High Signal Podcasts Evidence ledger
Method
Browse
← Back to evidence

Evidence receipt / recommendation

Published · transcript-backed

Marc Benioff: recommendation

22 Dec 2024 Lenny's Podcast Behind the founder: Marc Benioff

“That music could be your business plan, your product plan, your product launch plan like we're talking about for my Agentforce product. That's what we're all trying to do, and I use a place like Kyoto as a place to do that also because geography is important.”

— Marc Benioff

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Marc Benioff
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
recommendation
Recorded
22 Dec 2024
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…This episode is brought to you by Coda. I use Coda every day to coordinate my podcasting and newsletter workflows from collecting questions for guests to storing all my research to managing my newsletter content calendar. Coda is my go-to app and has been for years. Coda combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps to help me get more done, and Coda can help your team to stay aligned and ship faster by managing your planning cycle in just one location, set and measure OKRs with full visibility across teams and stakeholders, map dependencies, create progress visualizations, and identify risk areas. You can also access hundreds of pressure test templates for everything from roadmap strategy to final decision-making frameworks. See for yourself why companies like DoorDash, Figma, and Qualtrics run on Coda. Take advantage of this special limited time offer just for startups. Head over to coda.io/lenny and sign up to get six free months of the team plan. That's coda.io/lenny to sign up and get six months of the team plan. Coda.io/lenny. I love this idea of beginner's mind. I imagine it's very difficult to operationalize, especially for a company at 25 years old at this point. Obviously, you meditate. You put a lot of effort and focus into building this. It's hard to do that within a company. Is there anything you do with meetings, with leadership, with the way you operate that spreads this way of thinking within the org? Well, Salesforce is now the second largest software company in the world, but also the second largest software company in Japan, and that's a country where I put a lot of time and energy into. I love going there. I love going to Kyoto. When I go to Kyoto, I like to go to some of these amazing Zen temples. By the way, that's one of the things that Steve Jobs love to do, and he used to go to these great sushi restaurants. There's a great one in Kyoto named Sushiiwa. If you go in there, you'll see he's signed something for them. It says, "All good things. Steve Jobs." I said, "What did he do over here?" He would go to this great sushi restaurant, and then he would go to Ryōan-ji, the Rock Garden Temple. Incredible metaphysical temple. I've gone there. I've gone there for decades. I've brought a lot of friends of mine there. Yeah. You got to clear your mind and let it come in. You got to receive it. You need to listen. I remember I even brought Neil Young there, the musician. He's one of my favorite people in the world, and obviously, I love his music. His soundtrack is the soundtrack of my entire life. We were sitting there, and he was so deep in meditation, and then he started walking around. The temple was closing, and then he was in the zone, and I didn't want to bother him, but I'm like, "You know, I think we got to go." Anyway, it turned out he had written a whole album while we were there in his head, and he was basically transcribing it all. This incredible creative process. Look, we're all writing an album in our head. What album are you writing? What music are you writing? How are you getting into that zone yourself? You want to be a great entrepreneur. You want to be a great CEO. You got to clear your mind, and you got to be ready to write that music. That music could be your business plan, your product plan, your product launch plan like we're talking about for my Agentforce product. That's what we're all trying to do, and I use a place like Kyoto as a place to do that also because geography is important. Where you are matters. I know you're in Marin, so Marin County. Maybe you can go out to the top of Mount Tam. Maybe you go to Spirit Rock with Jack Kornfield and go clear your mind there, but you got to find the place to do that and create the location. It may not be in the office. It may be somewhere else. By the way, you have the most amazing friends list. All these folks you mentioned, I've met.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.

Search evidence