Salesforce is the largest tech employer in San Francisco, with more than 1, 100 employees hired last year alone. It has nine offices in the city, including the Salesforce Tower which is scheduled to open in 2017, Business Insider (BI) said
The company, worth about $35 billion, is now the fifth-largest software company in the world. But like any other company, Salesforce was once a tiny startup, the report said.
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The four founders of Salesforce had their first office in the historic and wealthy Telegraph Hill neighborhood of San Francisco. Marc Russell Benioff was a star executive at Oracle at the time, the website said..
The office was right next to Benioff’s house, which has amazing views, but you have to walk up a lot of stairs to get there. The office was apparently a one-bedroom apartment, BI said.
Benioff said there wasn’t any office furniture. “What we lacked in furnishings, we made up for with an amazing view of the SF Bay Bridge, ” Benioff wrote.
In late 1999, Salesforce outgrew its first office. So it moved to Rincon Center in downtown San Francisco. At the time, Salesforce had a little more than 10 employees, but Benioff leased nearly 8, 000 sq. ft of office space at the center. Within a year, they had to move to a larger space, the website said.
In 2000, Salesforce moved to The Landmark on One Market St., which still serves as its global headquarters although it doesn’t occupy the whole building. Salesforce also has offices at 50 Fremont St., the 41-story building in San Francisco’s SoMa district. Last year, it bought the whole tower for $640 million, BI said.
The Salesforce Tower, currently under construction, is located right across the street from the 50 Fremont building. It will be 62 stories high, making it the tallest office building in the city. Salesforce plans to lease half of the building once it’s complete in 2017, and pay $560 million over 15-and-a-half years, the website said.
In a 2010 interview with Forbes, Benioff said he saved up money to buy his first computer by doing part-time jobs fixing CB radios and cleaning cases at a jewelry store when he was 15 years old. He said that his grandmother used to drive him to his different jobs and even matched his earnings so he could buy the computer.
