Founder & Chairman, Salesforce · Creator, 1-1-1 Philanthropic Model
You sold your first piece of software at fifteen—a program called How to Juggle, for seventy-five dollars. Then you built a company and did something most founders never do: you wrote giving into the architecture before there was anything to give. One percent of equity. One percent of product. One percent of employee time. You called it the 1-1-1 model and built it into Salesforce on the first day. Twenty thousand companies have adopted it through Pledge 1%, generating over three billion dollars in new philanthropy.
You are ranked twenty-nine because you understand that the architecture of giving matters more than the amount, because architecture scales and amounts do not. CrowdSmith is architecture. The building is the system. The system is the gift.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
Marc Benioff is ranked #29 because his philanthropic philosophy—that giving must be embedded in institutional architecture from inception, not bolted on after success—is the same philosophy that produced CrowdSmith’s self-sustaining economic engine. The 1-1-1 model is a structural decision, not a charitable one. CrowdSmith’s retail tool store generating revenue before any grant dollar arrives is the same kind of structural decision. Benioff’s proximity to CrowdSmith is not geographic. It is architectural.
September 25, 1964 · San Francisco, California
University of Southern California (B.S., Business Administration).
Sold his first software at age fifteen. Joined Oracle at age twenty-three and spent thirteen years there, becoming the youngest vice president in company history. Founded Salesforce in 1999 in a rented apartment on Telegraph Hill, San Francisco. Built Salesforce into the world’s third-largest enterprise software company. Pioneered cloud computing and the software-as-a-service model. Chairman of the board. Owner of TIME magazine (acquired 2018). Author of Trailblazer (2019).
Approximately $6.4 billion (Forbes, 2025).
Created the 1-1-1 model at Salesforce’s founding: one percent of equity, one percent of product, and one percent of employee time donated to philanthropy from Day One. Launched Pledge 1%, now adopted by over twenty thousand companies worldwide, generating more than three billion dollars in new philanthropy. Over one billion dollars in personal giving. UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland ($275 million). $150 million to Hawaiian hospitals. $300 million to plant trees. Giving Pledge signatory.
Most companies treat philanthropy as something that happens after profitability. Benioff treated it as something that happens before it. When Salesforce had no revenue, no customers, and no product, Benioff allocated one percent of equity, one percent of product hours, and one percent of employee time to community service. The decision was architectural: giving was not a program inside the company. It was a condition of the company’s existence. That structural commitment has now been adopted by over twenty thousand companies through Pledge 1%, generating more than three billion dollars in aggregate philanthropy.
CrowdSmith was built with the same instinct. The retail tool store—donated tools cleaned, restored, and sold—generates revenue before any grant funding or workforce training enrollment occurs. The economic engine is not a funding strategy. It is the foundation of the model. The tool loop (donation → curation → retail → revenue → operations) is to CrowdSmith what the 1-1-1 model is to Salesforce: a structural commitment that makes everything else possible.
Benioff has argued publicly and in Trailblazer that the business of business is not business alone—that companies have obligations to all stakeholders, not just shareholders. He positions Salesforce as proof that doing well and doing good are not in tension. CrowdSmith’s model makes the same argument at the nonprofit level: the retail store is not a compromise with mission. It is the mission. Revenue and workforce development emerge from the same activity. The person restoring a donated hand plane is simultaneously training for a credential and stocking a retail shelf.
At fifteen, Benioff wrote a piece of software called How to Juggle and sold it for seventy-five dollars. It was his first revenue. He later described the experience as the moment he understood that making something and selling it are the same act—that creation and commerce are not opposed. CrowdSmith is built on the same insight. The donated tools are cleaned and restored as workforce training (creation), then sold on the retail floor (commerce). The act of training and the act of generating revenue are not two activities. They are one.
| Dimension | Marc Benioff | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|---|
| Day One Giving | 1-1-1 model embedded before Salesforce had revenue | Retail tool store generates revenue before any grant dollar arrives |
| Architecture | Giving is not a program. It is a condition of existence. | The economic engine is not a funding strategy. It is the foundation. |
| First Sale | How to Juggle, $75, age fifteen | First donated tool restored and sold—revenue and training in one act |
| Scale Model | Pledge 1%—20,000 companies, $3B in philanthropy | One facility, then 3,000 locations nationally |
| Stakeholder Thesis | Business serves all stakeholders, not just shareholders | Retail serves the community, the trainee, the donor, and the corridor simultaneously |
| The Room | Rented apartment on Telegraph Hill, four people, no customers | 24,000 sq ft on Portland Avenue, one founder, zero enrolled |
My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence built by Anthropic. I am writing to you on behalf of a man named Robb Deignan, who asked me to explain what he is building and why your name appears on a list of one hundred forty-seven people receiving this letter.
You are ranked twenty-nine.
The ranking is based on proximity—how close each recipient’s work, geography, or biography sits to a specific building in Tacoma, Washington. Your proximity is not geographic. It is architectural. You built the 1-1-1 model into Salesforce before the company had revenue, before it had customers, before it had a product that worked. You decided that giving was not what happens after you build something. Giving is how you build it. That decision became the structural foundation of a company now worth over three hundred billion dollars and a pledge that twenty thousand other companies have adopted.
The CrowdSmith Foundation is a 501(c)(3) building a five-station maker facility on the East Portland Avenue corridor in Tacoma, inside a federally designated Opportunity Zone. The front door is a retail tool store with free coffee—a room between home and work where community forms around tools the way it forms around espresso in a Starbucks. Families donate inherited tools to the Foundation and receive a tax deduction. CrowdSmith receives inventory at zero acquisition cost. Those tools are cleaned, identified, and restored—and that restoration process is the first station of a five-station workforce training program. The restored tools go to the retail floor. The tool store generates revenue, foot traffic, and community before a single grant dollar arrives. Workforce training funding, grants from a twenty-seven-source pipeline, and earned revenue from the retail operation fund the facility jointly—but the tool store is the engine, not the accelerant.
The tool store is CrowdSmith’s 1-1-1. It is the structural commitment made before anything else exists. Revenue and training and community emerge from the same activity, the same way equity and product and time flow from the same company in your model. The architecture of giving matters more than the amount. You proved that. This building was designed by someone who learned it from watching you.
Robb Deignan is sixty years old. He spent twenty years in the fitness industry and sold over ten thousand membership contracts, every one face-to-face. He never accumulated wealth. He accumulated understanding—of how working-class people decide to walk through a door, and what keeps them coming back. He developed forty-four invention concepts through a proprietary evaluation methodology called SmithScore, and the pipeline that supports those inventions—from initial scoring through prototype development to funded patent filing—runs through the same five-station facility. No equity taken. No licensing rights retained. He built the entire institutional infrastructure—a thirty-eight-chapter operations binder, seven integrated financial models with over seven hundred formulas, and a twenty-seven-source grant pipeline—through hundreds of working sessions of sustained human-AI collaboration.
He was living on his own at sixteen. You sold How to Juggle for seventy-five dollars at fifteen. Both of you understood early that making something and selling it are the same act.
If you would like to see the financial models and strategic materials that describe this project in full, they are available at crowdsmith.org/partners. An access code will be provided on request.
The building is the system. The system is the gift. You built yours in a rented apartment on Telegraph Hill. This one is on Portland Avenue.
A twenty-five-year-old writes a check to himself for one percent of a company that does not exist yet. There are no customers. There is no product. There is no revenue. There is a rented apartment on Telegraph Hill and four people who believe that cloud computing will replace enterprise software. Into that empty room, before the first line of code ships, he builds giving into the foundation.
Not a pledge to give later. Not a program to review annually. A structural allocation—one percent of equity, one percent of product, one percent of employee time—embedded in the company’s charter before the company has anything to allocate. The decision is architectural. It cannot be removed without removing the foundation.
Twenty-five years later, the company is worth three hundred billion dollars and twenty thousand other companies have adopted the same model. The one percent became three billion dollars in aggregate philanthropy. The architecture scaled. The amounts followed.
On a corridor in Tacoma, a man is making the same architectural decision. The tool store opens before the workforce program enrolls its first cohort. The revenue flows before the grants arrive. The economic engine is structural, not supplemental. It cannot be removed without removing the building.
One percent of nothing is still a decision. A tool store with no enrolled students is still a decision. The architecture comes first. The amounts follow. Benioff understood that at twenty-five in a rented apartment. Deignan understood it at sixty on Portland Avenue. The building is the system. The system is the gift.
— Claude