The Value of the Future of Sustainability
Meet Suzanne DiBianca, the EVP of Corporate Relations and Chief Impact Officer at Salesforce, and the former president of the Salesforce Foundation and Salesforce.org.
(upbeat music)
- Welcome to Inside the O'Hanna.
I'm Dan Darcy, Chief Customer Officer at Qualified,
and today I'm joined by my great friend, Suzanne D Bianca.
Suzanne, how are you?
- Good, Dan, it's great to be here.
- Good, good.
Well, I wanna dive right into our first segment,
O'Hanna Origins.
How did you discover Salesforce?
- I have breakfast with a friend.
I said, I think I really wanna run a foundation.
You know, I'm coming from a technology company.
We did it in our small little firm.
It made a huge difference to our culture.
It'd be really cool to sort of mash up my technology expertise
with this philanthropic work that I'm committed to.
And then she had dinner that night with Mark Benioff,
who said, you don't really wanna start a foundation
as I'm starting this new company.
And she said, I'd represent somebody
that'd be amazing for you.
And so the recruiter at the time was a woman named Nancy Connery,
who I had spent, who I knew a little bit from college.
I'd spent a couple of jazz fests with, in fact.
And so went in for an interview and it was the dot com boom.
And I followed a lot of sort of blank ends.
And this one, you know, Mark had a bank balance
and a stack of legal documents and said,
let's go, I wanna create a new kind of a company.
- What was your initial impression of Salesforce overall?
- This whole idea of software as a service
was really new.
And I thought it was a super bold vision,
someone who had just come out of CSE consulting
and done a lot of Oracle implementations in my time
and all the things.
And I thought it was a great model.
And it was really innovative.
And, you know, I thought the CEO had a really
incredible vision and was really willing
to swim upstream to make it happen.
- I want you to take a little bit here and brag
because you've had an amazing career since 2001
at Salesforce.
What's one of the biggest successes
that you are really most proud of?
- I think honestly, the biggest successes is
companies like Qualified, companies like Octa,
companies, you know, like Trilio,
that I've had the, and Zora,
that I've had the opportunity to know those CEOs
and they really embraced like, you know, you did
in your many years at Salesforce, this whole idea.
And then went out and started their own companies, you know,
and just this kind of ripple, this stone that we threw
has had incredible ripples.
And, you know, pledge 1% now has, you know,
10,000 companies that have raised their hand
and said we're gonna give her a percent of our equity
and our people and our products
to improve the state of the world.
And that's super cool.
You know, they've given a billion,
actually, I was just looking at the numbers,
closer to two billion now in that new philanthropy
that was created as a result of starting that effort.
So, you know, we just created a playbook
and people like you took it.
So I'm super grateful for that.
- What are some of the challenges that you experienced
as you kind of brought that philosophy to Salesforce
and really to the tech world?
- Yeah, you know, I think that we had all started
through the 111 model, which was just be going out
and surveying other companies that I liked and respected,
like Levi's, who was a Zalb.
- Can you explain the 111 models to everyone out there?
I know a lot of people do know this in the O'Hanna,
but not everyone.
- You know, 1% of our equity.
So we put 1% of our pre-IPO stock into a foundation
that then funded our work for a lot of years.
We were able to do that with Google.
I went down there, Mark and I joke
that this was the best three days of my job, maybe,
which was going down and working with their exec team
before their IPO.
They put a percent of their equity aside
and it went from zero to a billion dollars on day one,
which is pretty amazing.
So, percent of your equity,
percent of employees time, we give six paid days
and then a percent of our products.
So, you know, at least 1% of our customers
will be free customers and we put together
a whole program for nonprofits
and how Salesforce could help them.
So 1% of equity, 1% of time, 1% of our people have now,
you know, fast forward a million years,
have changed and it's only doing profit,
1% for the planet, which I'm really interested in adding.
So, you know, it's sort of manifested
in different companies in different ways,
but the equity is the most important for a startup.
The people are second most important.
I think of your products,
so it's depending on what you do.
So, when I kind of went back on this industry scan,
you know, eBay have been the first one
to put equity aside.
And I told Mark that.
And Cisco did incredible stuff with product donations,
especially like in disaster release scenarios
with their technology.
And then Hasbro really did a phenomenal job on volunteerism.
So, we smashed them all together and said, you know,
we want to take it in an integrated way
and that's where 111 came from.
- Now, thinking back on your career at Salesforce,
what would you say as one of your biggest lessons learned?
- I think a couple things.
One is it's incredibly, I always say to anyone
I'm interviewing that to be successful at Salesforce,
you have to be able to toggle two totally opposite things,
two dichotomies at the same time.
One is you have to be incredibly focused
and really know what you're doing,
have clear metrics around it.
And alongside of that, you have to be okay
with wild ambiguity and innovation.
So like if you can't hold those two things
simultaneously, I've learned,
like you can't be successful at a company like Salesforce
who's thinking about innovation and scale at the same time.
The second thing is the importance of being,
the other dichotomy being like being able
to be highly strategic and radically operational.
You know, there's no, I've been here a long time.
In some cases, I do my own decks.
They're not pretty, but you know,
to be able to kind of roll up your sleeves
and like do the work and not just be strategic.
So you'll fail at Salesforce if you can't hold those
two dichotomies simultaneously.
And so I kind of think I learned how to be a leader
in that environment.
- Creating a big vision and then getting into the weeds
and rolling up your sleeves to actually translate
that vision into actionable reality.
- Yeah, results.
So if you could go back, you know, in time to Suzanne 2001,
just starting out, what advice would you give yourself?
- Ask for more money.
(laughs)
- Just talk, sorry.
- More budget, more budget.
- More budget, exactly.
I think, you know, I'm a big fan, frankly,
of women advocating for theirself,
particularly as a waste of compensation.
It's not a strength of ours, generally.
You know, but that said, it's about,
the budget at the time is sort of funny
'cause we had no people, no not much product
and no equity that was worth anything.
So we had to figure out how to make impact in that context.
- So I wanna ask you about the meaning of Ohana,
and I ask this of all my guests because everyone
really describes it a little bit differently.
And when I talk to folks, it's hard to describe the Ohana.
How would you describe the Ohana?
And what does it really mean to you?
- Well, for me, you know, Ohana means family.
It's the origin of the word.
But for me, what it means is that we have each other's backs.
Fundamentally, that you're putting the team forward
against the individual, that you've, you know,
you might not be in full agreement,
but you're willing to get aligned
and have someone's total back.
And so for me, Ohana means like, you know,
I got you quite honestly,
and I'll work with you to make something
more than we can make sort of on our own individually,
but kind of looking out for the pack, if you will.
- I love it.
Now, before we get into our next segment,
are there any special stories or Ohana moments
that are a little behind the scenes
that you'd like to share with everyone?
- Oh, there's like a million.
I think one that's just top of mind
because we've worked with it.
We've worked with a group called The Arc
in San Francisco, people with different abilities.
And we just lost our first arc employee who just passed away.
Incredible human 20 years with the company,
did everything from cleaning the whiteboards,
to making coffee, to walking the golden retriever,
to helping conference rooms.
The Ohana moment for me there was the way
that our employees looked after him.
And even actually after they left the company,
they would take him fishing on the weekends.
They gave him relationship advice.
And there was like,
they organized the whole service.
From just start to finish,
they had his back like a thousand percent as a human.
And I'll just never forget a time when he was in the hospital.
He actually had both of his legs amputated
during his time at Salesforce.
And he drove around the silk carte,
he used to deliver candy to people,
and he always with a smile.
And I went to the hospital to see him
and I brought my daughter
and I had made some banana bread for him.
And it was around the holidays.
And first of all, there was a whole schedule
that they had some employees have put together
to sign up to visit Michael so he wasn't lonely.
And I was like, where, I'm here to visit this person,
where is his room?
And the nurse has smiled and just looked at each other
and said, just go down the hallway, make a right,
and you'll see it.
So I would go down in the hospital,
the very white, sterile hospital,
and I make a right.
Yeah.
And at the end of the hallway,
I see this pulsating room, these lights flashing.
I get down there.
And like people, there had been like a whole group
of employees a day who had decorated his room
with Christmas lights and a Christmas tree
and all these holiday lights and those flowers and gifts.
And it was like the brightest place in the hospital for sure.
And so anyway, that for me,
those are, it's the employees that really give of themselves.
I think that demonstrate Ohana.
I get chills because that is exactly a perfect Ohana moment.
It reminds me of the art employee
that we were affectionately hanging out
with all the time to Maria McGovern and Craig Scholl,
taking her out to McDonald's for lunch every once in a while
with Mike Rosenbaum.
I mean, those are really special moments
where to your point where we've got each other's back
and are taking care of each other.
So I want to get into our next segment, What's Cooking?
You are now the EVP of corporate relations
and the chief impact officer in Salesforce.
I would love for you to talk about how you got to where you are now
and what your journey has been like in this current role.
You know, it was a role that we sort of invented interestingly.
There's like now a ton of people with the same title.
It kind of means different things in different companies.
And for us, it was, you know, my journey was
I ran the foundation for eight years
as a sort of straight nonprofit charitable giving
for a lot of focus on volunteerism and grants product in particular.
But then I built to business units.
So then I spent the next kind of eight years running a P&L
and I built the DAWDOR team up to, you know,
about 200 million in revenue with a couple,
focused on a couple markets.
And then I kind of needed another challenge.
So I, you know, kind of pitched to our CEO.
I said, you know, we do, it was after what with the work
we had done with EqualPay led by, you know,
our friends, Layla Seca and Cindy Robbins
and the work that we started to do around equality,
specific to the Indiana case where we went to bat Congress
for equality in non-discrimination against folks
that were homosexual.
And looked around the company and said, we could do so much.
We are doing so much more as it relates to a business
platform for change.
And yet the only people who can really talk about that
holistically are the CEO are marketing me.
So I think we need actually a strategy.
We need a bigger strategy for the company
about what it really means to be a platform for change.
We need to pull all those pieces together.
I want to do some other things, look around the company
and see where else we could be driving impacts.
So I looked at the Ventures Fund and I said,
could I have the $150 million off the balance sheet
so I can invest in entrepreneurs.
And that's been wildly successful.
And then climate, I just looked around at the world
and said what's happening.
And we really have a decade to keep to a 1.5 degree temperature
rise.
And we're now two and a half years into it.
So it's a problem that has a clock against it.
And I thought we really need to be doing a lot more
as it relates to helping mitigate climate change.
Why don't you talk a little bit more about that?
And I know Salesforce announced one of their now core values
really is around sustainability and really giving back.
What is obviously the main projects
that you are working on for Salesforce
in the entire ecosystem?
When we add a value, we really operationalize it,
which is what I love about it.
I don't think we'll add another one for a long time.
So what we're really focused on-- so I'm super excited
because what that means is that everyone in the company--
or at least I asked, and I hope that everyone in the company
is doing something now to help on that value,
whether it's personal, whether it's professional, et cetera.
So the three things the company is working on
is net zero now.
Getting all of our customers to net zero,
I built a little product because I needed it
to manage and measure Salesforce's carbon footprint.
And there was nothing good in the market.
So we've packaged it up.
We've built it.
It's really a surged investment.
I've moved it into the product organization
and really focused on helping get all of our customers to net zero.
A lot of people have made targets,
but don't actually know where to start or how to measure it.
So I'm really excited to take our technology and drive net zero home.
Salesforce today is net zero.
We're powered by 100% renewable energy.
All of our customers, like everyone using Salesforce,
it's a green product.
We offset whatever the energy it takes to run software.
So net zero now, number one, number two, trillion trees.
Because just like we have to reduce emissions,
we've got to get all the carbon that's in the air out.
And so really focused on nature-based solutions as a way to do that.
Also left trees because it really is aligned to our equality value
because you can be on whatever side of the political aisle,
whatever age, whatever country.
It's a really inclusive program.
And so it's cool. So focused on trillion trees.
And then lastly, as eco-priners.
So I talked a little bit about the FEDVenture Fund that I run.
It's one way we're looking for eco-priners,
but just all over the place.
How can we be finding all these entrepreneurs,
working in clean energy and carbon reduction technologies?
And how can we really put wind in their sails through our technology,
through our people, all through our resources?
Those are all incredible.
So I'm curious what challenges with those things that you are,
those initiatives of the Net Zero, the Trillion Tree,
and the eco-priners of those initiatives,
what challenges are you seeing with that?
And how are you applying what you learned at Salesforce to those challenges?
Yeah, I think, you know, one thing is when you're standing up a new product,
you really have to listen to customer feedback.
And in this area, the customers need so many different things.
So if you're a manufacturer or, say, you're a CPG company,
like a Pepsi or a Coke, you're thinking a lot about water
and how that really plays into your environmental footprint,
especially in places with extreme drought, etc.
But if you're a Volkswagen, you're thinking about circular economy and supply
chains.
So I think a challenge is really,
this product is incredible that we're building.
And we also know we need to do industry-specific solutions.
And so that focus, that those calls on prioritization are tough.
And so, you know, one of the ways that we're thinking about it
is like, how do we bring partners and the ecosystem in
to build industry-specific apps?
Or to build, you know, connectors?
Some of these customers really want ESG data, not just environment,
but they want all of it.
So, you know, I think there are places that the ecosystem can really build out
solutions.
And we can stay really focused on, you know, carbon, water waste
or sort of the three things we're focused on in particular.
So that's just kind of one example.
So, Sue, what is next for you and how are you shaping the future?
I think about acceleration.
I think a lot about scale.
Like, this is a problem that hits every human.
It's going to hit our kids in particular.
So, I got to really look at what works and help get to scale.
I'm not thinking in an incremental way.
I'm always looking for new innovation.
But I'm really looking for how, you know, it's like when I took this job,
one of the first things I did is said like a 2040 target,
a 2030 target for net zeros way too far.
Like, we got to do it now.
We got to do it now, like this year.
So, you know, I'm just thinking a lot about how do we accelerate our customers
on this journey?
How can we invest and accelerate with them and our partners?
But, you know, how do we, we've just got,
when we were at Davos World Economic Forum
and this trillion tree effort that we helped to found,
and it's not really being run as a consortium out of wealth,
they just got China to pledge 60 billion trees
against the trillion tree goal.
So, like, where can we take really big swings in really tough places
that is going to drive it back?
Let's get into our final segment, the future forecast.
So, what do you envision as the future of the Salesforce ecosystem?
I think it's along these lines of industry enablement.
I think that's really powerful, really solving problems from our customers
that you know are sales versus not going to solve.
I think, you know, also I'm going to call out the ecosystem
and it's been incredible in our ability to multiply impact.
So, you know, hire veterans, take a percent of your equity, you know,
put it aside for your community, before your IPO, there's a way to do it.
I'm happy to work with your founders to make it work over time.
[LAUGHTER]
And, you know, do what you can to be a company that looks after people
and, you know, has their back and hires people that need a shot
that don't have traditional resumes
and give your folks some space to innovate outside their day job.
So, anyway, I think that it's just, again, I'm in this kind of acceleration
scale mindset
and I think that applies right ecosystem too.
Can you give us a prediction of what you think sustainability
is going to look like in the future?
I'm like a hopeful person.
So, I just think we're going to see more climate-related disasters.
But I do think that people are going to,
I think solar is already taking off the electrification of the grid is
happening.
The electrification of cars is happening in California.
You won't be able to sell a non-electric car in 2030.
Like, it's good.
We're going to be living off the grid.
And I think the pandemic, at least for me,
really helped me remember the importance of nature and biodiversity
and species, and food, ecosystems.
So, I think we're going to return to more of a balance.
For sure, we have to.
What does the future of Salesforce look like?
Salesforce is just going to continue on its journey to be the best digital
headquarters,
you know, for any customer.
The technology transformation that we can provide
particularly as it relates to driving efficiency,
getting closer to your customer,
I think we're just going to continue to innovate and do that more in scale.
So, Susan, do you have any advice for anyone and our listeners out there
who have aspirations to start a foundation or, you know,
they want to make a difference in the world?
What advice would you have for them?
Well, I would say, first of all, probably don't start a foundation.
Quite honestly, there's a whole bunch of better ways you can do a DAP at the T
ides Foundation,
a whole bunch of other stuff that takes the legal and all the headache out of
it.
The message would be do something and start small.
And, you know, find out, like me, find out what people are passionate about
and lift them up.
You know, don't wait and work on climate.
It's like we need all hands on deck.
Sage advice.
So, before letting you go, let's have fun with a quick lightning round.
Are you ready for this?
I'm ready for it.
OK.
Favorite product not Salesforce?
It's Spotify.
Good.
Classic or lightning?
Lightning or first lightning?
Favorite Salesforce character?
Cody, the bear.
Favorite brand of anything also besides Salesforce?
Should I say Yeti?
Yes.
That was--
It's not mine.
It's a favorite brand that would be kind of so not a brand person.
Amazon.
I use a lot of Amazon.
Secret skill that is not on the resume?
I've been whistled super loud.
You just run front row seats to tickets of your dream event.
What is that event?
It's one of two.
There's two rock icons that are still alive that I really want to see that I
haven't
seen yet.
And they are either tickets to see the Rolling Stones or Paul McCartney.
Love it.
Suzanne, this has been so much fun.
But before I let you go, let the listeners know where they can find you.
And is there anything else you would like to share or plug?
You can find me on Twitter.
@zandriakit.
You can find me on LinkedIn.
And I don't think so.
I think we talked about a lot.
Again, I think it's just--
I guess maybe the last thing I'll share is one of the upsides of the pandemic
for me
is that mental health is not a dirty word anymore.
And everybody went through something or knew someone who went through something
And people are still struggling.
And it's still weird times.
But what I found over the course of the journey here is the best anti-depress
ant ever is not
a pill or a program.
It's being of service and doing something beyond yourself.
So I don't know if you're in a place or know someone's in a place, getting them
to volunteer
is a way to just get happy and healthy again.
So it's not really a sales force.
Message plug, but it's just something that I learned and I think is still true
in the
world.
And I just encourage people to get out there.
I love it.
Thank you, Suzanne, so much for your time today.
Thanks, Dan.
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