THE SAFEST BUILDING IN THE WORLD
ON THE AFTERNOON of Tuesday, 25 September 2018, Marc Benioff, founder and co-CEO of Salesforce, stepped on stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco to deliver the keynote speech at Dreamforce, his company’s annual conference. The event – a combined business meeting, marketing rally, and New Age retreat – attracted more than 100 000 people from around the world, closing off an entire city block.
Benioff had built Salesforce and its core product of cloud-based customer management software from a Telegraph Hill apartment into a $13 billion-revenuea- year juggernaut employing 30 000 people worldwide, with 8 500 in San Francisco. Just a few days before Dreamforce, he’d sealed a deal to purchase the struggling Time magazine, prompting an admiring profile in The New York Times.
Completing his apotheosis, 25 September 2018 was Benioff’s 54th birthday. After his speech, he could return to his office in the 326-metre-high Salesforce Tower – the second-tallest structure west of the Mississippi, whose naming rights he’d purchased in 2017 – and look down upon the Salesforce Transit Center and Park, his native city’s new crown jewel.
Conventional wisdom warned against Benioff buying the naming rights to the Transit Center. What if there was a wreck or derailment, chaining your brand’s name to a disaster? But to Benioff, the potential pay-off seemed to outweigh the risk.
Built at a cost of $2.2 billion, the Salesforce Transit Center and Park formed the cornerstone of the Bay Area’s ambitious regional transportation plan: a vast, clean, efficient web of trains, buses, and streetcars, running through a hub acclaimed as the Grand Central Station of the West. Naming this structure – the embodiment of a transformative idea – could yield marketing gold for Salesforce. It could also make Benioff a household name on the level of Bezos, Gates or Zuckerberg.
Benioff took the gamble in 2017, pledging $110 million over 25 years, with $9.1 million up front and the rest committed to supporting operations when the trains started running. For now, the train box sat vacant on the bottom level, awaiting a 2 km tunnel connection.
