“This floor is really gonna feel more residential,” she says, asking me to visualize a sliding glass door here, a winding staircase there. For now, though, it’s a drab gray work-in-progress, with pieces of furniture and color swatches cast about as Pinkham and her team try to settle on precise style specifications.
Salesforce employees will be able to relax or hold meetings in the space, while nonprofits can use it on nights and weekends for free. Dubbed the Ohana Floor, it will eventually be a sprawling multipurpose lounge, complete with a kitchen manned by a gourmet chef, columns covered in lush vegetation, and a meeting area encircled by electronic benches that recede into the ground. Salesforce seems keenly aware of this tension, which may be why the top floor of the building has a charitable bent. The city has never been a grander nexus of power, but it’s also never been more exclusive. For San Francisco, the christening of the tower is a moment both celebratory and ominous. Other companies, like WeWork, are also planning to open large offices in the building. Later this year a transit hub will open next door, bearing Salesforce’s name, as will an elevated public park that will ferry people to ground level via gondola. The building opened for business in January, welcoming a handful of Salesforce employees with a local DJ and a corporate-branded photo booth in the building lobby. The thousand-foot tower is the boldest symbol of Salesforce’s workplace vision. According to Pinkham, it was the energy of Dreamforce that inspired the company to move forward with a bold plan to reinvent and standardize its office space worldwide under a set of principles it calls “Ohana design” (Ohana means “family” in Hawaiian-more on that later). Its annual tech conference, Dreamforce, attracted 170,000 attendees to downtown San Francisco in November. In 2016, it came close to acquiring Twitter, and also just missed out on LinkedIn. But in the enterprise world, Salesforce is a titan that ably competes with larger firms like Oracle and Microsoft. By all accounts, this should be the blandest business west of Dunder Mifflin. The company, launched nearly 20 years ago by Benioff just a couple of miles from the tower, sells other companies cloud-based services to help them manage their relationships with customers. Salesforce is the tower’s namesake and largest tenant, occupying about 60 percent of the building. (CEO Marc Benioff tweeted a link to a blog called “ Just the Tip,” which captures photos of the top of the tower from various angles the tweet was later deleted.) The 61-story gray obelisk redefines the San Francisco skyline, looming over its neighbors and peeking out at residents from vantage points citywide. If not its heart, the Salesforce Tower will certainly be the city’s most visible appendage. “This is becoming the new heart of San Francisco.” “It almost feels like you’re swooping in over the city,” she says of our perch. That’s where I’m standing when Elizabeth Pinkham, Salesforce’s executive vice president of global real estate, points south to the Golden State construction project, past hundreds of low-slung buildings that have traditionally defined the local landscape. Instead, the company decided to build up- way up, 1,070 feet in the air, to the highest point in an office building west of Chicago. Salesforce had been planning to build out on the Chase Center parcel, constructing a sprawling 14-acre campus that would have included shops, restaurants, and a large open plaza with a reflecting pool. The team is headed there only by the grace of the cloud-computing giant, which sold the plot of land to the Warriors ownership group in 2015. From the top of the Salesforce Tower, you can see the girders in the distance foreshadowing the Chase Center, the future home of the Golden State Warriors.
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