Salesforce s Marc Benioff talks Dreamforce software conference and launching the computer science h

Every year I come out to San Francisco for Salesforce's Dreamforce conference. It's a celebration of all the ways that the cloud is transforming both business and your day-to-day life. Couldn't come at a better time, given the Salesforce stock finally got its groove back over the last few weeks. Now earlier today, just as Dreamforce was getting going, I got a chance to speak with a man who makes this all possible. I'm talking about Mark Benioff. He's the founder, chairman, and co-CEO of Salesforce. Take a look. Mark, 171,000 people, most ever, they come out to Dreamforce. Why? Jim, this is the industry's biggest tech user conference. All these customers are participating in the Salesforce economy. They have jobs in the economy. They're here to get trained. They're here to learn new things. They're here to meet each other. They're also here to get entertained and have a good time. You have often said that tech creates jobs. Stop worrying about all the jobs that it takes away. You actually have some numbers this time around about what the Salesforce economy does. Well, you're absolutely right, Jim. We're creating a $1 trillion economy. You can already see that that is fully underway. Millions of jobs, millions of people who are participating in this Salesforce ecosystem. We're absolutely 100% committed to making sure that everybody can join this new economy. That's why we built Trailhead, so we can reskill and retrain. Many of the people who are here have actually learned their skills online at Trailhead.com. That's why we built Trailhead, so they can participate in this economy. Now, people have to understand, it's not necessarily a trade show. When I walked downstairs, I saw a very beautiful exhibit for State Farm. Some people think it's a boring insurer, but it actually had a cradle-to-grave approach about how you can use insurance, powered by you. Well, Jim, you're absolutely right. There are 2,700 sessions here at Dreamforce, and I expect you to attend to every single one of them. There's also a huge trade show that shows what all of our customers and partners are doing with this technology, with this economy, like you said. And with State Farm, well, we're providing that customer 360-degree experience for them. That is the Salesforce customer success platform, helping them manage their sales, their service, their marketing, their commerce, their apps, all the integration of their data. This is what we're doing for State Farm, and for so many others who are here. And to, let's say, plow through it, make some sense of it. Do we need Einstein? Well, we definitely need Einstein. I think you just woke him up. Oh, there he is. Hey Einstein, what's my forecast? You can now talk directly to Einstein. It's kind of amazing. You woke him up by talking to him. It's actually a partnership with us and Amazon. We've built this amazing smart speaker, but the speaker is actually talking to the customer 360, so you're able to find out how is your forecast? How are you doing? What is going on? It's incredible. What's 360 Truth? Well, 360 Truth is another amazing thing that we're introducing here. That has been the holy grail of computing, Jim, what we call SSOT, the single source of truth. We've had three amazing waves of computing. Systems of record, we've talked about that. Systems of engagement, we've talked about that. Systems of intelligence, including AI, we've talked about that. Now we're entering the fourth stage of computing. It's the pursuit of single source of truth. And we've built that into our platform. Now, this is a computer science holy grail that we've been trying to put together for a long time. But now, because we acquired MuleSoft, because we acquired Tableau, we are closer to providing for our customers the single source of truth for their customer information. There's another side of truth, which is the Trailblazer side, which is the book side, which is how you feel that everybody's invested equally in the concept of truth out here. What makes people understand the importance of truth and in other cases, not think it's important? Well, Jim, we've talked about this all over years. Do you know what's disappointing on people? Do you know what people say to me? You know, your friend Ben, he's talking about truth. I got to get in on that. I mean, that's I'm not kidding. You may have thought that we've been talking about it for years. David Blaine, who I bumped into, of course, along with President Obama, not yet. People may think about truth, but people are just starting to wake up to the idea that it matters. Jim, if you bought our stock in 2004 when we went public, you'd have a thirty five hundred percent return. You know that you talk about that on your show all the time. It's a great shareholder return. But we're not just about shareholders. We're also about stakeholders, all stakeholders, which is why when we started the company twenty one years ago, we put one percent of our equity profit in time into a charity or nonprofit. It was easy because we had no equity, profit or time. But now we've been able to give away four hundred million dollars, four million hours of volunteerism. We run 40,000 nonprofits for free on our system. And we also are a net zero company. We have no carbon emissions. We also will be fully renewable by 2025 because the planet is a key stakeholder. We just talked about that with the new book. Do you think that investors now, younger investors, want to check those boxes? They want that as much as they want earnings per share growth? Well, I think everybody wants that, Jim. I think investors I know you think about investors all the time. I think about all stakeholders, my customers, my partners, my employees, my investors, the citizens of my city where I do business. All of them are my stakeholders. I hold them all in my heart. That is what I do as a CEO, certainly as the CEO of the largest employer in San Francisco. Everyone is in my heart here, including our homeless. This is managing for all stakeholders, not just for all shareholders. Have you been able to convince some CEOs who may have been on the other side of some of these we call truth issues to join the lighter side, leave the darker side? Because I don't want to just say, you know what? So and so is a cancer because we can conquer cancer. Are there some CEOs we can conquer and bring over to the light side? Well, I think the most exciting thing that's happened, Jim, is the business roundtable, which is the 200 top CEOs in the country just said they are now about all stakeholders. And of course, they have to adapt their management practices. They have to manage in a whole new way. But that is a huge moment because now business schools can modify their curriculum and teach not only how to manage for all shareholders, but for all stakeholders. And that's why I wrote this new book, Trailblazer, so that CEOs like myself, but many of my friends around the country, like the ones who are here at this show. Like you mentioned, the CEO of State Farm, the CEO of Louis Vuitton, others about the manager, all stakeholders, former CEO of the country's here. What is the CEO of the country is here talking about actually what he's doing of youth and empowering youth and youth empowerment. And that's so important. Now, what do we do when we say, wait a second, your stocks had a great run. But of late, as my friend David Faber said, you should say, you know, Mark, your stock's been stalled. So don't you think you should be worried more about that? I'm focused on two things, really. One is my customer success, you know, making sure all my customers are successful. That's why I'm looking into the eyes and hearts of every single customer here and asking them, are they successful? Are they happy? There's nothing more important to the business. And then the second thing that is so important to me is to make sure that I am managing exactly and saying what I'm doing, managing for my shareholders and my stakeholders. And then I'm going to let the stock take care of itself. But I need you to 21 years. Need you to talk about one thing, the importance of trees. Well, you know, if we want to sequester carbon, we know that we need more trees. And I hope that we'll be able to come back with a major program here on the show to talk about how we're going to get more carbon reduction out of the atmosphere. Because I didn't want to leave without talking about we did have a good conversation about carbon sequestration. And it's important. It's important. We know that. All right. I want to thank Mark Benioff, Salesforce founder, chairman and co-CEO. Mark, congratulations, 171,000 people. Welcome to Dreamforce. Thank you. Look, happy you're here. Don't miss a second of Mad Money. Follow at Jim Cramer on Twitter. I have a question. Tweet Cramer. Hashtag Mad Tweets. Send Jim an email to madmoneyatcnbc.com or give us a call at 1-800-743-CNBC. Miss something? Head to madmoney.cnbc.com.