Some of his antics seem calculated to make a point about the importance of daring to be unconventional, a method that has worked well for him.

Benioff, 45, wouldn't be a billionaire and Salesforce.com wouldn't have emerged as an even better investment than Google if he hadn't been able to persuade so many corporate decision makers to change their ways.

Salesforce.com rents software for managing customer relationships and delivers its product exclusively over the Internet. The concept, often called "cloud computing," is hot now, but it was considered a pie-in-the-sky notion when Benioff started Salesforce at the height of the dot-com boom in 1999.

Back then, companies preferred to install all their software on computers sitting on their own premises. They bought prepackaged software so they could own the applications, even if it meant paying huge fees for installation and maintenance.

That mindset was so deeply ingrained in corporate America that Benioff was worried Salesforce.com might fail two years after he started the company.

There's no such worry now. Salesforce.com has more than 77,000 customers, nearly 5,000 employees and steadily rising revenue that's expected to hit $1.5 billion in the company's current fiscal year.

His most impressive accomplishment of all: A $10,000 investment in Salesforce's June 2004 initial public offering would now be worth nearly $84,000, based on the company's July 21 stock price of $92.16. By comparison, a $10,000 investment in Google's August 2004 IPO would now be worth about $56,000.

Benioff, who learned the art of promotion as a protégé of Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison, is now studying the ideas of a 26-year-old whiz, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The goal: building business tools similar to Facebook's social networking system (Salesforce's first attempt at this is called "Chatter.")

When he's not traveling around the world to meet customers, Benioff gets much of his work done at the Hawaii getaway he built with his estimated fortune of $1.3 billion. It's where he spends about one-fourth of his time, relying on a high-definition video feed that keeps him wired with Salesforce's San Francisco headquarters and other offices.

"Nothing will help you let go faster than swimming alongside a pod of dolphins," Benioff told The Associated Press during a recent video interview from Hawaii. "It's an amazing experience. It connects you back to what's really important." (continued...)

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