When famous CEOs tell their stories, you are never quite sure if they their goal is self-aggrandizement or an authentic desire to recount something that will be of real interest to others. Marc Benioff has lots of reasons to be very proud of accomplishments, but his book Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry will be an inspiration to many.

salesforce (with a lowercase as was the mania at the turn of the century) is, of course, a major industry success, but also the symbol of a timely, intelligent strategy adjustment at a time of crisis and craziness, the dot.com bust. Great ideas and products that are useful to people always manage to weather bad storms. Sure, Marc Benioff, the CEO founder of the company must have freaked out at the 2001 meltdown, but he lost neither his cool nor his faith on his “End of software” motto (a striking way to impose the then novel software as a service — SaaS — model). His obstinacy paid off: The company went public in June 2004. “Yeah,” as the song goes, “there’s a big blue sky waiting just behind the clouds.”

Not all entrepreneurs have Marc’s chutzpah, but his 111 recommendations to entrepreneurs will all be extremely precious to anyone. Sure, you may not dispatch a commando unit on bicycle to circle the Los Angeles Convention Center at a Microsoft launch event and instead settle for less spectacular tactics, but the message is clear: if you are an underdog, you can’t be too subtle either, and you have to find a way to force the big guys into adopting your message. Regardless of who they are. Frankly, when Tom Siebel from Siebel Systems started to talk about software-as-a-service after he acquired Upshot, most of us smiled at the recollection that only two years before, Siebel had been repeating that SaaS was the type of stuff for dot.com kids. “Don’t fear competition: welcome it and leverage it,” Marc concludes – provided, though, that you keep it under tight control.

And you do so by maintaining an all-out high energy level. High energy (sometimes high voltage) is the tone of the book. It has a lot to do with Marc’s personal style. But guess what? Low-energy doesn’t work. So find what your own high-energy level can be, and make sure that your employees and your customers turn into fervent evangelists of the company anywhere in the world. Meanwhile, enjoy dozens of great anecdotes. (Well, Hawaiian shirts aren’t necessarily the hottest tickets in Ireland.)

There is one section of the book I especially like: The Corporate Philanthropy Playbook. This section is a must read for entrepreneurs of for-profit companies, of course, but also for any executive director of any foundation who does not want a foundation to stagnate or simply “survive”: “Innovative nonprofits have historically achieved true sustainability by embracing a revenue-generating business model.”

Great book. Very well worded (no siliconite verbiage), co-authored with an excellent writer, Carlye Adler. 

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

The entrepreneurial spirit is complex. Sometimes it makes you create companies; sometimes the startup is just yourself, as you keep on developing your multi-faceted persona and meaningfully contribute to the success of a large diversity of ventures.  The latter characterizes a long-time friend, Melissa Eisenstat.

She worked for me in my first company in France very early in her career, right after she completed her double masters at Wharton (MBA and International Studies). I never really liked hiring trainees or interns in the various companies I ran or helped, knowing all too well that in startups, the air is so vibrant that it is hard for newcomers to jump into the fray, learn by capillarity and yet, show results. I still don’t know to this day how she survived within our gleeful mess, but she did and in no time, she had added to her French, which she already spoke fluently, all the gallicized high-tech and database jargon – so much so that when she came back to the US, she had to learn that “rubrique” did not translate into “rubric,” but into a “field.”

From one success to the other… Twenty years later, Melissa’s career is a series of successes. She spent three years at Apple Computer, four years at Pillar Corporation, a start-up specializing in financial software, before making a big jump by moving to CIBC Oppenheimer as the firm’s senior software analyst. She stayed there for nine years, working at least 70 hours per week, traveling 70% of the time, turning frantic each time Bill Gates was sneezing, yet sending chills to Siliconites by openly stating that Commerce One’s business model didn’t hold water or downgrading Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) from “Buy” to “Hold” during its litigation with the Department of Justice in 2000.  In 2002, she became President of Palladian Research, an independent equity research firm where she grew the revenues 50% in 2003 and expanded the research organization from two to eight analysts and the product line from two to seven publications within one year, all of which was no less stressful. “The more you work, the more workaholic you become, and I would have probably continued to speed through existence on autopilot, were it not for my seasonal addiction to sky, and above all, my lifelong passion for music. In 2004, I made the drastic decision to focus on my cello…”

“… And of course, I worked nearly as much! As a child, I started to play the piano and, shortly after, the cello. In fact my parents were encouraging me to audition for conservatories instead of choosing to get a BA in Soviet Studies at U Penn” - incidentally, Melissa also speaks Russian. Melissa’s father, Al Eisenstat (Apple’s historic chief counsel), plays the trombone and both her parents are dedicated music lovers. “When I returned to music as an adult, though, I was playing my cello five or six hours per day every single day of the week. Of course, that’s what I had to do, and even more, to get back into shape! This was exhilarating. I joined the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony in 2004.” Given that Melissa would never settle for anything ordinary, I should mention that the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony (www.chambersymphony.com) that David Bernard founded in 1999 is probably one of the most remarkable non-professional ensembles in the country, offering professional-level music and performing in New York anywhere between All Saints Church and Carnegie Hall. “I had a moment of guilt along the way for focusing on what I liked best,” Melissa adds. “So I got lured into joining Lehman Brothers Inc. in September 2006. I hated almost every single day of the nine months I spent there. I couldn’t stand so much arrogance. The good thing is that it reinforced my dedication to music.”

As we were having lunch this week at Sfoglia opposite the 92nd Street Y, “a quintessential New York institution,” Melissa was joyfully going back and forth between the Debussy and the Ravel she is learning and her missions in various NPOs, especially at the Hope Funds for Cancer Research, which makes post-doctoral grants for basic research in rare cancers and that she joined as Trustee and Treasurer in 2008. No matter what, she works a lot! And so does her husband, Jonathan Blau, managing director and head of the leveraged finance strategy and portfolio products group at Credit Suisse – but also one of the original actors (a “Microkid”) in the 1981 The Soul Of A New Machine, an epic where Tracy Kidder chronicled the efforts of Tom West and his team at Data General at Westborough, MA, to build a minicomputer code-named “Eagle” in order to catch up with DEC.

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

For more information about:

The Park Avenue Chamber Symphony and David Bernard: http://www.chambersymphony.com and http://www.davidbernard.com

The Hope Funds for Cancer Research: http://www.hope-funds.org/

Although it was written in 1981,The Soul Of A New Machine is one of the best book on the history of the computer industry and easily available. You may also want to check this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine