How to Pivot Without Starting Over (with former Salesforce CFO Amy Weaver)

So, I was working on a CFO search behind the scenes with a search firm and with our CEO, Mark Benioff. And one day, Mark sent me a text and said he needed to talk to me about a search. I said, "Fine." He immediately called me on FaceTime and I said, "Well, I'm glad that you called because I've got some new names for your list." And he said, "So do I." And I said, "Okay, you go first." And he said, "Amy Weaver." And Ebony, it was like, this is just not a thing. I was so shocked that I remember I looked, I literally looked down at my list and said, "She's not on my list."

Oh, Ebony, it's great to be here. Very excited to talk to you.

So, you're right. When I say I come from a family of lawyers, that's almost an understatement. I started counting up how many lawyers in my extended family the other day and when I got to 15 I just stopped counting. This includes my grandfather who was chief justice of the Washington State Supreme Court. He had four children. All four children became lawyers including my father. I have cousins who were lawyers. The list just goes on and on. So, it was really natural growing up to think that I would go into law. That just felt like the family business and what everyone would do. And sure enough, I did. After graduating from Wellesley, I worked for a few years and then headed to Harvard Law School with the idea that I would, you know, practice law probably back in Seattle where I grew up for the rest of my life. The other thing about growing up in a family of lawyers is, you know, I think there's a heightened sense of justice. And I think I have to be careful with the word justice because justice can sound very lofty and very intellectual, but it really comes down to fairness. And I think when you talk about fairness, the example I would give is if you have two children and they both have sore throats and you tell Billy you're going to give him something that's going to make him feel better and you tell Annie she doesn't get it. Like they understand that. They can be seven years old and just appreciate that's not fair. And I think growing up in a family of lawyers, I really grew up with this heightened appreciation for fairness and really wanting to make the world fair. And that's had a huge influence throughout my career, no matter what role I was in.

It's Cravath. Cravath, Swaine & Moore, kind of the classic New York Wall Street law firm.

So after law school I returned to Washington State and did a clerkship on the Ninth Circuit in Seattle, which was wonderful. But then after that, I took a different direction. Everyone expected me to work for a big law firm in Seattle and had these offers. I wound up turning all of those down and instead pursuing a fellowship that took me to Hong Kong. It was through the Luce Scholars Program and my husband and I picked up with two suitcases each and moved all the way to Hong Kong having never stepped foot in Asia before. And the opportunity was to work for a member of the Hong Kong legislature on the handover, the change of sovereignty from the UK to China at that time. And it was this absolutely extraordinary year that allowed me to work on issues related to democracy. We just fell in love with living in Asia. So at the end of that year, we decided not to return to the states and I joined a New York law firm that had an office there called Cravath, Swaine & Moore. And Cravath is one of kind of the classic New York hard-charging Wall Street law firms. And I will tell you that was one of the scariest years I've ever had. I had barely taken corporate law in law school, but that's what they did. And they took a real gamble on me and you're just thrown in when you do that. And I was suddenly working on deals in India and the Philippines and Korea and all over the place. And I remember being so terrified that I was going to screw something up that I had about a 20-minute walk every morning from my apartment, or my flat as they would say there, to the office. And I would pass St. John's Cathedral, which is one of the oldest Anglican churches in Asia. And I remember I would go and I would get down on my knees and just pray that I wasn't going to commit malpractice that morning. And somehow made it through it. But, you know, it was interesting. I remember at one point talking to a very senior associate and he just kind of encouraged me to hang in there. And he said, "Look, get through your first year. If you get through two years at Cravath, you're going to feel like you can do anything." And I really did. You know, I made it through those two years and suddenly I was the one running, you know, a lot of the deals and I was a senior associate and I was traveling and going around the world. But I'll never forget like just what a total fish out of water I felt like walking in those first few days to the law firm.

You know, it's interesting. A lot of people say that the stereotypical lawyer is risk averse. And there's some truth to that because part of your job is to assess risk and advise your client on where the risks are. But for some reason, I had never been risk averse with my own career. And whether it was moving to Hong Kong, whether it was taking a risk, you know, later on to move to California to be at Salesforce or to take on the CFO role or later the CEO role, I've always been willing to take those risks. And I think when I look back, one of my favorite expressions is from a theologian, a man named William Sloane Coffin, and he was the chaplain at Yale University way back in the 1950s, 1960s. And he was talking about leaps of faith, and this was in a religious context but I think it applies to so many areas of life. And he said, "I love the recklessness of leaps of faith. First you leap and then you grow wings." And I've thought about this so many times because I think that there are so many times in your life where people are presented with risks, presented with things that they just don't feel ready for or the timing just isn't right. And I think it's important to remember sometimes you're just going to have to make that jump and you're going to have to have the confidence that those wings are going to grow before you hit the ground.

Okay.

Well, I do think when you make the big moves, whether it's a change in where you live or whether it is changing jobs, it's always interesting how much to me that heightens everything else in your life. The drive to work looks different. The surroundings look different. It kind of wakes you up in so many ways. And I've always loved that feeling.

So, I do think it's unprecedented. As far as I know, within a Fortune 500, no one has gone directly from the chief legal officer to the chief financial officer role and it absolutely was not on my radar screen. So, what was happening, this was back in 2020. We knew that the then CFO of Salesforce, who was a wonderful man named Mark Hawkins, was likely to retire. So, I was working on a CFO search behind the scenes with a search firm and with our CEO, Mark Benioff. And one day, Mark sent me a text and said he needed to talk to me about a search. I said, "Fine." He immediately called me on FaceTime and I said, "Well, I'm glad that you called because I've got some new names for your list." And he said, "So do I." And I said, "Okay, you go first." And he said, "Amy Weaver." And Ebony, it was like, this is just not a thing. I was so shocked that I remember I looked, I literally looked down at my list and said she's not on my list because there was no way. I mean I was not going to do this. So of course, you know, I very politely said well thank you. That's very flattering but no. And he asked me to go away and think about it. So, I did and I talked to my husband and went for some long walks and came to the same conclusion that I wasn't going to do that because I'm not crazy. I did not have an extensive accounting background. Like I said before, I'm from a family of lawyers. We're really good at being lawyers and we stay right in our little box as lawyers. We're very happy there. But as I started to think about it more, there were a few things that happened that really got me thinking down a different path. One was I had a long conversation with our COO, Brett Taylor. And at that point, Brett we already knew was likely to become co-CEO of Salesforce. He has since left Salesforce and is now the founder of Sierra and he's the chair of the board of OpenAI. So just an incredible tech mind. And I said to him, "Brett, I am not doing this. I am not qualified to be CFO." And I remember he said to me, he said, "No. You're not qualified to be the traditional CPA CFO. But that's not what I'm looking for. I really want a partner who's going to help me, you know, guide the strategy of the company going forward. And I want you to take your skills and your experiences and make the job your own." And it was such an incredible gift to me because then I could stop comparing myself to the prior CFO. I could stop comparing myself to every traditional CFO who had come up through finance and had a CPA degree and everything else and really look at, okay, what skills do I have that I can bring to the job? And whenever I hire someone now, I tell them that story and try to get them to think that way as well. What are the skills that they can uniquely bring to the job and think that they're not replacing someone? They are really creating a new role. So I started thinking about that. And then the other thing that really got to me is I spend a lot of time mentoring people in the workplace, talking to groups of young women or people who are coming to the workplace for the first time from different backgrounds. And I always tell them the same thing which is yes you've got to lean in, you've got to take risks, don't be scared, you know, all of these leap before you know, leap, the wings will come in. And I started thinking, how could I continue to have those conversations if the truth was that I had turned down the biggest opportunity in my life to that point because I was scared. And they might not know that, but I would know it. And I wanted that credibility. I wanted to show people that they could take those risks and it was okay. And I wound up taking the job. Now, I'll tell you on that second point, that first year, I really felt the weight of the world on me. I felt like, you know, what if I failed? What if this was an absolute disaster? What if what I was showing people was you shouldn't take a risk. You know, you could fail and you failed very publicly. You mess up as a chief legal officer and it's embarrassing and everything else. You mess up as a CFO, you're on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. And so I really felt so much pressure that full year and I felt like I was doing it for so many other people that I might let down. And luckily the first year went very well and I got my feet under me and I wound up really loving the job, but I felt so much pressure.

So, one of the things I'm most passionate about is changing kind of our views of leadership. And when I look back over the course of my career, it is a much different workforce now. We have many more women in the workforce. We have many more people of color. We have people from different backgrounds. But what I don't think we have changed as much is our view of what a leader is. And the leader does tend, I think the stereotypes are that it is the deepest voice and the tallest person and the loudest voice in the room at any time. And what that does is it means we're telling everyone you're invited to the workplace but to move up you need to act exactly like everyone else has in the past. And I don't think that is good advice. I don't think it's effective. I mean, let's talk about the things I just listed. Tallest, loudest voice, pounds the table, speaks the most. Not one of those is a thing that is good for a company. It's just things that we've associated with leadership. And we've got to switch that to what are the skills that really matter. And to me, it's effectiveness. Can you get things done? And can you do it in a way that is true to yourself and kind? And there were a couple of turning points for me as I really started thinking about this philosophy. The first, and this was probably 15 years ago, but I had worked with a young woman at another company who, she was in internal audit and she was very, very good at her job. She was just whip-smart, but she was also very soft-spoken, very, very polite, a little bit quiet. And when she left the company, she asked me to be a reference for a much larger role. It was for a regional utility. And I remember I said I'd be happy to be a reference. And this luckily was before Zoom because I remember sitting in a parking lot getting on the phone with the chief operating officer of the organization. And I started talking about all of Asha's attributes and the COO cut me off and said I only had one question for you. Is she too nice for this job? And you know, I said I was glad it was before Zoom because I remember pounding my head against the steering wheel like, "You've got to be kidding me." And I really realized at that moment that the executive was confusing niceness or kindness with weakness. And what they didn't recognize is that this niceness or politeness that Asha had was actually the reason she was so effective. Like she was constantly getting me to do things I didn't want to do because she was just relentless and polite and lovely. And I really made it my point that people should never confuse those two things. Treating someone well, being polite, just basic decency, that's not weakness, that's strength. And I also think it's really powerful in how long it carries you much further. I think the table pounders, the yellers, sometimes that works in the moment. It really does. But over the long term, I'm a firm believer that they don't have the loyalty and the people who will run through doors for them. And I think that that's what's really, really important. The other point on that is authenticity. And it had been a couple years before that that I remember I was at another organization and I worked for a man who was just a fabulous advocate for me and we were going into a meeting. I was going in on my own but it was going to be a really tricky negotiation. So he was giving me like this pep talk ahead of time on what I needed to do. And I remember he said, "All right, you know, Amy, you've got to go in there. Just march in, lay down the law, and whatever happens, you cannot be too nice." And then he suggested all of these words I should use, which words I would never ever use. And I don't know what it was about that moment. And again, he was trying to help, but something just kind of snapped with me because I knew it was ridiculous. Everything he described would work for him and be very effective, but I told him I wasn't going to do it. And I said I was going to do it in my own way. And he looked really disappointed. And I remember saying to him, "When was the last time you sent me into a meeting, a negotiation, a case, and I didn't get the result you wanted?" And that really stumped him. But the reality was if I had gone marching aggressively into the room, smacked the table and started cursing, all that would have happened is everyone burst into laughter. I mean, I would have looked ridiculous because it would have been so completely inauthentic. But I really realized at that point that if I relied on the skills that I thought were my strengths and trusted myself, I could negotiate it. You know, I went in, I really listened. I really tried to figure out what was motivating the other person and the other side. We worked through it and I walked out with exactly the answer they wanted. And it was a real moment of realizing that leaning into your own strengths and your own comfort area, so you're not going in playing the role of someone else, is a huge advantage.

Always does. Yes.

So, Salesforce really is a very special company and the 1-1-1 model was one of the things that really attracted me to working there. And as you said it was from day one. So Mark Benioff, Parker Harris and the two other founders founded the company on day one and it was either that day or the next day that they also established this 1-1-1 model with this commitment. And they like to joke that, you know, at the time the equity wasn't worth anything and they didn't have a product and they had four employees. So it really didn't make a huge difference. But you look at Salesforce today where you have a market cap which has been ranging between 150 and 300 billion, nearly 80,000 employees, incredible products that has really moved the needle. They have given away hundreds of millions of dollars and perhaps even more importantly, the product is being used by nonprofits around the world either at a free or a discounted amount. And employees have donated, I'll have to double check on this but it's something close to 10 million hours of their time volunteering with different organizations. And it really struck me. It was one of the reasons I stayed there for 11 and a half years is it showed me that you can really use business as a very powerful platform for good. And I truly believe that that is also in the long-term interest of the company. There's a school of thought that businesses need to worry about business and that's all they're there for and anything else you're doing is not returning you the capital and the gains to your shareholders. I think that that is so misguided. And I think what shareholders want is long-term gains over time. Having a company that has employees who are incredibly dedicated, they're motivated to be there not just for the business purpose but because of the good that they see doing. Having a company that's operating in a community that is healthy and has good schools and hospitals and other things from there that goes to the long-term growth of the company. And it's something I believed as an employee. It's something I believed as a CFO and when I spoke to stockholders and to Wall Street in general, something I continue to see now in the role I am. The most powerful companies are the ones that are making a contribution to making the world better.

Well, it's interesting. Just this morning, I was looking for an old email and I came across an email exchange with the head of the search committee for this role at Direct Relief. And she told me that the board had voted to extend me an offer on January 17th. Three days later was when USAID was initially frozen. So the world just started shifting right as I was considering this role and it just got more and more, the changes just kept coming. So I had the offer in January. In March I was announced publicly but I couldn't start until the beginning of May. During that time, USAID was basically dismantled and we also started seeing a lot of changes. They weren't passed yet, the discussions about the budget and what that was going to do to Medicaid in this country. So from the time I started looking at Direct Relief to the time I took the job, the world looked very different. Now, Direct Relief is in a wonderful position because we don't take any government money. We never have in 78 years. So, the cuts did not initially hit Direct Relief in the way that it impacted so many NGOs around the world. So, when I was starting to look at this, I will say I did have a few sleepless nights wondering like what in the world I had just agreed to do. I have a few very well-meaning friends who definitely asked me, you're walking away from one of the most successful software companies in the world to join a nonprofit now. But the more I thought about it and the more I thought about this unique position Direct Relief was in where we had such a strong platform in the middle of so much chaos, I really felt that this was actually exactly the right time to be doing it. Because it gave me an opportunity to do more. And I've always thought very firmly, and I think this probably goes back to my parents and their involvement with nonprofits and great causes growing up. If you have the ability to do more and whether that is using your skills, using your money, using your time, I really believe you have a moral obligation to do more. So in my mind, this opportunity came up exactly right.

So you're right, Direct Relief is massive and the scale is incredible. So last year alone, we delivered more than $2 billion in aid across 92 countries and all 50 US states. It's a massive operation. Coming here, it's been very interesting. I'm asked frequently about the differences between working for a Fortune 500 company that has very strict securities regulation and standards that we are held to and coming to a nonprofit. And what I have to tell you is the skills are the same and the standards are the same. Direct Relief operates in one of the most highly regulated areas in the world. We deliver prescription medications. So, we have got to operate at commercial standards. And in fact, in my mind, at the end of the day, when there is a life on the line, it means that our pressures and our standards have to be even higher. So, it's been wonderful to take a lot of the skills I learned at Salesforce, the focus on operational excellence, the focus on financial stewardship, on innovation, on trust and see how they transfer over to the nonprofit sector with the added goal in the nonprofit sector that we have this extraordinary mission of saving lives. And to me that brings really a special magic to every day.

Public companies definitely have the quarterly pressures every 90 days, that earnings call is coming up. You're filing your 10-Q or your 10-K. There's a calendar to that and a schedule that you really know what your year is going to look like. Moving to the nonprofit or even just moving outside of a public company, you have a little bit of a relief from that and I think you can take a breath and look longer term. At the same time, in the nonprofit world, you have events coming up like the Ebola crisis right now. You have hurricanes like Hurricane Melissa that was out there. You have things that come up completely off schedule that you need to be able to pivot and focus on immediately. So yes, a different timing, a different cadence, but so many of the skills are the same. So, interestingly, I've been following kind of a debate on LinkedIn and I spoke last week at the World Health Assembly and someone wrote it was very interesting they came from the corporate world to the nonprofit but we don't see as many people moving from nonprofit to corporate world. And I do think the corporate world is missing out by not looking in more detail for whether it's looking for people for their orgs, looking for different roles, looking at people in the nonprofit arena. Because not only are the skills very, very similar, but in some places they're really enhanced. For example, if you want to see efficiency, if you want to see a group of people that can work miracles on a shoestring budget, you want to go to the nonprofit sector and get those people over. So I'd love to see people going back and forth much more between these sectors.

You know, as you said, I've seen the corporate world doing amazing things with AI. So I left kind of Silicon Valley about a year ago and, you know, in a year things have just taken off. So I feel like my knowledge now is almost ancient history but even at that time we were seeing corporations do things that would seem almost like magic with AI and making incredible leaps in how they could run their companies and what they were doing. What concerns me is we're not yet seeing that in the nonprofit area. A lot of these investments take incredible financial commitments. They take really long-term planning at a time where there's a lot of chaos. And I worry that what we're going to see is a gulf and an increasing gulf between the humanitarian world and the for-profit world in terms of AI and other technologies and how they're being used. Now, at the same time, I think the case for using AI in the humanitarian world is incredible. I think what we can do with data, I think in terms of identifying where the needs are, where the impact can be, how we can get things there is incredibly important. So since day one I've been really investing in Direct Relief in terms of the strength of our tech systems and particularly around data, making sure that we have access to as much data as we possibly can, that we have clean data, and that we have data that puts us in a position to really be able to use that and bring in AI at the right time.

So, it's been an extraordinary year. And I have loved every minute of it. What it has started off with is really the importance of listening. And actually, let me step back for one minute in terms of how I approached coming in because it's a lesson that I really learned from when I became CFO. The night I was announced as CFO, I got a series of texts from Julie Sweet who is the CEO of Accenture and just extraordinary business executive, one of the best globally. Julie and I had actually worked together at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, my first law firm back when we were both in our 20s and had kind of loosely kept in touch over the years. But the day that she saw something in the Wall Street Journal that I was the new CFO of Salesforce, she sent me all of these urgent texts asking me to call her. I remember it was almost midnight her time. She was on the east coast and I kind of dialed her up a little bit nervously, but it was fascinating. She really wanted to talk to me about the transition she had made. So she went from being a partner at Cravath to being general counsel of Accenture, then moved to a business role as CEO of North America and then became CEO globally of Accenture. And she told me when she moved initially from being the lawyer, being the GC to the North America CEO role, she said she really had to prove herself. She said they knew she was smart. They knew she knew Accenture. She knew how they worked. But she said, "Such a really how you get your credibility is can you sell?" So she really spent her first six months focused on showing them she can sell. And she told me, "Whatever you do, find out what's going to give you the most credibility as CFO and overrotate on that for your first six months." So for me, it was really Wall Street. It was really learning the language of our stockholders, learning to talk to the analysts, learning the press. So, I doubled, tripled down on that. I went through training. I had, you know, our investor relations team throwing me questions. I think they loved torturing me on this. It was fairly brutal, but it really paid off. It became one of my favorite things that I did as CFO was working with Wall Street. And it gave me the credibility I needed. So fast forward to Direct Relief and coming here I was making another leap. Very unlikely, I know for the first time but very unusual to have a CFO of a Fortune 500 company come directly to be CEO of a major nonprofit. And I really had to think about what was going to give me credibility in this role. And it was very different. Certainly, it wasn't learning the language of Wall Street, but it was listening. And I realized I couldn't walk in as some Silicon Valley executive and expect people who had spent their entire life working on mission-driven humanitarian causes to believe that I would know what I was doing or that I was there for good reasons. So I really tried to talk about how much can I listen, how much can I meet with employees, how much can I hear from them, how much advice I could get and how much I could listen to our partners on the ground. You know, within a second week here, I went down to the Santa Barbara Neighborhood Clinic, which is a federally qualified health clinic, and spent time with doctors there and dentists there and really learned about their day-to-day. A couple weeks later I drove down to Altadena to the fire scenes and saw the work that Direct Relief had done. In the summer I went to Ghana and to Uganda. I just got back from Ukraine. There's nothing that gets you the credibility and the thoughts more than really deeply listening. And what it really taught me is first the role of passion. How much every decision has to be made through what's the ultimate impact to the people we serve. And then also how all of the principles that you run a major for-profit public company with apply here. You've got to have the same standards. You've got to have the high level of governance and you've got to have the discipline. And you've got to do that with your mission in mind. So the first year has taught me so much and mostly it's just made me really excited about the second year and the years to come.

Well, you know, oh, Ebony, I'm so glad you mentioned that. I hear that phrase all the time. You can't be what you can't see. And you won't be surprised to know that that's like my least favorite saying. Like, I understand why people say that. I understand that it's certainly easier to do what you can't see, you know, or something when you see someone else has done that. I was trying to be that role model, but we need people to give you breaking down the walls.

Well, Ebony, one special note that especially I think everyone can fall into this trap, but I've seen it probably more from women. Just a reminder, that perfect opportunity, that incredible job, that new location will never come up at the right time. And if you keep waiting for all of the stars to align to feel like you've got all the experience you need, that you've got all of the training, that it's going to work out perfectly with everything in your personal life, you will never move. And it goes back to really where we started is you've got to have that leap of faith and you've got to know that sometimes you're going to have to make that leap and those wings are going to come in.

Great to be here.