BY THE TIME he'd turned 39, in the spring of 2007, Mark Suster was a doubly successful entrepreneur. A Philadelphia native with a University of Chicago MBA, Suster had worked for Accenture around the globe for eight years, and then launched, in 1999, BuildOnline, an Ireland- and U.K.-based software company that enabled collaboration in the construction industry. He steered that business through the dot-com bust and a merger with an American competitor named Citadon, after which he stepped down as CEO. Then he founded Koral, a maker of content management software, in 2006, and sold that company to Salesforce the following year.
Through it all, Suster was aware that some aspects of his personality had a tendency to make his life more difficult. He couldn't focus on routine tasks; unless he loved a subject, his mind would wander. He couldn't remain at boring meetings. He felt a deep-seated need to pursue only ideas he cared about. He often did multiple things at once without completing them; he'd read five or six books at the same time without finishing any. He was sometimes argumentative, sometimes late for meetings. He didn't see a connection between these idiosyncrasies—or struggles, or problems— but they weighed on him as he tried to decide whether he should stay at Salesforce.
For six months, Suster worked as an increasingly frustrated vice president, trying to figure out how to assimilate as a subordinate. He told colleagues he intended to leave. But before he met with CEO Marc Benioff—the cloud-computing legend already well on his way to being San Francisco's biggest tech employer—Suster told his wife, Tania, that he hadn't fully made up his mind.
“I figured I'd listen, and if I felt enough autonomy, I'd stay,” Suster says now. “And if I didn't feel inspired, I would just politely leave.”
But his encounter with Benioff didn't leave room for a considered response. “I came into the room that day, and he just started yelling at me,” Suster recalls. Benioff famously talks about modeling his company's culture around ohana, a Hawaiian term for extended family. But in this instant, he was a domineering patriarch. “He said, ‘I can't believe you're quitting! You're disloyal! I never would have bought your company!’ And … I just walked out.”
Suster, with graying hair and a direct gaze, gestures often when he talks. And when he recounts his meeting with Benioff, his hands reflexively rise up, as if pushing back against intellectual restraints. “It wasn't about money, and it
