Salesforce announced this evening that Keith Block, the company’s vice chairman and president, would become co-CEO alongside Marc Benioff, the socially minded billionaire who has led the business software company since its founding nearly two decades ago. Benioff, who pioneered not only Salesforce’s now-widely copied business model—selling software as a subscription service—but who also helped propel an industry-wide migration to the cloud, will remain board chairman.
“This announcement really reflects how Salesforce is run today, which is that Keith and I over the last five years have developed a very strong partnership,” Benioff told Fortune from a management meeting in Hawaii. “Of course, we knew each other for quite a bit before that—we both started at Oracle in 1986—so we have known each other forever. And we’ve really grown to be great partners. We wanted to cement that, so we’ve exchanged our vows and now we’re co-CEOs.”
The move is both an eye-popping surprise—and, well, not. In the latter category, Block, who joined Salesforce in 2013 and whom my Fortune colleague Adam Lashinsky once called “the buttoned-down yin to Benioff’s Hawaiian-shirt-wearing yang,” has served as chief operating officer since 2016, helping to drive the company past one revenue milestone after another. Salesforce raced through $10 billion in annual sales in its 2018 fiscal year—a feat it accomplished faster than any other enterprise software company—and is on pace, says Benioff, to pass $13 billion in sales this year.
The company’s annualized five-year revenue growth is four times that of its nearest competitors, SAP (7.7%) and Microsoft (7.2%)—and well ahead of the giant in the field, Oracle, which has grown revenues at a 1.4% pace over these past five years.
“We’ve said we’ll do $23 billion in fiscal year 2022 and we can now just see tremendous trajectory beyond that,” Benioff says. “Cementing Keith and I together as the leadership is really the key to accelerating future growth.”
But such hairy audacious talk shows why this C-suite shuffle is a bit of a shocker, too. Benioff is the IMAX version of the modern chief executive—a larger-than-life 3-D figure who can meld brassy ambition and showmanship into genuine vision…and then pull it off, it appears. The company’s 53-year-old maestro has not only set the company’s prestissimo sales pace, he’s also changed corporate practice with the wave of a wand. When a recent internal review, for instance, revealed that women and men at the tech giant weren’t being paid the same salaries for the same jobs in the same locales, Benioff fixed it by fiat—boosting comp, as needed, until there was equity. In much the same way, he long ago instituted a “1-1-1” policy at the company (Salesforce devotes 1% each of its equity, product, and employee time to charitable efforts).