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Parker Harris, a co-founder of Salesforce, speaks during a keynote at the company’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on Sept. 12, 2023.

Marlena Sloss | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Each year, Salesforce updates its V2MOM, a planning document laying out vision, values, methods, obstacles and measures. CEO Marc Benioff has said it’s “been used to guide every decision at Salesforce” since the software company’s founding 25 years ago this week.

But in early 2023, there was a problem. ChatGPT was going viral, and Salesforce’s strategy didn’t account for it.

“The V2MOM had nothing about generative AI,” Parker Harris, who co-founded the company with Benioff, told CNBC in an interview.

It was a first for Salesforce, which had never been caught so off-guard about an emerging technology trend. If Salesforce was to become a leader in generative artificial intelligence, the company would need to quickly revise its guiding document to redirect the company — and its 73,000 employees — toward the technology that’s sweeping across Silicon Valley and making its way into every industry, from manufacturing to medicine.

Salesforce would have to go to battle with tech giants Amazon, Google and Microsoft, as well as red-hot and well-capitalized startups. But following a handful of hefty acquisitions and a run-in with activist investors that led Salesforce to disband its M&A committee, a splashy deal was likely off the table.

Salesforce would have to build. And that’s when Benioff turns to his longtime sidekick, Harris.

Well known in the software industry but largely unfamiliar outside of it, Harris has always been core to the fabric of Salesforce. In the past six years, Benioff has elevated two different top lieutenants to the role of co-CEO, but neither lasted in the job longer than 18 months. Harris, a Salesforce board member and now the technology chief of Slack, which Salesforce bought in 2021, said he’d rather avoid the limelight.

“I don’t like being front and center,” Harris said, in an interview tied to the company’s 25th anniversary, which was officially March 8. “I don’t like the articles necessarily to be written about me. I like being behind the scenes.”

Internally, Harris is in the thick of it. After generative AI made its way into the revised V2MOM last year, Harris supervised its brisk insertion into the company’s sales, customer service, marketing and commerce applications. He studied new techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation, which involves feeding information outside of an AI model’s training set to yield a better answer.

Questions swirled about whether Salesforce should spend billions of dollars to assemble its own general-purpose large language model for spitting out text in response to a few words of human input, Harris said. But the company started seeing clients use multiple LLMs.

Salesforce slashed its investment in some areas while doubling the size of its research group, which was fleshing out its own AI models. At the same time, it started drawing on models from AI startup Anthropic, as well as GPT-4, the model powering OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In September, Benioff brought OpenAI CEO Sam Altman onstage at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference, which takes over a chunk of downtown San Francisco.

At past Dreamforce shows, Harris has appeared in superhero costumes, entertaining the audience of tens of thousands. But 2023 was not a time for jokes. Harris was busy repositioning the company. He chose a professional look: a checked blue suit that matched his glasses with thin blue frames.

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, right, and Parker Harris, co-founder of Salesforce, introduce Salesforce 1 Lightning during the company’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on Oct. 14, 2014.

Noah Berger | Bloomberg | Getty Images

In his keynote, Harris talked about the Data Cloud, a product originally called Genie that surfaces real-time information. In about 2016 he had decided to push much of Salesforce’s IT infrastructure into the public cloud, enabling tighter integration of many assets the company had acquired over the years. That helped Salesforce launch the Data Cloud.

Without the Data Cloud, Harris told CNBC, “I think we would have been in a much worse place.” It’s such a critical part of the company that Benioff mentioned it 58 times on the company’s earnings call in February.

A Robin for Batman

Despite his status as the most decorated technical leader at one of the world’s largest software companies, Harris was an English major. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Middlebury College in Vermont.

His love of computers came early, though. He told Business Insider in 2015 that he started programming on an Apple II as a kid growing up in North Carolina.

In the early 1990s, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and took a software-engineering job at a company called Metropolis Software, where he got to know developers Frank Dominguez and Dave Moellenhoff. The trio founded a Java consulting firm called Left Coast Software.

They were contracting at Saba Software, an online learning company co-founded by former Oracle executive Bobby Yazdani. Benioff, who was still working at Oracle under Larry Ellison at the time, told Yazdani that he had this idea to build web-based sales software. Yazdani told Benioff he needed to meet Harris, Dominguez and Moellenhoff.

“He was a very abstract thinker,” Yazdani said about Harris, in an interview with CNBC. “He had clarity around capability of what’s possible.”

In the fall of 1998, Benioff and Harris met for lunch at Kincaid’s, a seafood and steak restaurant in Burlingame overlooking the San Francisco Bay. It was an uneven match. Benioff is hard to miss at 6 feet, 5 inches tall. He’s loud and loves to talk.

Harris is scrawny and quieter. He said he’s averse to conflict. He defuses the drama, said Brett Queener, a former Salesforce executive who’s now a venture capitalist.

“Every Batman needs their Robin,” Queener said.

After the lunch meeting, Benioff had Harris, Dominguez and Moellenhoff over to his home in San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill neighborhood. They were all in.

Salesforce.com was born on March 8, 1999. Harris was 32. His parents, wife and young daughter came by corporate headquarters — a one-bedroom apartment next to Benioff’s home — to commemorate the moment, which Harris posted to YouTube eight years later.

“We are going to probably work here for six months to a year, and we’re going to just really enjoy it,” he told his father, who was behind the camera. Salesforce played the clip for employees this week during a celebration.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: Co-pilot uses our customers data to make decisions

While Harris shared the title of co-founder with Benioff, his partner held much more of the equity. That’s why Benioff is now worth around $11 billion, with a current stake in Salesforce that exceeds $7 billion, while Harris’ holdings are worth nearly $600 million.

Though he’s relatively soft spoken, Harris has his indulgences. He’s spent money on red wine from France and Italy, works of art by Ruth Asawa and Josef Albers, a home in Nantucket and a renovation of the family home in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights.

“We really shifted it to a focus on sunlight,” Harris said.

In his office at the top of the house, he likes to put on headphones and crank up the music. He listens to the Avett Brothers, Radiohead and Miles Davis. He plays golf and surfs. A coworker said Harris is an “enthusiastic” dancer. He belongs to Middlebury’s board of trustees.

At Salesforce, Harris led the development of the platform that enables companies to build on top of its software, along with an initiative to make Salesforce work well on mobile devices. There was also the push to build the next-generation Salesforce Lightning, as well as Chatter, an enterprise social network.

He talked about AI way back at Dreamforce 2009, suggesting that the technology might one day help Chatter identify in-house experts on different topics. He admitted to his shortcomings.

“I don’t understand that area,” Harris told a group of journalists, regarding AI. “I understand we have to solve it. I have hired some people in that area that do understand it.”

Tough time in social

At the time, social was the big buzzword. Facebook was still private but taking off.

A startup called Yammer was being described as the Facebook for the workplace. A few Salesforce employees started discussing the potential for information to go viral among salespeople and customer-service agents. Benioff was intrigued. He insisted that it become the top priority.

After Harris allocated eight engineers to the new project, Benioff demanded he go bigger. Harris checked in with engineering leaders and secured a headcount of 75.

That wasn’t enough. At a briefing on the updated status, Benioff was dissatisfied, according to a meeting attendee who asked not to be named to speak candidly about the matter. Harris was silent. His face went pale. He told Benioff he’d redo the plan, the person said.

Marc Benioff, co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, sits in the audience ahead of the special address by U.S. President Donald Trump on the opening day of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 21, 2020.

Jason Alden | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Harris eventually got 80% of Salesforce’s engineers to start working on Chatter. But the product never took off.

“We didn’t take it far enough,” Harris said. Microsoft was also hot to get into the market, snapping up Yammer in 2012 for $1.2 billion, a huge multiple for a company with a small revenue base.

Salesforce wound up buying the big prize in the space, purchasing Slack in 2021 for $27.1 billion, by far the company’s priciest deal.

But perhaps Harris’ biggest swing in his decades at Salesforce was the push to the public cloud. It wasn’t an easy choice.

“Half the engineers, the brightest people, were like, ‘We’re going to run the company if we do this,'” Harris recalled. “The great fear was that we would ruin our cost model because the cost would be much more expensive on public cloud, and then we would be able to hire less salespeople or less engineers or whatever.”

The other half of the engineering staff, Harris said, was petrified that if Salesforce didn’t move to the cloud, everyone else will “innovate faster than us.'”

Benioff didn’t have much to contribute for a change.

“Marc was like, ‘This is crazy, that these are some of the smartest people I know, and you guys can’t agree,'” Harris said.

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, left, speaks as Parker Harris, co-founder of Salesforce, center, and Kara Swisher, executive editor of Re/Code, listen during a keynote address at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on Sept. 17, 2015. Salesforce.com Inc. aims to cut the time its customers spend plugging data into its systems by weaving machine-learning technology from acquisition RelateIQ into its software for managing sales accounts.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Harris saw the advantage that startups gained by outsourcing data center needs to Amazon Web Services. And he knew Salesforce had failed to build a viable platform for easily developing apps while partnering with VMware. Harris concluded that not pushing Salesforce to public cloud services like AWS would be an existential threat.

“That was a very lonely decision,” he said. But as it became a part of the V2MOM, it rippled out to thousands.

While Salesforce might have saved money when it ditched its Equinix colocation facilities, leaning more on the cloud hasn’t been cheap. Last year, after activist investors called for more profitability from Salesforce, the company signed up for longer-term cloud commitments. It agreed to spend at least $16.8 billion on infrastructure service providers as of January, up from $6.5 billion in January 2023, according to regulatory filings.

The biggest beneficiary of that spending is AWS, which is run by former Salesforce executive Adam Selipsky. Harris said Salesforce is looking at other providers as additional partners.

“Oracle has done a great job around their platform, so technically, it’s actually quite good,” he said.

‘Try to build something great’

Harris recently gave up the CTO title at Salesforce that he’d held for seven years. The company hasn’t yet named a successor.

Now he’s onto Slack.

In 2022, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield left the company he founded in 2009. He was replaced by Lidiane Jones. She departed a year later to run dating app developer Bumble. And in January of this year, Slack co-founder and CTO Cal Henderson said he was stepping down.

“I thought, ‘I can have an impact there,'” Harris said. ‘But I can also — I would love to do that job, I would love to go back and run some engineering teams and really try to build something great.'”

Harris visited Benioff’s home in the Sea Cliff neighborhood of San Francisco, and the two co-founders were in agreement that it was the right call.

“I’m excited for this next chapter with Parker as Slack’s CTO, continuing his legacy as one of our industry’s greats,” Benioff said in an email.

Harris flew to New York to hang out with Noah Weiss, Slack’s product chief. Harris moved his desk to the Slack floor in San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower, where he’s near new unit CEO Denise Dresser. He comes in two to four days a week, and attends Monday meetings to review Slack metrics.

“People, probably fairly, had a lot of apprehension,” Weiss said.

Some of Slack’s employees suspected Harris would try to apply the Salesforce approach to Slack. But instead, Harris sought to understand how Slack had become successful.

Weiss said that at Salesforce’s new fiscal year kickoff in Las Vegas last month, Harris talked at an executive meeting about one of Slack’s product principles called prototype the path. And Harris has started writing documents in Slack’s collaborative Canvas tool.

“He’s been showing up extremely well, definitely winning hearts and minds, for sure, including mine,” Weiss said.

Employees sometimes add flair to Slack chats with a Parker Harris emoji, he said.

When it comes to keeping up with Benioff, who spends a healthy amount of time at his palatial estate in Hawaii, Harris uses other services.

“Marc is all mobile and all text and FaceTime,” Harris said.

The men talk once every few weeks. They’ll be talking more frequently, as Harris said they’re about to kick off weekly meetings on Slack and Salesforce integrations.

Harris hopes that his presence can convince Slack employees to stay after the executive exodus.

“I don’t want to talk too much about myself, but I think it is helping,” Harris said.

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USDC stablecoin issuer Circle files for IPO as public markets open to crypto

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USDC stablecoin issuer Circle files for IPO as public markets open to crypto

Jeremy Allaire, Co-Founder and CEO, Circle 

David A. Grogan | CNBC

Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, has filed for an initial public offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The S1 lays the groundwork for Circle’s long-anticipated entry into the public markets.

While the filing does not yet disclose the number of shares or a price range, sources told Fortune that Circle plans to move forward with a public filing in late April and is targeting a market debut as early as June.

JPMorgan Chase and Citi are reportedly serving as lead underwriters, and the company is seeking a valuation between $4 billion and $5 billion, according to Fortune.

This marks Circle’s second attempt at going public. A prior SPAC merger with Concord Acquisition Corp collapsed in late 2022 amid regulatory challenges. Since then, Circle has made strategic moves to position itself closer to the heart of global finance — including the announcement last year that it would relocate its headquarters from Boston to One World Trade Center in New York City.

Read more about tech and crypto from CNBC Pro

Circle is best known as the issuer of USDC, the world’s second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization.

Pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar and backed by cash and short-term Treasury securities, USDC has roughly $60 billion in circulation.

Circle is best known as the issuer of USDC, the world’s second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization.

Pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar and backed by cash and short-term Treasury securities, USDC has roughly $60 billion in circulation. It makes up about 26% of the total market cap for stablecoins, behind Tether‘s 67% dominance. Its market cap has grown 36% this year, however, compared with Tether’s 5% growth.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said on the company’s most recent earnings call that it has a “stretch goal to make USDC the number 1 stablecoin.” 

The company’s push into public markets reflects a broader moment for the crypto industry, which is navigating renewed political favor under a more crypto-friendly U.S. administration. The stablecoin sector is ramping up as the industry grows increasingly confident that the crypto market will get its first piece of U.S. legislation passed and implemented this year, focusing on stablecoins.

Stablecoins’ growth could have investment implications for crypto exchanges like Robinhood and Coinbase as they integrate more of them into crypto trading and cross-border transfers. Coinbase also has an agreement with Circle to share 50% of the revenue of its USDC stablecoin.

The stablecoin market has grown about 11% so far this year and about 47% in the past year, and has become a “systemically important” part of the crypto market, according to Bernstein. Historically, digital assets in this sector have been used for trading and as collateral in decentralized finance (DeFi), and crypto investors watch them closely for evidence of demand, liquidity and activity in the market.

More recently, however, rhetoric around stablecoins’ ability to help preserve U.S. dollar dominance – by exporting dollar utility internationally and ensuring demand for U.S. government debt, which backs nearly all dollar-denominated stablecoins – has grown louder.

A successful IPO would make Circle one of the most prominent crypto-native firms to list on a U.S. exchange — an important signal for both investors and regulators as digital assets become more entwined with the traditional financial system.

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Hims & Hers shares rise as company adds new weight-loss medications to platform

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Hims & Hers shares rise as company adds new weight-loss medications to platform

The Hims app arranged on a smartphone in New York on Feb. 12, 2025.

Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Hims & Hers Health shares closed up 5% on Tuesday after the company announced patients can access Eli Lilly‘s weight loss medication Zepbound and diabetes drug Mounjaro, as well as the generic injection liraglutide, through its platform.

Zepbound, Mounjaro and liraglutide are part of the class of weight loss medications called GLP-1s, which have exploded in popularity in recent years. Hims & Hers launched a weight loss program in late 2023, but its GLP-1 offerings have evolved as the company has contended with a volatile supply and regulatory environment.

Lilly’s weekly injections Zepbound and Mounjaro will cost patients $1,899 a month, according to the Hims & Hers website. The generic liraglutide will cost $299 a month, but it requires a daily injection and can be less effective than other GLP-1 medications.

“As we look ahead, we plan to continue to expand our weight loss offering to deliver an even more holistic, personalized experience,” Dr. Craig Primack, senior vice president of weight loss at Hims & Hers, wrote in a blog post.

A Lilly spokesperson said in a statement that the company has “no affiliation” with Hims & Hers and noted that Zepbound is available at lower costs for people who are insured for the product or for those who buy directly from the company. 

In May, Hims & Hers started prescribing compounded semaglutide, the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk‘s GLP-1 weight loss medications Ozempic and Wegovy. The offering was immensely popular and helped generate more than $225 million in revenue for the company in 2024.

But compounded drugs can traditionally only be mass produced when the branded medications treatments are in shortage. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced in February that the shortage of semaglutide injections products had been resolved.

That meant Hims & Hers had to largely stop offering the compounded medications, though some consumers may still be able to access personalized doses if it’s clinically applicable. 

During the company’s quarterly call with investors in February, Hims & Hers said its weight loss offerings will primarily consist of its oral medications and liraglutide. The company said it expects its weight loss offerings to generate at least $725 million in annual revenue, excluding contributions from compounded semaglutide.

But the company is still lobbying for compounded medications. A pop up on Hims & Hers’ website, which was viewed by CNBC, encourages users to “use your voice” and urge Congress and the FDA to preserve access to compounded treatments.

With Tuesday’s rally, Hims and Hers shares are up about 27% in 2025 after soaring 172% last year.

WATCH: Hims & Hers shares tumble over concerns around weight-loss business

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Meta’s head of AI research announces departure

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Meta's head of AI research announces departure

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg holds a smartphone as he makes a keynote speech at the Meta Connect annual event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.

Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters

Meta’s head of artificial intelligence research announced Tuesday that she will be leaving the company. 

Joelle Pineau, the company’s vice president of AI research, announced her departure in a LinkedIn post, saying her last day at the social media company will be May 30. 

Her departure comes at a challenging time for Meta. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made AI a top priority, investing billions of dollars in an effort to become the market leader ahead of rivals like OpenAI and Google.

Zuckerberg has said that it is his goal for Meta to build an AI assistant with more than 1 billion users and artificial general intelligence, which is a term used to describe computers that can think and take actions comparable to humans.

“As the world undergoes significant change, as the race for AI accelerates, and as Meta prepares for its next chapter, it is time to create space for others to pursue the work,” Pineau wrote. “I will be cheering from the sidelines, knowing that you have all the ingredients needed to build the best AI systems in the world, and to responsibly bring them into the lives of billions of people.”

Vice President of AI Research and Head of FAIR at Meta Joelle Pineau attends a technology demonstration at the META research laboratory in Paris on February 7, 2025.

Stephane De Sakutin | AFP | Getty Images

Pineau was one of Meta’s top AI researchers and led the company’s fundamental AI research unit, or FAIR, since 2023. There, she oversaw the company’s cutting-edge computer science-related studies, some of which are eventually incorporated into the company’s core apps. 

She joined the company in 2017 to lead Meta’s Montreal AI research lab. Pineau is also a computer science professor at McGill University, where she is a co-director of its reasoning and learning lab.

Some of the projects Pineau helped oversee include Meta’s open-source Llama family of AI models and other technologies like the PyTorch software for AI developers.

Pineau’s departure announcement comes a few weeks ahead of Meta’s LlamaCon AI conference on April 29. There, the company is expected to detail its latest version of Llama. Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, to whom Pineau reported to, said in March that Llama 4 will help power AI agents, the latest craze in generative AI. The company is also expected to announce a standalone app for its Meta AI chatbot, CNBC reported in February

“We thank Joelle for her leadership of FAIR,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “She’s been an important voice for Open Source and helped push breakthroughs to advance our products and the science behind them.” 

Pineau did not reveal her next role but said she “will be taking some time to observe and to reflect, before jumping into a new adventure.”

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