Meet the Salesforce power players who are helping Marc Benioff take his $87 billion empire to the next level (CRM)

Marc Benioff 2014

When Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff started his company in 1999, it was little more than four guys and an idea in a one-bedroom San Francisco apartment. The server was stored in a bedroom closet, and one of his co-founders slept on a futon he stored under his desk.

Now, 19-years-later, the company has transformed into a 29,000 person behemoth with more than $10 billion in annual revenue and a market cap of $87 billion.

And while Benioff remains the effusive and boisterous face of Salesforce, he didn't build the company alone.

These are the 11 people who helped build Salesforce into what it is today —and the people charged with moving it toward an ambitious $22 billion revenue goal in the next four years and beyond.

Parker Harris, Cofounder and Chief Technology Officer

Parker Harris co-founded Salesforce with Marc Benioff in 1999, and has since masterminded the product and engineering side of the company.

Harris — described by his peers as kind and demure — is considered the voice of reason at Salesforce, and an important counterbalance to Benioff's impassioned business strategy.

Like Steve Wozniak was to Steve Jobs at Apple, Harris is credited with executing on the untethered ambitions of a visionary CEO.

"Marc is showing us a vision, the direction," Harris told Business Insider in 2015. "And I'm right there with him figuring out how are we going to get there. We bounce ideas off of each other to try to make it the right path together."

Keith Block, President and Chief Operating Officer

As chief operating officer, Keith Block manages the day-to-day at Salesforce, from growing its global sales and marketing units to keeping the company's 29,000 employees moving in the same direction.

Analysts attribute Block's 2013 hiring from Oracle with Salesforce's move from serving primarily small customers to winning business with large enterprises.

Under Block's watch, Salesforce has signed more large enterprise deals than ever and continues to expand into new industries, turning itself into one of the largest business software makers in the world.

Salesforce has been signing big deals at a record pace, and now has roughly 150,000 customers that are under contracts worth at least $13.3 billion.

Bret Taylor, President and Chief Product Officer

If Marc Benioff has a favorite in the organization, it's Bret Taylor, the former CEO of Quip.

Salesforce added Taylor to its team in 2016 with the $750 million acquisition of Quip, a cloud collaboration tool akin to Google Docs. Salesforce has since added Quip as a product offering, but what Benioff really wanted was Taylor himself.

"He's one of the absolute rising stars of our industry," Benioff told Business Insider in 2016. "It's been my dream to work more closely with Bret Taylor."

Taylor reports directly to Benioff, and has even attended monthly private dinners at Benioff's home.

Two years later, Taylor is now president and chief product officer for Salesforce, where he runs the company's global product design, development and go-to-market strategy.

One more thing to know: Before starting Quip, Taylor was chief technology officer at Facebook. He's credited with inventing the company's acclaimed "Like" button. And before that, he co-created Google Maps.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider