All right. Good afternoon, everybody. Is everyone doing all
right? Good. All right. Welcome to Salesforce.
And this is the 2015 annual meeting to stockholders. So what I'm going to do is go through this. I'm going to read this script and then to on behalf of the Board of Directors and the Officer of Salesforce to send you a warm welcome and to express our appreciation to you for attending this meeting. And I also like to welcome our stockholders who are listening to the webcast of this event. I will ask the Chairman of this meeting, first Norton to my left, our Chief Legal Officer is going to act as Secretary to speak.
And I'm pleased to introduce you, our directors sitting here in the front row, and I'd like to begin by asking them to stand up and show you that they're here. Here they are. And Keith Block. Director, Alan Hassenfeld is not able to be here with us today as he is an agent. There are also several other company officers and employees in the audience.
And I'd like to ask our company officers and employees to stand up as well. Very good. Thank you. Also President are Craig Smith and Shay Malcolm of Ernst and Young. Very nice.
Thank you. They are our independent registered public accounting firm. And Bert is going to report on the existence of a forum and cover the procedural things.
Okay. Thank you, Mark. At the outset, let me say that this meeting will be conducted in accordance with the agenda and the rules of the procedure. Copies of these documents have been distributed to you. If you don't have a copy, please raise your hand now and a copy will be provided to you.
We have appointed Lisa Brenton, please raise your hand now so Mr. Brenton can pick them up.
Thank you.
If you have already voted, you do not need take any further action. If you did not turn in a proxy or if you wish to vote in person or revoke an earlier proxy, please raise your hand. Larry, vote. You did our vote. Thank you for voting.
I don't need to take any further action.
You definitely do not need to take further action. But if anyone else has not and or wishes to vote or revoke an earlier proxy, please raise your hand now and a ballot will be brought to you. Our transfer agent mailed a notice of meaning in our proxy materials and annual report were made available to stockholders on or about April 22, 2015. The stockholders of record as of the record date April 9, 2015. 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 can be conducted.
Since no stockholder nominations or additional proposals were properly 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 The first item of business today is the election of directors. 11 directors are to be elected at today's meeting. The votes cast for each nominee's election must exceed the votes cast against such nominees' 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 current members of the Board to be reelected: Mark Benioff, Keith Block, Craig Conway, Alan Hat himself, General Colin Powell, Sandy Robertson, John Roos, Larry Tomlinson, Robin Washington, Maynard Webb and Susan Wodisti. The Board has recommended a vote in favor of each nomination.
With respect to the 2nd through 5th items of business being proposed to our stock holders today, the Board has recommended a vote in favor of each proposal. For each proposal, the affirmative vote of at least the majority of shares represented in person or by proxy if this meeting is required for the proposal to pass. These items of business are the amendment and restatement of our 2013 equity incentive plan to increase the number of shares authorized for Grant by 37,000,000 the amendment and restatement of our 2,004 employee stock purchase plan to increase the number of shares authorized for employee purchase by 7,000,000 the ratification of the appointment by the Board of Ernst and Young LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending January 31, 20 16. And finally, the advisory vote to approve the compensation of the named executive officers for fiscal 2016. Are there any questions with respect to any of these proposals?
Okay. Because no further business is scheduled to become before the stockholders, I declare the polls for each matter to be voted on if this meeting opens 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 any further actions. If you did not turn in a ballot or a proxy or wish to vote in person or revoke an earlier ballot or proxy, please vote at this time using the ballots previously distributed to you. Once you have voted, please raise your hand and your ballot will be collected.
Okay. I believe we now have all the ballots and proxies. So I hereby declare
been
Have all ballots been tabulated?
Thank you.
All ballots have now been tabulated.
All right. Will the secretary please report the results of the voting?
The Inspector of Elections has confirmed that according to the elected as the 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 Election has also confirmed that a majority
of the shares present have voted
in favor of the amendment and restatement of our 2013 equity incentive plan to increase the number of shares authorized for Grant by $37,000,000 the amendment and restatement of our 2014 our 2,004 employee stock purchase plan to increase the number of shares authorized for employee purchase by 7,000,000 the ratification of the appointment of Ernst and Young to act as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for fiscal 2016 and the compensation of the named executive officers during fiscal 2015. Accordingly, each of these proposals has passed. The Inspector of Elections will furnish a written report of the final vote count with respect to the matters voted on today, which will be included in the minutes of the meeting These results will also be filed with the SEC.
Very good. As there is no further business to come before this meeting, this meeting is hereby adjourned. Thank you all for attending today's meeting.
We're now happy to take any questions you may have. Please raise your hand and a microphone will be brought to you if you have
any questions.
Yes, the microphone is submitted.
You'll be the one.
I was at the Robert Half meeting and the presentation features Salesforce. The CEO somehow is very proud to tell us that he was Salesforce had been integrated into the company. What do you do for them? I have a couple of other questions.
I don't really know.
I believe they use our sales cloud technology as part of their implementation of Salesforce.
Keith, do you know?
Okay. Okay. We're
happy to have them as a customer.
Yes. Okay. Now I Ms. Washington knows me as a shareholder activist.
Okay.
I go to the Gilead meeting and fight off the left wing proposers who want to cut the prices and the level of CEOs because we make too much money. But I'm here to lodge a couple of criticisms. First, I don't understand why salesforce.com shareholder money was donated to the Clintons on Baker. And my second criticism is that I listen to Kramer every night and I hear you quite often. And I didn't mind you taking on the state of Indiana But you told one fib the last time I saw you.
And that was that your employees, your gay employees did not get a slice of pizza. And that poor little girl who was confronted by a reporter who told what he want Menry's Pizza was not going to deny anyone on Slide 15. So those are my 2 things. Okay. If I could answer your question about the Clinton concept.
Okay. We hold a conference every year called Dreamforce, which is the largest technology event for a vendor. And we hired Hillary Clinton to come to that conference. And as part of that, we paid
a speaker fee. We paid a speaker fee and a contribution which was made to the Foundation as it says in connection with her speaking at our event.
Maybe. Sure. I have no problem with that. I also think the Clinton Foundation is an excellent very well run nonprofit organization that has amazing work that they have done. I mean, it's been phenomenal what they've accomplished.
Thank you, Dan. Sure. I'd
also like to speak about Indiana. So the story in Indiana is like goes like this. 2 years ago approximately we bought a company in the state of Indiana called ExactTarget for about $2,500,000,000 several months ago. Now maybe six months ago, I started to hear from the head of that unit that there was legislation that was coming forward in the state of Indiana that would discriminate against homosexuals and other folks. And I was quite surprised and I know Mike Pence very well and who's the Governor of the State of Indiana.
And I thought there's no way that Mike Pence could sign that legislation. I also worked on a couple of letters to Mike Pence to amplify our position. And this was especially important because in the state of Indiana, there is really no safety net for discriminatory behavior. Unlike a lot of other states in our union, that state in particular really does not have a fabric of protection. So I was surprised that I was driving home one night after speaking at an event and I heard that Mike Pence had signed this legislation.
I said that just doesn't seem to be possible, because what it had created was a fabric where indeed our employees or customers who are gay could indeed go to the state of Indiana and yes be denied a slice of pizza And yes, also be denied access to a restaurant. And so we I tweeted that I'm going to have to reduce the amount of investment that we're making in the state of Indiana, because how can I rightfully send my employees and my customers to a state that's openly discriminating against gays? In fact, a few days later, when Mike Pence was on George Stephanopoulos' show and was specifically asked, does this mean that gays will be discriminated against in the state of Indiana? He refused to answer the question. It's actually a very well known sequence.
So I got home that night and I sent an e mail out to quite a few of my friends and I said, are you aware of this legislation? And most of them were not. But then as they started to see what was going on, they got kind of, enthralled by it as well and said, well, we need to do something about this. And then that next morning, I turned on CNBC and one of my friends was on CNBC talking about it. And I was like, wow, something is really happening.
And more and more momentum happened and other CEOs came forward. And then all of a sudden, we also saw the CEOs within a few days of a number of our most important customers and partners companies like Eli Lilly and Cummins Engine and Marriott and Nike. And then all of a sudden one of my friends Doug McMillan is the CEO of Walmart, which is one of the biggest companies in our country called the Governor of Arkansas and said you better not do the same thing here and stop that legislation. And within a few days, we had hundreds of CEOs who were all united against the legislation in Indiana. I was completely taken aback.
I had no idea that that's what was going to get unleashed. But it did turn into a dramatic social media storm. And the reality is that we can't we have to be there's 2 kinds of companies in this world. There's companies who kind of follow the Milton Friedman motto, which is the business of business is business. And when I went to business school that's what I was taught.
But I think that our world is at a different place. And today, I think that our world is at a place where the business to business is improving the state of the world. Now over here, the key is really shareholder management and shareholder optimization, EPS optimization. I just don't believe in that in today's world and I don't think it's an effective way to run a company. Over here, it's about stakeholder management.
And it's really looking at every stakeholder that means something to your company, which yes, includes your shareholders, which are very important. I mean, here's our shareholder meeting and I hope they value the returns they have received over the last decade or 11 years that we've been a public company. But also very important to me is our employees and our customers. I think there's other critical stakeholders today as well including the environment, which is in dramatic peril, Our community, our people who are not very well served, there's many things that make this business successful and that is the stakeholder theory. That's why I go to the World Economic Forum every January because Klaus Schwab who wrote that theory in 1972 kind of put together this forum to bring CEOs and to educate them and to kind of transform them from the Milton Friedman point of view to the Klaus Schwab point of view.
And I kind of bought into that idea that business can be a platform for change. And that if you're a CEO in this country, you need to be a leader not just of your company, not just of your industry, not just of your community, but really of your wherever you're doing business and certainly wherever you have significant employees. In the state of Indiana, we're the largest employer. So how could I sit back and let my employees suffer? I can't.
And if the same thing happened here any place where we have a significant of employees, I would do the same thing, because my job is to make those employees a success. Just as it is my job to make our customers a success or shareholder success or anyone else. And taking a position that CEOs don't have the right to stand up and say, hey, that's not right. You can't do that. This is not what the world is about today.
The world is about today that we're all in a situation where it's about are you making the world better or are you letting it go the way it is? We see what's happened in Washington, D. C. And I know that everyone here is probably as concerned as I am with what we've seen, and kind of somewhat mismanagement of our country and fight with the dysfunctional nature of government. But then to see it at the state level that was shocking.
But we weren't going to stand by. We didn't know we were going to change something. That was a huge shock to us. It was a surprise. But guess what?
We got that legislation changed, because you want to know what happened? All of a sudden, it wasn't just us pulling out of the state of Indiana. We had all kinds of CEOs who made the same thing. There was this incredible situation where there was a conference called the Big Data Conference. And all of a sudden, the person who was running the Big Data Conference got a call from a company called Pivotal and then another company called CMC and another company called Oracle.
They were all withdrawing. And then they were hearing about the Final Four was going to leave Indiana and the MCAA was going to leave India. I mean it was a tidal wave of support. So that's why I really felt that we did right thing. For sure, it was super uncomfortable.
It's not what I do every day. What I do every day is make great software and make customers successful. And what I try to do is make a great company. But then what I learned was to make a great company sometimes you have to get out of your comfort zone and to do what's right. And that's what I felt.
So it's a long answer to a short question, but I felt like you deserve the answer. So thank you very much for coming. Any other questions?
Okay. All right. Thank you very much.
And we'll bring the meeting to a close. Thank you.