The Salesforce CFO who left to save lives

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1:29And right now, you can get six months of Rippling free when you sign up at rippling.com slash scale. That's R-I-P-P-L-I-N-G dot com slash scale. Don't get sad. Get Rippling. Terms and conditions apply. Got to the end of the call, and I agreed I would at least think about it. So the next week I'm thinking about it, I came to the same conclusion. This is ridiculous. I am not going to do it. Because you're not... Crazy. Yes, exactly. It was absolutely unprecedented. Amy Weaver had just been offered a new job. chief financial officer of Salesforce. It took her totally by surprise, but the opportunity was too intriguing to pass up.

2:21Amy had already spent enough time at the iconic software company to know it'd be hard work, but hard work worth doing. How do we make it faster? How do we make it more efficient? How do we get rid of any of the bottlenecks? It's very hard to scale if you have a rickety platform. You really have to invest in having the right systems, the right processes in place. If you've got those, you can scale very, very quickly.

3:11nut balls. Ten years later, we're like, well, that's just how you do it. We haven't made it just how you do it. This is Masters of Scale.

3:24I'm Jeff Berman. You're our host. This week on the show, we're talking with Amy Weaver. As someone who's had a pretty nonlinear career myself, after all, it is not every former public defender who goes on to work at places like MySpace and the NFL and lead companies and host a podcast like Masters of Scale, I'm always drawn to others who've charted unconventional paths. And Amy's story is truly an extraordinary one. We reveal how Amy, a lawyer by training, zigzagged her way into the job of chief financial officer at Salesforce. We also dig into the latest challenge she's taken on. As I dove in and started learning more and more about Direct Relief, I realized that it's probably the largest, most efficient, most effective, and most impactful global humanitarian group that you may never have heard of.

4:20Amy is now the CEO of Direct Relief. You may not have heard of it, but you need to know what it is. It is an incredible humanitarian organization that distributes billions of dollars worth of medicine and supplies to people in need every single year. We'll talk more about that later in our conversation. Amy, welcome to Masters of Scale. Thank you, Jeff. I'm really excited to be here. I'm thrilled you are here. We have so much to talk about. You come from a family of lawyers. Being a lawyer almost seemed preordained. So when you say I come from a family of lawyers, that's not an overstatement. I think we stopped counting after we hit 12, 15 in the extended family.

5:03My grandfather served on the Washington State Supreme Court. He had four children. All four, including my father, became lawyers. I'm the oldest grandchild. It just felt very natural to become a lawyer. Did you have a vision of what that would be for you? Well, if you had asked me in sixth grade what I saw as my future, I thought I would practice law in Washington state and at some point move into the public sector. And I was determined that I would eventually be the first female president of the United States. And I was so earnest as a 12-year-old that I remember I actually sat down and made a list of who my cabinet would be.

5:43And I remember very distinctly that one of my best friends at that time, I decided she just wasn't there for vice president. And I gave her Secretary of Interior. I broke the news to her and she went skipping off. And when she went skipping off, I thought, I knew she wasn't vice presidential material. What I didn't anticipate is that my career would take me to Salesforce, to being a CFO, and then now to being CEO of Direct Relief. Amy's first step away from the traditional law career she'd always imagined happened because of her love of travel. I got a call from Expedia and they were looking for a securities lawyer.

6:23Expedia operated all over the world. It was a product that is simply my favorite thing in the world, which is travel. So I jumped over. It was a wonderful jump, but it was very hard. I remember I told my father on Father's Day and the entire day he kind of looked like all he wanted for Father's Day was for me to say I was joking about going in-house. Why? I mean, it's not like you are leaving the law to go do, you know, some... Be a CFO or... Or frankly, to go do some, you know, 12 person bootstrap startup where you're just like, I'm throwing away one career and I'm going to take a big shot. What was it where your dad wasn't like, this is awesome.

6:58I think what was hard is we have so many lawyers in my family and they're all doing different things, but they're all very strictly within the law. And I remember my father kept asking me, but will you still be a lawyer? They really view law in the most lofty terms. There's something beautiful about it and about the profession. and I think he wanted to make sure he was still going to be part of that. And I'll tell you many years later, I still feel like I'm part of that. I don't think I'll ever not identify as a lawyer. Yeah, I very much understand that feeling. So you were Expedia for how long?

7:31Five and a half years. Worked for a terrific general counsel, but I recognized I'd gotten very comfortable in that second seat. And I really realized I need to push myself and find that number one chair and see if I could do that. Where did you find that number one chair? It was a company called Univar. It was a hundred-year-old Northwest company, and I was very committed to being in Washington State. So jumped and went over, loved being in the number one seat. But within one year, CEO who had recruited me left, and the new CEO decided to move the company to Illinois. Wow. It was one of those times in my life, I remember waking up at 2 a.m.

8:12quite a bit, and just feeling like I'd really done the research. I thought about this. I thought I was doing everything right. Yeah. And suddenly I felt like my career was just skidding and did not know what to do. Can we just pause for a second? Because I think this is an experience that so many of us feel. We have these moments where we just, we're waking up at two in the morning and going, I made a wrong turn. Yes. Like I just know it. I feel it in my body. On a personal level, how did you deal with that? Glad we paused on this because I don't think people talk about this enough. Certainly not enough.

8:47There was a few things I learned. One is that 2.15 is never a good time to contemplate your life. No one has ever woken up at 2.15 and felt really great about their decisions. So I've gotten much better at not contemplating life at that time. But the other is you've got to take charge of your life. And I did. I decided to leave. And I did it without lining up any other jobs. And it was terrifying. trying, but it was much better than languishing in a role where I knew I was not going to move forward. What gave you the clarity to say, I have to leave to be able to get to whatever's next? One of the things that really comes to mind is a favorite quote of mine, and it's from William Sloan Coffin.

9:31He was actually a chaplain at Yale University back in like the 1950s, and he was talking about leaps of faith. He was talking about it in religion, but I think it transfers. And he said, I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings. And I said that to myself probably a million times when I was trying to make that decision. And then again, later in my career with big decisions, sometimes you're going to have to take that leap and have the confidence that the wings are going to grow. I love that for so many reasons, not least of which because Reid Hoffman talks all the time about how entrepreneurship is jumping off of a cliff and building the airplane on the way down.

10:09Yes. How long did it take to grow the next set of wings? Not long because Salesforce came calling very quickly. And I got a call two months later asking me to consider being a general counsel. How did they identify you as their next general counsel? So actually, they had a chief legal officer. So the general counsel was one step below. And it was a man named Burke Norton. And I'd worked for him at Expedia. And he called, asked me to consider the role, and I was not interested. You know, I just left Univar partially because I wanted to stay in the Pacific Northwest. And this was going to require a move to the Bay Area.

10:47Also, my kids had just started school, like literally that week. It just wasn't going to happen. And Salesforce is persistent. So a couple of weeks later, I finally agreed I would fly down. My husband and I flew down and said, I'll spend a day there. came back to the hotel that night and Jeff asked me, how was it? And I said, horrible. And he said, why? And I said, I think we're going to have to move. And I had just gone there and I had never seen a company with the potential that I saw at Salesforce. And they also had this incredible thing called the 111 program. And this was this new basis at Salesforce where they put side 1 % of their pre-IPO equity, 1 % of employee time, 1 % of their product, all for good causes.

11:35And over the time I was there, almost everyone I knew who joined Salesforce, that played a role in why they joined. And within a couple of months, we had packed up, done a mid-school year move and come down to California. Just on the 111 program, I love hearing that that was such a critical part of recruiting in Salesforce. But I think the other thing that's really important about the 111 is starting small. So Mark and Parker like to joke that when they adopted it, the equity was worthless. They had four employees and they had no product. But if you look at where they are 26 years later, it's hundreds of millions of dollars that have gone out, millions of employee hours, and something like 70 ,000 nonprofits running on the Salesforce system.

12:25That's what you do. And that's how you scale good works over time. You start small, but you keep at it. Still ahead, more with Amy Weaver on why she left the corporate world to become CEO of a not-for-profit.

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14:50IBM helps you turn AI into more than potential. It helps you turn it into smarter ways of working and ultimately scaling. Let's create smarter business, IBM. Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel and be sure to subscribe to our newsletter. We've got a link in the show notes.

15:16while you were there salesforce was you really at the front of gender pay equity could you tell us a little bit about those very public efforts it was 2015 2016 there were two women cindy robbins and leila sega and they went to mark and said you know great company great values and we don't know for sure but we think anecdotally there may be a gender pay gap And I think Mark's reaction was, of course, we don't have a problem. We're great people. We do good things. We don't pay women less. Three weeks later, Mark went on an interview live and said, we would be investigating whether we had a gender pay discrepancy.

15:58We would publish anything we found and we would fix it. Wow. And I'll tell you, at that point, I was general counsel and half of me as a woman was so excited about what we were doing. As general counsel, I remember thinking, I'm not so sure this is a good idea. We had no idea what we were going to find and no idea what the scale was going to be in terms of trying to fix it. We're trained as lawyers not to ask a question we don't already know the answer to. Exactly. I was like, how about like a little digging in behind the scenes before we jump in? But it showed a few things. First, huge credit to Cindy and Layla for raising this.

16:35But Mark really makes decisions on where to go on that. And once he makes a decision, we are lined up and we're going to make it happen. So we did dive in. We did a very deep study and we found out, no surprise really at the end, that there was a discrepancy and we fixed it. But one of the things we learned in that is that you can't do that once. So we ran the study again the next year. And sure enough, we also found a gap. So we had to look at what was causing that. How is this repeating? And they've continued to do it every year. But I also think this really goes to something about gender pay and your expectations at the workforce.

17:14When people first started talking about the differences in gender pay, what I heard a lot was, look, it's because women don't ask for more pay. I mean, Bobby's in my office every week demanding more. And I always hated that argument. I mean, first, as a manager, the last thing I wanted were more Bobby's coming in my office and demanding more pay. But second, you're putting the pressure on the person who has the least amount of information. So if Julie on your team thinks she might be underpaid, she doesn't know anyone else is being paid and it's her job to fix it is just the wrong approach. What you need is that the company that has the information needs to be using their data.

17:55They need to see what's going on and they need to fix it. And I think you can use that analogy for so much about what is going on in the workplace. Yeah. And that is both leading nationally, globally as a company that has innovation as one of its core values and showing a way, it's also doing what's right for your team, right? And frankly, to your point, for your leadership, for your managers who don't want people in their office every week, you're incentivizing wrong behavior. So let's go back to your Salesforce journey because you're now the top lawyer, one of the top companies in America. You could have a wonderful and linear path from there.

18:36Definitely not done the linear path. No. So, and it's one thing for general counselor, chief legal officer to jump to an operating role. It's another thing to become CFO. Yes. How does that happen? Very unusually. So at Salesforce, I had been there about seven years. At my best point, I was the chief legal officer and it was 2020. And we realized that our current CFO, Mark Hawkins, who's just a wonderful person, had indicated that he was thinking about retiring. So behind the scenes, I was working on a global search for a new CFO with Mark Benioff, our CEO and our audit chair. And one day I remember Mark FaceTimed me out of the blue.

19:19I remember it very clearly because he was in Hawaii. It was his birthday. He had the Hawaiian shirt on. And he said he wanted to talk to me about the CFO search. I said, great, I'll pull up my list of people. And he said, I have a new name. I said, who? And he said, Amy Weaver. And this was so far off my radar screen, so incomprehensible that I just remember looking down at the list and saying, she's not on my list. And I barely remember the rest of this conversation other than just thinking, there is no way I am going to do this. But Mark is quite persuasive and it got to the end of the call and I agreed I would at least think about it.

20:03So the next week I'm thinking about it and I came to the same conclusion. This is ridiculous. I'm not going to do it. Because you're not... Crazy. Yes, exactly. It was absolutely unprecedented. As far as I know, this is the only time in the Fortune 500 that anyone has gone directly from the chief legal officer role to the chief financial officer role. It was going to be hard. It was going to be very public. I mean, when you're CLO, you make mistakes. They're embarrassing. You get through them. Your CFO, the stock dips, you're on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. But there were a few things that changed my mind.

20:40The first was a conversation with Brett Taylor. So Brett is now founder of Sierra. He's the chair of the board of OpenAI. And at that point, he was COO of Salesforce and was about to become co-CEO and a very, very good friend. I sat down with him and I said, Brett, I am not qualified to be CFO. And he said, you're right, you're not, which is actually not quite what I was fishing for in this conversation. But he said, you're not qualified to be the traditional CPA CFO. He said, but that's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for a partner to help lead the company and set the financial strategy.

21:20He said, I want you to take the job and make it yours. Apply your skills, your experiences, bring that to the job. And his comments were such a gift because it immediately took away all of the comparison I was doing in my head between myself and every other Fortune 500 CFO. And it let me start thinking about what were the skills I did have and how could I recreate the role of CFO? The other thing is I started thinking about all of the times I have spoken to other people, whether it's mentoring or new people coming into the workforce or just general advice. And I would always tell them the same thing.

22:00It's like, you gotta lean in, you gotta take risks, don't be afraid, just go for it. And I realized that was really easy to say to other people and really hard to apply to myself. And I started imagining myself trying to speak to groups of people again, or maybe even going back to Wellesley College, my alma mater, and talking to young women. And maybe they wouldn't know, but I would know that when I was offered to that point the biggest opportunity in my career, I turned it down because I was afraid. And so I jumped in. First of all, incredible. And to live the advice you're giving other people, take that risk.

22:40What did you do substantively to prepare for the role? Because even if you're making the role yours, to your point. You have to have the basics. Right. So there were a couple of things and I got some incredible advice. So the day after I was announced and something had been in the Wall Street Journal, I got a series of texts that evening from Julie Sweet. And Julie's the CEO of Accenture. And Julie is another former lawyer. We practiced together at Cravath, and then she had become general counsel of Accenture, moved to become CEO of North America, and then global CEO. And she started texting me quite insistent that I call her that night.

23:20And I remember thinking it was almost midnight on the East Coast, but I did it anyhow. And what she wanted to tell me about was how she moved from general counsel to North American CEO. And she said at Accenture, they knew she was hardworking. They knew she was bright. They knew that she knew Accenture inside out. But she said at Accenture, what gets you the credibility is can you sell? So she said she took the first six months and focused on showing everyone she could sell. And her advice to me was find what is going to give you the most credibility on the job and focus on that. So for me, I decided it was Wall Street.

24:02It was the relationships with the shareholders and our analyst community. So immediately started the listening tour with our shareholders. This was, we were still kind of coming out of the pandemic. So I was able to do this very quickly on Zoom. But I also started making sure I could speak the language of Wall Street. And I remember our investor relations team and our PR team really putting me through the paces, just throwing question after question. These days were just brutal as I was trying to memorize a million numbers, trying to learn the approach on this. I remember one day, Evan Goldstein, who was then leading in IR for us, throwing out a question.

24:43It was a pretty technical question financially. And I answered it and I knew it and I was so proud of myself. I looked at Evan and he said, and I said, Evan, I got it right. And he said, yes, you got it right technically, but you didn't sound like a CFO. You didn't use the words a CFO would use. You didn't organize it. Do it again. And we would do it over and over until I had that comfort level and I knew I could go head to head with our analyst community. And not only was Julie's advice just game changing for me in terms of credibility, but investor relations and working with the analysts and working with our shareholders actually turned out to be one of my favorite things about the job.

25:28It's a great reminder that getting the substance right is only part of it. Yes. And having truth tellers on your team who, because I'm guessing Evan was reporting into you. He was and he did not, he did not shy away from giving me that feedback. Which is a big deal because you can imagine a lot of people would be like new boss, like not sure I want to say this. So remarkable. Okay. Amy, you've got this stunning run at Salesforce, one of America's best run companies, certainly shortlist for any number of extraordinary roles. You made another leap in this next phase of your career. So tell us about going to direct relief.

26:05I had an incredible experience at Salesforce and never really considered going to another company. It would be very hard to beat. The experiences I had there, just the faith that Mark put into me and the opportunities he put in front of me. But particularly when I took the CFO role. I knew it was going to be an opportunity to learn, an opportunity to see more about how to run a company. But I really wanted to take those experiences and use them in a different way. So I announced last August that I would step down from the CFO role and help a search for my replacement. And really thinking I would take some time away and then look for either public sector or nonprofit work.