Fortune has an article that chronicles Marc Benioff's story in building Salesforce.com, with initial funding from Larry Ellison, to a successful startup generating $50M+ in annual revenues. It's an interesting article that profiles Marc Benioff's diverse interests and his quirky relationship with Larry Ellison, his former boss and mentor. It's too bad that the picture in the Forbes article isn't very flattering. Compare his picture in the article to the one on Salesforce.com's management page and you'll see what I mean.

I never worked with Benioff when I was at Oracle, but I do believe that he was responsible for such stellar Oracle products like PowerBuilder and PowerObjects. Interestingly enough, the article doesn't mention these two highly visible failures at Oracle. As someone who actually tried using PowerBuilder and PowerObjects, and even worse, trying to get Partners to use these products, I can say that it wasn't Oracle's finest hour. Regardless of his history at Oracle, Benioff is getting a lot of attention at Salesforce.com, even from respected industry analysts such as Chuck Phillips from Morgan Stanley.

The funny thing about Salesforce.com is that it seems to be stuck in a time warp, partying like it's still 1999. I can't think of many startups that are spending $100K to rent out PacBell park and blowing $600K in product launches. Either Benioff must be doing some very right, or he's using Salesforce.com's status as a private company to generate buzz (a four letter word nowadays) without substance. Given Benioff's history, I wouldn't be surprised if he's doing a little bit of both. Whatever he is doing, I hope he keeps doing it, because I really would like to see companies such as Salesforce.com succeed and prove that the ASP subscription model for enterprise software can be successful.