When former Salesforce COO George Hu took an unpaid leave to come up with the idea for his new startup Peer, one of the first things he did was to re-read Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s autobiography, “Behind the Cloud.”

The book, published in 2009, is a compilation of Benioff’s personal account on how he started Salesforce, the $50 billion cloud software company launched in 1999. It also comes with 111 of Benioff’s own management tips, and it served as an early inspiration to Hu’s startup.

“When I started [Peer], I actually read ‘Behind the Cloud’ again, and looked at what he did, and tried to pattern a lot after that, ” Hu told Business Insider.

Ready to write the next Salesforce book Beyond The Cloud–How we went from an idea to $10B rev. Do you have stories? @carlyeadler @dbfarber

— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) January 4, 2016

 

 

Read the full story at Business Insider, by Eugene Kim