Good afternoon, everybody. Is everyone doing all right? Good. Welcome to Salesforce. This is the 2015 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. What I'm going to do is go through this. I'm going to read this script, then get Burke Norton, who, our Chief Legal Officer, and he's also going to read this script as well. Then we're going to have a presentation from Burke.
Two minutes.
Two minutes.
Okay, great.
Very good. I'm going to go ahead and start. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am Marc Benioff, chairman of the board of directors and chief executive of Salesforce. It's my pleasure on behalf of the board of directors and the officers of Salesforce to extend to you a warm welcome and to express our appreciation to you for attending this meeting. I'd also like to welcome our stockholders who are listening to the webcast of this event. I will ask the chairman of this meeting, Burke Norton, to my left, our chief legal officer, is going to act as secretary this meeting. I'm pleased to introduce to you our directors sitting here in the front row, and I'd like to begin by asking them just to stand up and show you that they're here. There they are.
Sanford Robertson, Craig Conway, General Colin Powell, John Roos, Lawrence Tomlinson, Robin Washington, Maynard Webb, Susan Wojcicki, and Keith Block. Director Alan Hassenfeld is not able to be here with us today as he's in Asia. There are also several other company officers and employees in the audience. I'd like to ask our company officers and employees to stand up as well. Very good. Thank you. Also present are Craig Smith and Shay Malcolm of Ernst & Young. Very nice. Thank you. They are our independent registered public accounting firm. Burke is going to report on the existence of a quorum and cover the procedural things.
Okay. Thank you, Marc. At the outset, let me say that this meeting will be conducted in accordance with the agenda and the rules of 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. Great. We have appointed Ms. Lisa Brenton, a representative of our transfer agent, Computershare, to act as Inspector of Elections. Most stockholders have already voted. If you have any completed ballots or proxies to be counted, please raise your hand now so Ms. Brenton can pick them up. Thank you. 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 or revoke an earlier proxy, please raise your hand now.
Did everybody vote?
You did already vote.
Oh, good. Okay.
Thank you for voting.
I don't need to take any further action?
You definitely do not need to take further action.
Okay.
If anyone else has not voted, or wishes to vote, or revoke an earlier proxy, please raise your hand now, and a ballot will be brought to you. Okay, great. Thank you. Our transfer agent mailed a notice of meeting, and our proxy materials and annual report were made available to stockholders on or about April 22nd, 2015, the stockholders of record as of the record date, April 9th, 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, 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 statement. 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 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 current members of the board to be reelected: Marc Benioff, Keith Block, Craig Conway, Alan Hassenfeld, General Colin Powell, Sanford Robertson, John Roos, Lawrence Tomlinson, Robin Washington, Maynard Webb, and Susan Wojcicki. The board has recommended a vote in favor of each nominee.
With respect to the second through fifth items of business being proposed to our stockholders today, the board has recommended a vote in favor of each proposal. For each proposal, the affirmative vote of at least a majority of the shares represented in person or by proxy at 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 per grant by 37 million, the amendment and restatement of our 2004 Employee Stock Purchase Plan to increase the number of shares authorized for employee purchase by seven million, the ratification of the appointment by the board of directors of Ernst & Young LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending January 31st, 2016, and finally, the advisory vote to approve the compensation of the named executive officers for fiscal 2015. Are there any questions with respect to any of these proposals? Okay.
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 any further action. 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 the polls for each matter voted upon at this meeting closed and direct the Inspector of Elections to collect and tabulate the ballots. 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 tabulation of votes, all 11 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 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 per grant by 37 million, the amendment and restatement of our 2004 Employee Stock Purchase Plan to increase the number of shares authorized for employee purchase by seven million, the ratification of the appointment of Ernst & Young LLP 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, and these results will also be filed with the SEC.
Very good. There's 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, a microphone is coming to you.
You'll be the one. Okay.
You're the guy that brought me upstairs, I guess. I was at the Robert Half meeting, the shareholder meeting. The presentation featured Salesforce.
The CEO somehow was very proud to tell us that Salesforce had been integrated into his company. What do you do for them? I have a couple of other questions.
I don't really know. Rick?
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.
Yeah. Okay. 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 belittle the CEO because he makes too much money. I'm here to lodge a couple of criticisms. First, I don't understand why Salesforce.com shareholder money was donated to the Clinton Foundation. My second criticism is that I listen to [Inaudible] every night, and I hear you quite often.
I didn't mind you taking on the State of Indiana. You told one fib.
The last time I saw you.
That was that your gay employees would not get a slice of pizza.
That poor little girl who was confronted by a reporter, who told Memories Pizza was not going to deny anyone a slice of pizza. Those are my two comments.
Mm-hmm. Okay.
I'd like you to answer the question about the Clinton Foundation.
Okay. We hold a conference every year called Dreamforce, which is the largest technology event for a vendor. We hired Hillary Clinton to come to that conference. As part of that, we paid a speaker fee. Is that right?
We paid a speaker fee and a contribution which was made to the Clinton Foundation, as it says, in connection with her speaking at our event.
Will you speak again?
Maybe. Sure. I have no problem with that. I also think the Clinton Foundation is an excellent, very well-run non-profit organization that has done incredible work in the world. I hope to have a foundation myself one day that does as amazing work that they have done. It's been phenomenal what they've accomplished.
Thank you. Can I say something?
Sure. I'd also like to speak about Indiana. The story in Indiana goes like this. Two years ago, approximately, we bought a company in the state of Indiana called ExactTarget for about $2.5 billion. Several months ago, 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. I was quite surprised. I know Mike Pence very well, who's the governor of the state of Indiana. I thought there's no way that Mike Pence would sign that legislation. I also worked on a couple of letters to Mike Pence to amplify our position. 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. I was surprised that I was driving home one night after speaking at an event. 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, yes, also be denied access to a restaurant. 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's 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. I got home that night. I sent an email out to quite a few of my friends. I said, "Are you aware of this legislation?" Most of them were not. As they started to see what was going on, they got kind of enthralled by it as well. Said, "Whoa, we need to do something about this." That next morning, I turned on CNBC. One of my friends was on CNBC talking about it. I was like, "Wow, something is really happening." More and more momentum happened. Other CEOs came forward.
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. All of a sudden, one of my friends, Doug McMillon, who 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." 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. It did turn into a dramatic social media storm. The reality is that there's two 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. When I went to business school, that's what I was taught. I think that our world is at a different place. Today, I think that our world is at a place where the business of 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 about looking at every stakeholder that means something to your company, which, yes, includes your shareholders, which are very important to me.
There's our shareholder meeting, and I hope they value the return that they've received over the last decade or 11 years that we've been a public company. 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 in to educate them and to kind of transform them from the Milton Friedman point of view to the Klaus Schwab point of view.
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 wherever you're doing business. Certainly wherever you have significant employees. In the state of Indiana, we're the largest employer. How could I sit back and let my employees suffer? I can't. If the same thing happened here or any place where we have a significant of employees, I would do the same thing. My job is to make those employees a success, just as it is my job to make our customers a success or our shareholders success or anyone else.
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 kind of letting it go the way it is? We see what's happened in Washington, D.C., I know that everyone here is probably as concerned as I am of what we've seen, and kind of the somewhat mismanagement of our country inside the dysfunctional nature of government. To see it at the state level, that was shocking. 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. 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. All of a sudden, the person who was running the Big Data Conference got a call from a company called Pivotal, another company called EMC, and another company called Oracle. They were all withdrawing. They were hearing about the Final Four was going to leave Indiana, and the NCAA was going to leave Indiana. I mean, it was a tidal wave of support. That's why I really felt that we did the 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, what I try to do is make a great company. 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. That's what I felt. It's a long answer to a short question, I felt like you deserve the answer. Thank you very much for coming. Any other questions? Okay. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you. We'll bring the meeting to a close. Thank you. Thank you.