All right. Let's see. We have everybody here? All right. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Marc Benioff, the Chairman of the Board of Directors and Co-CEO of Salesforce. It's my pleasure, on behalf of the board and the officers of Salesforce, to welcome you and to express our appreciation for attending this meeting. I'd also like to welcome our stockholders who are listening to the webcast of this event. I will act as chairman of the meeting, and Amy Weaver, right here, our President of Legal and Corporate Affairs and our General Counsel, will act as secretary. I'm pleased to introduce our directors. Sitting here in the front row, we have Keith Block, my Co-CEO, Parker Harris, Craig Conway, Alan Hassenfeld, Neelie Kroes, General Colin Powell, Sandy Robertson, John Roos, Bernard Tyson, Robin Washington, Maynard Webb, and Susan Wojcicki. Also are several other company officers and employees in the audience.
Also present is Guy Wanger of Ernst & Young, our independent registered public accounting firm. Amy will now report on the existence of a quorum and cover the procedural and voting matters.
Great. Thank you, Marc. As Alex said, let me say that this meeting will be conducted in accordance with the agenda and rules of procedure. Copies of these documents should have been distributed to you. If you don't have a copy, raise your hand and we will provide one. Great. We have appointed [Christina Zeko] as the representative of Broadridge to act as Inspector of Elections. Most stockholders have already voted. If you have completed ballots or proxies to be counted that you brought with you today, please raise your hand so we can collect them now. Okay, terrific. We will send someone over to collect those. If you have already voted, you do not need to take any further action. If you did not turn in a proxy or if you wish to vote in person and revoke an earlier proxy, please raise your hand.
Our notice of meeting was mailed, and our proxy materials and annual report were made available beginning on April 25th, 2019, to stockholders of record as of the record date, April 10th, 2019. The Inspector of Elections has confirmed that a majority of the company's issued and outstanding shares entitled to vote is represented in person or by proxy at today's meeting, and therefore a quorum is present, and the business of this meeting may be conducted. Since no stockholder nominations or additional proposals were filed with the corporate secretary in advance of this meeting, the business of this meeting is limited to the matters set forth in the company's proxy statement. The first item of business today is election of directors. 13 directors are to be elected at today's meeting.
The votes cast for each nominee's election must exceed the votes cast against that nominee's election in order for the nominee to be elected as a director. As set forth in the company's proxy statement, the board of directors has nominated the following persons to be elected: Marc Benioff, Keith Block, Parker Harris, Craig Conway, Alan Hassenfeld, Neelie Kroes, General Colin Powell, Sandy Robertson, John Roos, Bernard Tyson, Robin Washington, Maynard Webb, and Susan Wojcicki. The board recommends a vote in favor of each nominee. With respect to seven proposed items of business being proposed to our stockholders today, the board also recommends a vote for each proposal. Proposal two is the amendment of the company's certificate of incorporation to remove supermajority voting provisions from the company's charter and bylaws. Approval of proposal two requires two-thirds of the outstanding shares entitled to vote at the meeting.
Approval of the remaining proposals, three to six, requires the affirmative vote of a majority of the votes cast, affirmatively or negatively, on the matter. Proposal three is the amendment of the company's 2013 Equity Incentive Plan to, among other things, increase the number of shares authorized for issuance by 35.5 million shares. Proposal four is the ratification of the appointment of Ernst & Young LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending January 31st, 2020. Proposal five is an advisory vote to approve the compensation of the named executive officers for fiscal 2019. With respect to proposal six, the board recommends a vote against the proposal. Proposal six is a stockholder-submitted proposal regarding a true diversity board policy. Here today to present proposal six on behalf of the stockholder proponent is Justin Danhof.
If you could please make sure Mr. Danhof has a microphone. Right here? Terrific. Please go ahead, Mr. Danhof.
Thanks so much. My name is Justin Danhof from the National Center for Public Policy Research, and I'm here with Proposal Six this afternoon, which seeks to increase diversity on the company's board of directors. Across corporate America, company after company are adopting board diversity policies that are based on race and gender. These procedures have a noble goal, reducing corporate groupthink. They require companies to interview an underrepresented minority and a woman for each open board slot. I'm here to tell you that's not what diversity is. That's actually racism and that's sexism. Not all women think alike based on the fact that they are women. Similarly, not all Asian or Latino or Black Americans think the same based on their respective skin color. Diversity is not what someone looks like. It's a sum of what that person thinks and feels and believes. It's their ethos. It's who they are.
When the company takes overtly political positions on legal and policy issues, we think it would benefit you all to have voices from both sides of the aisle in the room. At Salesforce, you guys spend a significant capital taking the same far-left positions. For example, the company threatened to divest from Georgia over that state's consideration of a religious freedom law, falsely suggesting the measure was designed to discriminate. The company also signed the Human Rights Campaign's highly disingenuous amicus briefs in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case. The company's position there would've allowed states to compel speech of private businesses and citizens, all while further eroding religious freedom.
Just last week, The Washington Post reported that Salesforce has instituted a new policy taking aim at the Second Amendment, specifically the company's barring its clients that sell certain guns, clients such as Camping World, quote, "From using its technologies to market products, manage customer service operations, and fulfill orders." End quote. This could damage the company as existing clients may leave, and new clients may consider other options. Whether you're willing to admit your biases is actually beyond the point, because in business, perception is often reality, and our proposal provides a tangible business way for the company to combat its bias. We believe that boards that incorporate diverse perspectives can think more critically and oversee corporate managers more effectively. Appointing a few conservatives may help the company actually avoid groupthink. That's a win for investors and for diversity.
Thank you. Please join me in voting yes on proposal number six.
Great. Thank you very much. Because no further business is scheduled to come before the stockholders, I declare the polls for each matter to be voted on at this meeting open and direct that a vote of the stockholders be taken on the matters previously discussed. If you have previously voted, you do not need to take further action. If you did not turn in a ballot or proxy, or wish to vote in person or revoke your earlier ballot, please vote at this time and the ballot previously distributed to you. Once you have voted, please raise your hand and the ballot will be collected. Okay. If there are no additional ballots or proxies, I hereby declare the polls for each matter voted upon at this meeting closed.
Based on the preliminary voting results, the Inspector of Elections has confirmed that all 13 nominees have each received more votes cast for his or her election than against. Accordingly, each nominee has been elected as a director of the company to serve until the next annual meeting and until his or her successor has been duly elected and qualified. The Inspector of Elections has also confirmed that based on preliminary votes, all of the proposed following proposals have received sufficient votes in favor to pass. The amendment of the company's Certificate of Incorporation, the amendment of the 2013 Equity Incentive Plan, the ratification of the appointment of Ernst & Young, and the advisory approval of the compensation of their named executive officers.
The Inspector of Elections will provide a final voting report, which will be included in the minutes of this meeting. The final voting results will also be filed with the SEC.
Very good. Thank you.
If no further business.
That's great. As there is no further business to come before this meeting, this meeting is hereby adjourned. Thank you very much for attending today's meeting and for your continued support of our company. Thank you. Thank you very much. What's that?
You want to take some questions?
Oh, I'd be happy to. What questions do you have?
The meeting is officially adjourned, we do typically take a few questions for Q&A, if there are questions from stockholders.
My name is Harold Kellerman, a long-term stockholder. I actually made it to 100 being the number of years I belonged to the IEEE at my age, and that's why I wore it. I wore a pipe pin, IEEE 100. I've been around a long time, and Sandy can tell you when he had Robertson Stephens, and with Bill Hambrecht in course. I've seen four different cycles. I know the difference between sizzle and steak. I'm an engineer. I really like steak, and you guys are fantastic with the sizzle. You promote artificial intelligence and machine learning and all these other things. This has been around I've seen four cycles.
Last time I said something, and here's what I said 49 years ago about artificial intelligence. "It is still not possible to use computers where final human judgment is needed. We cannot effectively computerize judgment because human pattern recognition and decision-making are not well enough understood." I stand by that. 49 years ago, it was published in this edition at Andover. My, my question is, there's lots of buzzwords. You have a great field, green field right now in mobile and cloud. Do you have to push something that says artificial intelligence, machine learning, AR, VR, and all of the buzzwords, which won't, in my opinion, won't happen for another five to eight years?
Well,
Completely disagree with you. The advancements that I've seen in artificial intelligence, machine intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning have been incredible. The stuff that I've seen the company produce, especially in the last 24 months, has shocked even me. I don't know if you've seen any of our recent demonstrations or came to our TrailheaDX conference last week and saw some of the new technology, or how it's already been deployed by thousands and thousands of our customers, but it's unlike any computer science that I've seen. Maybe you have a better understanding than I do. The head of our research department is Richard Socher, who runs the number one computer science class at Stanford. He's a PhD in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and helped him create deep learning. It's a golden time of innovation.
When you look at our platform, our job is to take these technologies and make them available to everybody. We make them easy. When we look at not just the cloud, not just mobile, but also AI. blockchain is another area that's incredible what's happening. We've ingested those into our platform, and then we make all that available very simply and easily to our trailblazers. If you haven't had an opportunity to get your hands on it or come to one of our events and conferences, I'm happy to give you the schedule of those programs. I think you'll be quite shocked to see the tremendous advancements that have mostly happened, I think, in the last five years and really made it into the commercial markets in the last two to three.
As one example, the ability to do vision with artificial intelligence by just having a simple commodity camera, like on your phone, and for it to be able to interpret our physical world, is not something that we were really able to offer our customers through our platform just a short time ago, and now it is. Another example is the ability for our software to be able to interpret a voice and then make the leap from what you're saying, not just voice recognition, like the words, but to understand it and to insert, update, and delete into the database. We've never been able to do that before, but now we can. There's a lot of examples, and I'd be happy to, like I said, invite you to one of our programs so you can take a look at that.
Maybe you were at our TrailheaDX conference last week.
I'm confident about it.
I'd be happy to go through it, but thank you very much.
If you go to Cambridge and Oxford, they'll tell you this is all algorithms, and this is regression analysis.
Yeah
Artificial intelligence. It depends on your viewpoint between Europe and the United States.
Right.
I'll be here in the next five years, and I hope.
I'm just about customer value. That's it. Are we able to offer our customers more value based on this amazing technology? The value that we're offering our customers is just incredible.
Thank you.
That's what I'm excited about.
Thank you for that question. One thing I should have noted in the comments earlier, I confirmed everything that I had passed, the Inspector of Elections also has confirmed that based on the preliminary results, the stockholder proposal regarding improved diversity board policy did not receive the required-
Oh, okay. Thank you for that. Okay.
Any-
Any other questions?
Sorry, say one more time. Yeah?
All right. Well, if no other questions, I think we will call the meeting closed. Thank you very much for attending our-
Thank you everyone. Bye
shareholder meeting