C'mon now, admit it. If you're a senior executive at an established Silicon Valley company, the trappings of vice-presidential power are getting a little bit stale of late. You want to be hip, insanely rich, admired by your peers ... basically, you want to go dot-com. You stay awake late at night, dreaming up the business plan that will attract the venture funds to fuel your CEO dreams.

Now imagine getting your boss to help foot the bill for your escape. A bit of a stretch, perhaps?

Not for Marc Benioff. While other execs leave burned bridges in their wakes, Mr. Benioff was able to persuade his now-former boss -- Oracle chairman and CEO Larry Ellison -- to chip in some seed funding for Mr. Benioff's Internet startup, Salesforce.com. Though the 34-year-old Mr. Benioff is withholding operational details of the company until later this year, for now he says it's pursuing a "massive opportunity" in the area of sales-force automation.

While we withhold judgment on the validity of the business plan, we can't help but admire the strength of Mr. Benioff's connections, which allowed him to raise $4.2 million in seed funding by talking to just three people. In addition to Mr. Ellison, Mr. Benioff also solicited contributions from CNet founder Halsey Minor and Magdalena Yesil of U.S. Venture Partners, all of whom now hold board positions at Salesforce.com. Mr. Benioff, personally wealthy from stock obtained during his 13 years at Oracle, also dug into his own pocket for startup capital.

Though he was a solid team member at Oracle, Mr. Benioff says startups are in his blood. While still in high school, Mr. Benioff says he started a software company that developed games for the Atari and Apple II platforms. During his Oracle career, he says he helped engineer "numerous internal startups," many under Mr. Ellison's direct supervision.

"I enjoy building new teams," says Mr. Benioff, who originally hosted the Salesforce.com workers in a San Francisco apartment next to his own, near Coit Tower. Now, the growing company ("we'll have 15 employees soon," Mr. Benioff says) is set to move into a 7,500-square-foot space close to Spear and Mission streets in downtown San Francisco.

There, Salesforce.com will pursue a strategy complementary to Oracle's, Mr. Benioff says. "If this takes off, it will be the best thing to ever happen to Oracle," he enthuses. "It will prove that this whole revolution is not about [Microsoft] Windows, but about the Internet."

Now there's a business plan to make a father proud.

MORE MICROSOFT DEPARTURESIs it time to make this item a weekly feature? The revolving doors at Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) kept spinning last week, this time ushering out group vice president Paul Maritz, who plans to retire soon. Mr. Maritz, who currently presides over Microsoft's developer-relations group, will technically keep his desk occupied for the near-term future, but will leave the company as soon as next year, according to company statements. David Vaskevitch, a vice president in the developer division, will take over day-to-day operations for the group, according to the company.

Once one of the most powerful lieutenants in Chairman Bill Gates's cabal, Mr. Maritz seems to have undergone a gradual pullback from power over the past year, first giving up oversight of software development to move to the lower-wattage spotlights of the developer department. What's up next for Mr. Maritz? Anything he wants. Earlier this year, he sold 900,000 shares of his Microsoft holdings, netting a cool $78.1 million.

THEM BOOTS WERE MADE FOR WALKIN'This time, it's venerable catalog shopping house L.L. Bean that feels the sting of the Internet's charm. Thomas Harden, executive vice president of Bean's worldwide operations, is leaving to become executive VP and chief operating officer at online gift concern Send.com.

One of the lures? An equity share in an Internet property in a growing market segment -- something the privately held, family-owned Bean couldn't match.

TALENT POOLEBroker:ETrade convinced Frank J. Petrilli, formerly chief operating officer of competitor TD Waterhouse, to run its online brokerage business. Mr. Petrilli replaces Kathy Levinson as president of the ETrade Securities division, while Ms. Levinson remains president and COO of the overall company. ... Sounds good: Neale Mayle has been promoted from chief technical officer to chief executive of PageTalk, a Cedarhurst, New York, company that lets users create and update Web-page audio files via the telephone. ... Gone (to) Gator: Jeff McFadden, formerly vice president of business development at Excite, has joined Gator.com as president and CEO. Gator.com provides software that streamlines the process of filling out online forms.