat GPT in many cases was giving more accurate diagnoses than a doctor because the doctor had a more bias coming in, working with the patient. So that's super interesting. And I think something that we should probably all look at that study and think about that. Speaking of the New York Times, there's actually this quote I found. You did this op-ed talking about AI. So the quote is, throughout my career in Silicon Valley, I've witnessed numerous waves of innovation, but none compared to the profound impact of AI. AI is the defining technology of our lifetime

and probably any lifetime. When was kind of the moment for you where you started to realize this, where it's like, oh shit, this is not just another cool toy. Well, I keep having these kind of existential freak out moments about AI and it's happened over a series of decades. But for those of us who grew up with these movies like War Games and Monori Report, you know, or Her or across the board or read some of these books, you know, like one of my favorite books on AI is Ghost Fleet. And, you know, you think about where are we going with AI? Where are we going with AI? And, you know, with Salesforce, I think about, you know, our journey, and I've been waiting for this to happen and, you know, trying to bring us along, especially in the last decade with the development of our Einstein platform and now the development of our AgentForce platform.

This week at Salesforce, we'll probably do about 2 trillion AI transactions, you know, with our, you know, total now Einstein and AgentForce platforms. We're definitely the largest provider of enterprise AI transactions in the world, as far as I can tell. And I keep thinking, wow, this is going to get more and more, you know, intense. And one step was we had to automate all these customer touch points. So I like wearing my Disney Fanboy shirt here. Yeah, we run the Disney Store and the Disney Guides and there's Disney Real Estate and there's the Disney Plus Call Center. And there's every aspect of Disney when you're a customer, you're interfacing with Salesforce.

So that's what we've loved doing, automating all these customer touch points, sales, service, marketing, analytics, Slack, integrating it all with MuleSoft. That's what we do. And then aggregating it all into a big database where we call it data cloud and then federating that data cloud to other data sources. So that's the two steps we've been doing. Automate the customer touch points, aggregate the data. And then step three is the agentic platform on top of that. And when you think about what's happening now that you can go to help.salesforce.com and have your issues resolved with that on the agentic layer, that's amazing.

And then the fourth layer that will come will be the robotic drone layer, where those robots and drones will then feed off of the platform and all of these capabilities. And that vision of the future is something that we've all had in the industry, you know, for years. It's not my magic vision. This is a vision that's been around. It's been the fundamentals of computer science that we would move from having, we'd go from this kind of from data to automation. and that is what we're all driving and we're driving that industry we're going lower cost easier to use and more automated constantly and that's powerful like this is really moving fast you mentioned Einstein briefly I'll also mention my dog is named Einstein and I got Einstein swag ones with the the socks and I love them so and also that's also an example of you bought Einstein.com or very early.

That was another domain name that you owned. Well, I just thought Einstein would be a great name to talk about artificial intelligence. And it really has been there. You can see him behind me right on my shelf, on my bookshelf. I keep him back there. You see Einstein? I can go grab him. Oh, I'll go grab him. Okay, let's check it out. Here he is. Show and tell segment podcast. Oh, cute. Yeah. That was a big old Einstein. And that's a key part of our vision for Salesforce. Our Einstein platform is everything we're doing. We wouldn't get to agent force without getting to good old Einstein here. Very cute.

As you talk about all this, I imagine many people are thinking, oh, shit, we're not going to have as many people working. What are we going to do with our jobs, AIs, agents? I know anything you say could be taken way out of context and just like Mark Benioff says everyone's not working. But I guess just I know you've said you're not going to be hiring as many engineers next year. I guess anything there to help people understand how the workforce will change in the future? Well, I can tell you about like my own company and what I'm telling my own employees, which is that, yeah, we're going to have to rebalance some of our workforce because you can see it in the numbers I just gave you, which is we need less support engineers because we have a robotic support layer, you know, with AgentForce.

So that is, you know, very real and we all need to adapt. And at the same time, I'm hiring a lot more account executives and folks to grow the company. So I just encouraged everybody on the all hands call to think about that. And then I just gave you the idea of health care. The interesting thing about health care, though, is that a lot of the jobs that I think they're going to get created. Just we don't have people for. And I think there's a lot of things that we need help with in the world that we don't have people for. So I think a lot of these jobs will not necessarily get replaced. And I think that I have a home in a small town and in this small town, it's very much a blue collar town and folks are still working in their restaurants, driving trucks, working in the supermarket.

and, you know, working on their homes, building, construction, gardening. Look, it's going to be a long time before, you know, I think jobs in the small town where I have a home will ever get, you know, impacted. But in the large town where I have a home, San Francisco, well, then I just gave you an example where I think that jobs will get impacted. So it'll be a tale of two cities, literally. And I think you will see different impacts in different places. So what I'm hearing there is support people trending down, account executive sales trending up. Right now, that is Salesforce in a nutshell.

That touches on something I wanted to touch on also, which is that a lot of founders today are very product-minded, very product-oriented founders, and they want to build product-first companies, grow product-led, all these things. Salesforce, I think very publicly is very sales led, very marketing led, not product led. Obviously, product is a core part of it and it all works together and all these things. But I guess just any advice for founders that are very product oriented and maybe hesitant to lean into sales? I would say we're not sales led. Well, I think let's just use agent force as an example.

Right. So we're running the year. We're running this year. This is our fiscal year 25. OK. It ends in the end of January next year. and Lenny, you know, this is the year of data cloud. This was not supposed to be the year of agent force. So it's the year of data cloud. I just gave you the pitch. We've automated all the customer touch points. Now we're adding the data cloud to all of our customer implementations. We have 135,000 customers. We've implemented data cloud into all of them. They all need to turn it on. Our teams need to show our customers how to build data cloud and how it's going to help our customers have a better data structure.

They almost combine beta and data together. So they need a better data structure, data architectures, data cultures. And then we had our breakthrough. And I can tell you the story where all of a sudden I'm like, wow, this agent technology is happening much faster than I thought it was going to. And we are going to market now. And by the time we get to Dreamforce, we are going to take this incredible technology. We accelerated it radically because we bought this company called AirKit, which is one of our Ohana. You know, we, it's a great story. You know, we, great entrepreneur, um, have this company, fantastic company called Relate IQ that we bought many years ago, about 10 years ago, stayed with us for many years, like six or seven years.

Wanted to leave and said, great. We gave him the investment to leave, invested in the company through Salesforce Ventures. built this amazing platform. And then we said, now we want to buy it back. And then he came back about a year ago, and then it just accelerated the agent vision. And then we delivered Agent Force production code at the end of October. So all of a sudden now we are releasing this product. I think it's very important if you're an entrepreneur to realize it's not just about the product. It's not just about sales. It's not just about marketing. It's not just about accounting. It's not just about your investors. It's not just about your employees. It's not just about your stakeholders. It's about everything. So you better be ready to be an orchestra leader.

You can't just be playing the clarinet. And I think that's kind of what you're getting to, which is that there's entrepreneurs who are like, I'm just going to play the clarinet. And for those, I don't think they're going to go as far as they could go. You want to be playing the whole symphony and you want to get everyone running. And that symphony is sales, service, marketing, product, you know, every part of your shareholders, your stakeholders, your customers, you have to be constantly playing the whole symphony. And you have to have a big mind to think about, whoa, I have a lot of stakeholders in my company, not just one stakeholder. It's not just about product and technology. And if you're going to narrow cast yourself, you're doing a disservice, not just to yourself, but to everybody else as well. Speaking of big mind and beginner's mind, we have a recurring segment on this podcast that I call Fail Corner. And where it comes from is people come on this podcast, they share all these stories of everything's going great, we're killing it, I've had all these successes, and people get discouraged because they hear just like all the people only succeeding when they often fail. And so I try to ask guests to share

One of these people they described that jumped out of the airplane, kind of speaking on the roller coaster ride, is your co-CEO, Brett Taylor. And what's interesting to me is he's also all in on agents. And what it makes me think about is like, there's this meme of what did Ilya see when he left and tried to kick out Sam Altman. I'm curious, just like what did you guys see about agents being the future that you're both so committed to this? So interesting.

Well, I just think that this idea that agents are one of the most important things that we're all going to work on. And I think everyone is going to go to agents. So, you know, I look, I just heard about Google today has agent space, you know, and I what I first I was like, I guess they like the agent force name. I love Sundar. He's one of my favorite people in the world. you know um we heard microsoft now has agents or i read oracle has agents sap has agents everybody's got agents and good that's what we want we don't want to be the only one if you're the only one and no one else is working on it you've got a problem actually so you don't want to be the only one you want to be in a market you don't want to be one company offering a solution i'm the only one you want to be in a competitive market where people are competing with you and you're selling against somebody else and you're getting better and you're moving you know forward it's like the automobile industry you know one of my favorite people is um uh kira toyota toyota-san was now the chairman of toyota was the ceo of toyota's grandfather started toyota he says better better better never best you know it's it's the japanese motto of kaizen so we talked about japanese shoshin

which means beginner's mind. Now we're learning another Japanese word here, Kaizen. Kaizen is continuous improvement. And you need to be doing continuous improvement. And with where we are right now with agents, every software industry is going to move to agents. We have to, just like every software industry, well, at least in CRM, we're automating customer touchpoints, data and managing data and data building that data infrastructure agents. It's all related. We're all moving in the same direction. I'm just thinking as a founder, you're just like, God damn, I just got used to AI and everyone's wanting to work on AI in my company. Now we got to freaking figure out agents. No, no, no, no, no. That's a mistake. So that is the mindset you want.

But you want that mindset. You want the mindset of, oh, the next thing is coming. I can't wait for the next thing. In some ways, you have to be saying, I can't wait for the next failure. I can't wait for the next success. I can't wait for the next innovation. Oh, well, that's innovation overall, right? See, we're in an industry where technology is constantly getting lower cost, easier to use, and more automated. so if you're doing it for two and a half decades or four decades or four and a half decades now that i've been doing it you know when i started in this industry i started on a computer called the trs80 model one with 4k of ram you know and i i was doing a podcast recently and they're like who did you sell your first piece of software to and i said well i sold it to seaload magazine and in Goleta, California. And for $75 for $75. And they said, thank you for that. And then they said, oh, that's great. And did you, you know, sell them to send them the disc? And I'm like, no, no, there was no disc. C-Load standard for cassette load in basic. That was the command in basic C-L-O-A-D cassette load load. That was the, that was the command. And so that was the name of their magazine and then you would get the cassette every month with five or six things that they had

bought from people like me i mean they didn't know they were buying it from a 15 year old kid in high school and early game high school california but you know i i had written the how to juggle thing and they bought it for 75 they sent me the one page agreement and i signed it and then i told my parents and they're like what huh you're doing what oh okay that's nice honey great job so they didn't understand nobody knew like it was crazy it's like it was like 1979 or 1978 so nobody knew i was selling software i was in high school you know i it was just a moment in time but i need to have that mindset all the way along which is what is the next great thing what is the next great success what is the next great failure and that you're growing you're evolving you're learning from that, that that's what you want. You want to have that growth mindset, right?

You want to embrace that. Does it make sense what I said? I kind of jumped on that one little thought. Oh, gee, yeah, I've got this now under control, but now I've got agents. So no, what am I going to, it's like, no, that's what you want. And by the way, I want what's after that too. And what's after that and what's after that. That's what's really exciting about the future. it's coming i want to be one of our customers said this and people think i said it it wasn't me i want to be you know i want to get to the future first and welcome our customers there that that's what i think is by the way that's what i think elon musk does so well like he is like i don't know what all the crazy things he's doing to see the future he's off clearly doing some unusual things but then he's like yeah we're gonna have robots in the future and brand you know brain machine interfaces and driving electric cars and all of these things are going to be happening in the future and you know i'm gonna have i'm gonna have 10 companies that are going to do all of them wow he's not only thinking about it he's doing them each amazing amazing no one like this never seen anything like it don't understand how it is even possible

same mark i know you have to run uh this was incredible i think this is a beautiful place to end it oh let me it was so much fun i've been looking forward to being on your podcast and talk about entrepreneurship and thanks for everything you're doing for the industry and for entrepreneurs everywhere same mark benio we're all so grateful to you oh thank you bye bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.

You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.