As Bay Area childhoods go, Marc Russell Benioff's was solitary and geeky. He was shy, favoring the company of his golden retriever or, better yet, circuit boards. A streak of defiance ran through him. Once, in kindergarten, his teacher asked him to draw a circle. He looked her in the eye and drew a straight line.

In 1966, when Benioff was 2, his father, the son of an immigrant from Kyiv, took the helm at a local dress shop chain. The job ruled him. Most nights he'd be at the kitchen table until 11, going over the books. On Sundays, Marc would climb into his father's 1970 Buick station wagon. His “most formative business classroom wasn't a classroom at all,” he writes in Trailblazer. It was delivering bolts of wool, poplin, and polyester in that hot Buick. Among the lessons he absorbed: work ethic, integrity, I hate retail.

Electronics beckoned. At 12 he relocated to the family basement, where he could geek out unimpeded. At 14 he bought his first computer, a TRS-80, and wrote a program called How to Juggle, which he sold to a computer magazine for $75. At 15 he founded Liberty Software, which made games for the Atari 800. Soon he was bringing in $1,500 a month, which he used later to enroll at USC.

At college, Benioff rushed Tau Kappa Epsilon and did the normal frat boy thing of buying two Macintosh computers and hooking them together. The plan was to start writing code—all he needed was the company's developer software to arrive in the mail. When months passed with no sign of it, he phoned Guy Kawasaki, Apple's head of developer relations. It would be the first of many conversations. “Why don't you spend the summer of 1984 at Apple?” Kawasaki eventually asked the insistent kid on the other end of the line. A summer at Apple led to a job answering the sales line at Oracle soon after graduation.

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With apologies to Benioff completists, I'm about to fast-forward through some of his most noteworthy career turns. His time as the youngest vice president in Oracle's history. His complex relationship with Larry Ellison. His Ferrari, reportedly a more expensive version of Ellison's. I'm even skimming over the pivotal moment when he came up with his software-as-service idea and his father cautioned against leaving a stable job, but he did it anyway, and the company that started in a rented apartment on card tables and folding chairs now has a market cap dwarfing the GDP of many countries.

More interesting to me is the sabbatical he took before starting Salesforce, after more than a decade at Oracle. For five months he swam with dolphins in Hawaii and traveled throughout India, where he had “an incredible awakening.” He met with the humanitarian leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, as well as the Dalai Lama, who “talked about finding one's calling and the importance of community service.” But most profound, he says, were the words of the Hindu guru Mata Amritanandamayi, known as the hugging saint or Amma.

“It was she who introduced me to the idea, and possibility, of giving back to the world while pursuing my career ambitions,” Benioff wrote. “I realized that I didn't have to make a choice between doing business and doing good.”

This was the birth of both a generous mindset and a savvy personal narrative. Over the course of four books, countless speeches, and 25,000 tweets, Benioff has created a public persona that marries audacious business acumen with ambiguously spiritual beneficence, all inextricable from Salesforce. Over the years, he would proselytize Salesforce's 1–1-1 model, in which the company donates 1 percent of its revenue, 1 percent of its product, and 1 percent of its employees' time to the community. He would install meditation rooms on every floor of Salesforce Tower. He would be periodically subject to epiphanies of rectitude, like “I am not gonna have any more meetings that aren't at least a third women.” And in the nation's most influential publication, The New York Times, he would call on “my fellow business leaders and billionaires” to create a “more fair, equal and sustainable capitalism that actually works for everyone.”