Staff from a nonprofit using Salesforce actively protecting people from ICE discovered that Marc Benioff, the Salesforce CEO and co-founder, made a joke about ICE monitoring international employees during an event for the company. It led them, and many other Salesforce customers to ask: Is Salesforce even right for us, if the values of the CEO don’t align?

Just as we struggle to separate a masterpiece from a problematic creator, we must now ask if a platform can be separated from its founder.This question is a corporate evolution of the “The Artist vs. The Art” debate: can we enjoy Picasso’s work knowing that he was notoriously misogynistic and abusive toward women? There is no right or wrong answer, but in literary theory, “Death of the Author” means that once a book is out in the world, the author’s intentions no longer matter; the audience owns the meaning. I will apply this concept to Salesforce as well.

Benioff may have built this platform, but he doesn’t own what it means to us anymore. We can choose to let the “author” (the CEO) fade into the background so we can appreciate the “art” (the ecosystem, the platform, the people) on our own terms. You see Community Groups volunteering their time to host events and MVPs who are showing up purely to help others in-person and online. You see the Open Source Commons constantly churning out great, free tools for all of us to use. That is where the actual value lives.

The power to define what a product means belongs to us, the community driving real change. Our talent is what turns it into a force for good. We can separate the CEO from the product and the narrative and ensure our energy is spent fueling the positive change we choose to define.