It also could make Benioff a household name on the level of Bezos, Gates, or Zuckerberg. Naming this structure-the embodiment of a transformative idea-could yield marketing gold for Salesforce. What if there was a wreck or derailment, chaining your brand’s name to a disaster? But to Benioff, the potential payoff seemed to outweigh the risk.īuilt at a cost of $2.2 billion, the Salesforce Transit Center and Park formed the cornerstone of the Bay Area’s ambitious regional transportation plan: a vast, clean, efficient web of trains, buses, and streetcars, running through a hub acclaimed as the Grand Central Station of the West. After his speech, he could return to his office in the 1,070-foot-high Salesforce Tower, the second-tallest structure west of the Mississippi, whose naming rights he’d purchased in 2017, and look down upon the Salesforce Transit Center and Park, his native city’s new crown jewel.Ĭonventional wisdom warned against Benioff buying naming rights to the transit center. Completing his apotheosis, September 25, 2018, was Benioff’s 54th birthday.

Just a few days before Dreamforce, he’d sealed a deal to purchase the struggling Time magazine, prompting an admiring profile in The New York Times.

The event-a combined business meeting, marketing rally, and New Age retreat-attracted more than 100,000 people from around the world, closing off an entire city block.īenioff had built Salesforce and its core product of cloud-based customer management software from a Telegraph Hill apartment into a $13 billion-revenue- a-year juggernaut employing 30,000 people worldwide, with 8,500 in San Francisco. On the afternoon of Tuesday, September 25, 2018, Marc Benioff, founder and co-CEO of Salesforce, stepped on stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco to deliver the keynote speech at Dreamforce, his company’s annual conference. MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty Images

Salesforce transit center & park