Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Says Funding Thousands Of Startups Is How Innovation Happens: 'You're Going To Throw A Lot Against The Wall'

Salesforce CRM chief Marc Benioff says Silicon Valley's frenetic rush to bankroll thousands of AI start-ups isn't a bubble worth fearing but the price of true breakthroughs.

What Happened: "If you don't have all those components, you're not going to get the breakthrough … you're going to have to throw a lot against the wall before you figure out what sticks," he told the Financial Times in a new interview, adding that "these 10,000 companies just got funded, and only 100 of them are good. But you have to fund them all to get to the 100."

Benioff argues the same spray-and-pray logic propelled past revolutions from the browser to the iPhone, and he's applying it inside Salesforce with an "all-in" push on autonomous AI agents.

The company's Agentforce platform, unveiled last year, aims to seed a "billion bots" that can handle routine tasks for clients, a goal he reiterated while blasting rival Microsoft's Copilot as "science projects."

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Why It Matters: The 60-year-old billionaire has plenty of personal capital riding on the thesis. Salesforce Ventures has $6.8 billion under management and just scored a roughly $600 million gain when Google bought cybersecurity firm Wiz, one of hundreds of bets Benioff calls his "side hustle" in an interview with Business Insider.

Time Ventures and the company's $1 billion Generative AI Fund have already poured cash into Anthropic and other up-and-comers chasing the next platform shift.

Benioff's willingness to bankroll long shots dates back to his mentor Steve Jobs and, more recently, to Salesforce's own leap from CRM software to multitrillion-dollar "digital labor," a market he says will dwarf every tech wave before it.

"You must fund the chaos to harvest the miracles," he said to FT, insisting the current hype cycle is a feature, not a bug, of innovation.

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