“I especially liked Meredith’s core values,” he said. “I have followed them since I started Salesforce.” He noted Meredith’s corporate focus on volunteerism, “something that is very important to me as well.”

Lynne Benioff, 43, was a publicist during the dot-com boom. She serves on the board of several organizations and was a co-founder in 2011 of a short-term residential community for homeless families in San Francisco. She declined to be interviewed.

The hands-off policy might not last, given the deep gloom over physical magazines.

“Marc Benioff is a guy who wants whatever he touches to succeed,” said Phil Bronstein, a longtime Bay Area newsman. “If that’s going to require him to be involved, he’ll do it.”

Mr. Benioff is deeply embedded in the Bay Area. His grandfather helped build the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, and his father ran a chain of clothing stores in the city. He began writing software as a teenager and briefly wrote code in the mid-1980s at Apple during the original tenure of Steve Jobs. But he first broke into prominence during a 13-year stint at Oracle, a dominant supplier of databases and other software. There Mr. Benioff was schooled in sales and strategy by one of Silicon Valley’s most brash leaders, Larry Ellison.

Mr. Benioff, though he calls Mr. Ellison his mentor, broke from Oracle’s practices in significant ways when he started Salesforce. His start-up, founded in an apartment on San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill in 1999, opted not to sell software that customers would install on their own computers. Rather, Salesforce ran its offerings — which initially automated sales tasks like tracking customer histories — on its own computers and delivered them to corporations over the internet.

This strategy reduced technical expenses and headaches for customers, while allowing Salesforce to make initial sales to small groups of employees at companies that would expand over time.