Ron Conway, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist who was an early investor in Google, Facebook, and several other notable tech giants, resigned Thursday from the board of the Salesforce Foundation after the company’s chief executive, Marc Benioff, said last week that he fully supported President Trump and wanted the National Guard to come to San Francisco. The Salesforce Foundation, which had roughly $400 million in assets by the end of 2023, aims to help disadvantaged students, mainly by trying to improve tech literacy and college preparation.
Conway, who had been a member of the Salesforce Foundation board for a decade and has been a close friend of Benioff’s for more than 25 years, told Benioff in a fiery email that their values were no longer aligned and that he was resigning as a director. The email, seen by the New York Times, laid bare the rift between two of San Francisco’s best-known tech figures over Benioff’s political shift and his controversial call for federal troops to be deployed in the city.
