Hear from NetSuite founder and EVP Evan Goldberg on leadership and success

Oracle Academy Tech Chat

Hearing from changemakers and innovative leaders can inspire students to become the leaders of tomorrow.

In this episode, Evan Goldberg, NetSuite founder and Oracle Executive Vice President, speaks with Oracle Academy Vice President, William McCabe, about what it’s like to be a leader today, and the skills students need to succeed.

As NetSuite celebrates its 25th anniversary as the first cloud company, Evan will also talk about the challenges of being the disrupter and what he thinks is next for the technology industry.

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Episode Transcript:

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Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps prepare our next generation's workforce.

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I'm your host, Tyra Crockett Peirce and this special two part episode of the Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast. Oracle Academy Vice President Willie McCabe speaks with Oracle Executive Vice President and NetSuite founder Evan Goldberg on what it's like to be a creator and leader and the skills students need to succeed as they become the technology innovators of the future.

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Hello, everybody. Welcome to our Oracle Academy Fireside chat with Oracle EVP. NetSuite Founder, Evan Goldberg. I'm Oracle Academy Vice President Willie McCabe, and I'll be your host for today. Evan and I will focus our discussion on net suite key qualities of leadership and skills. Students need to succeed in today's workforce. As Net Suite celebrates its 25 year anniversary as a first cloud company.

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Evan and I will also talk about the challenge of being a disruptor and what he thinks is next for the technology industry. A little bit about our guest, Evan Goldberg, Executive Vice President, Oracle NetSuite, Global Business Unit. Evan leads the Oracle next week, Global Business Unit. He and his team are responsible for the product strategy, development and delivery of next week's Unified Business Management Suite, encompassing ERP, financials, CRM, e-commerce and many more.

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In 1998, Evan co-founded NetSuite, and as mentioned, it was the first cloud computing company ushering in a new era of cloud computing. Prior to Oracle's acquisition of NetSuite, Evan was CTO and chairman of the next Suite board, and before founding that suite, he spent eight years at Oracle Corporation as a vice president. Credit He was involved in a variety of projects, all focused on making powerful database technology more accessible to users.

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Evan holds a B.A. and Summa Technology and Applied Mathematics from Harvard College. Welcome, Evan. Thank you for joining us today.

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Thanks for having me.

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We're all very privileged to have you join us and also to share your experiences. Today, we have an audience of faculty, students and colleagues from around the world joining us. And while I'm sure they all know you as a creator of NetSuite and for leading the Oracle Net Suite Global Business Unit today, we'd like to delve a little bit more into your thoughts around skills that students might need.

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I'd like to start with some specific questions. First off, and I'm sure this is an easy one for you. Can you tell me a little bit more about your career path?

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Yeah, well, I've always been interested in technology programing applications would have been a dream from an early age that someday I'd be able to use my programing skills and product design skills to build something that would make life easier for people. And I sort of fortunately, was very I've been very fortunate to be able to achieve that dream in that, you know, we now have nets, we helping, you know, tens of thousands of organizations and hundreds of thousands of people within those organizations achieve their whatever their dream is.

00;04;26;18 - 00;04;57;24

So the path hasn't been straight and narrow and narrow, but eventually got there through, you know, probably some luck and a lot of hard work. Yeah. You know, I came out of college. That's college on the East Coast, as you as you mentioned, and immediately moved out here to California, seeing that there sort of was a tectonic shift in our you know, just to use another metaphor, the center of gravity for the technology industry was rapidly moving west.

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And I got connected with Oracle, actually from my sister, who was working in the financial industry at Fidelity and was investing in Oracle and was really high on their on their prospects, you know, really bullish about their prospects and said, if you're going to go out there, that's a company you should work for. This guy, Larry Ellison, he's going to change the industry.

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So again, I was fortunate that she had that insight and that led me out here. I started in the database team at Oracle where I was working on sort of the core database software, and Larry kind of handpicked me to go in there over the objections of the management and were like, he doesn't even know see, which was the programing language that Oracle was built in.

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And Larry said, Oh, he'll get a book. It's kind of like when I started that suite and I was getting an accounting book on the first day. But anyway, but actually I and this is a it was an important point in my career, I think, you know, I was always attracted, as I said to building applications that people will use to make their daily life easier.

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And of course, at its core, Oracle does that. But I was so deep within the innards that I felt disconnected from users. And again, serendipity to some degree. Marc Benioff We ended up starting Salesforce.com and building got into a great company three months after we started. Next week, the second Cloud Company was starting a group to make Oracle available on the Mac and make it much easier to use and and build next generation kind of applications on top of Oracle.

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And I was really attracted to that and I was torn which direction should I go? Because I felt like I was in this great position that was every was very desirable for programmers to be working in the group. It was called the kernel group at the time. Was I going to let that all go to test these new waters?

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Who knows whether it would work out? I had no idea who this Marc Benioff character was, and Larry passed me in the hall one day and he said, I hear you're thinking about going to work in the Mac group. And I you know, he said, if I were if I were getting out of call, you know, just out of college, that's where I would go work right now.

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So, of course, you know, when he was anointed with Hall and did that kind of comment. And so, you know, that steered me in a direction I think was a really good one. And and you can kind of follow the line from there, because I got very interested in making applications that people could use every day build on these powerful databases.

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I did another start up soon after that that was sort of related to that, making websites easier to use. And so that that's kind of the you know, I can't say that I had the vision that eventually I'd be building next week, but, you know, I did at that moment when I made that choice, I was kind of steering my ship towards what I think was really my northstar all along.

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So those moments are important moments when you got to think long term, you know, where where do you want to do.

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The amazing and that decision to move from coast to coast was that that's a difficult decision at the time.

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AH yeah. I mean, I didn't know anybody in California. Fortunately, the year before I came out to Oracle. One student from Harvard had gone to Oracle. Oracle had typically hired from MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Harvard wasn't. I mean, you know, people now think of Harvard, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, obviously, you know, great computer science department, etc.. But back then, it was very much a fledgling department and people didn't really people were like this Harvard even do computer science.

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But fortunately, one one student came the year before and it worked out so that the next year Larry decided to basically hire half the graduating computer science class and a few other stragglers like me from applied math. So I had lots of my classmates coming out to California, and that helped. And it was a great culture at Oracle in those early years were only 900 people there, lots of them young recent college grads like myself.

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So that sort of became the the family, because as I said, I didn't really know anybody anywhere else. So I you know, and that's sweet. I think we've some in some cases created that sort of environment. People moved to Austin, for example, which is where a place where we have tons of people working on that suite and they, you know, just starting their careers there along with lots of other people.

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And it reminds me of that culture that Oracle had way back in the day. So that was very helpful, offering to make that make that transition.

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Fabulous and a true story of classroom career, which really ties in with with Oracle Academy as well. So thank you for that. Just moving on a little, when you were founding net three, was it a particular problem that you were working to solve?

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Yeah, Yeah, that's a great softball question there. Thank you. There was because as I mentioned, I did do a startup around in 1995. The Internet was really just sort of turning lights on, you know, getting getting up and running. And there was tons of excitement. And Oracle was doing some work in the Internet, but I had always dreamed of having my own software company, and that seemed the right time to make the leap, so much opportunity.

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And so where I started initially was something that was my idea, which was building on some of the things that I worked on at Oracle, but really leveraging the web to build more interactive, more engaging experiences than just the static websites that you saw. Because I've worked on some of that kind of technology. In fact, my last thing that I worked on at Oracle is Oracle's interactive TV initiative.

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People probably don't remember much about that, but Larry had a vision that one day soon, not quite as soon as he thought you'd be able to watch movies on demand or TV shows on demand, on your television, crazy ideas, just that idea.

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Wonder from that.

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It just goes to show you that you can have great ideas, but you have to have the timing right up. So I had that was my last project. So I took some of the things that we've done to make engaging experiences on television, set top boxes as they were called back that again, I'm really aging myself here and said, Let's do that kind of thing on the web.

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So that was my first company giving tools to Web site designers to make their sites more interactive. And we had a great product. People loved us, but we never really could get traction because we had competition that had a lot more muscle in us. It turned out to be what is now Adobe, part of Adobe. They had something called Flash and that sort of took over and we couldn't get a lot of traction.

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But I learned a ton about running it, running a company. It was my first company, my first time as CEO. We had at our peak, we had 15 employees and it was 15 boys. There's a lot of complexity. People don't necessarily appreciate how businesses can get complex fast, and we had lots of different systems. I mean, literally, we probably had six different systems that we were using to manage our operations.

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That's like one system or two and a half people, too many systems. And so like they were all disconnected. We had like five different customer lists, and the key information about the business was sitting in QuickBooks, which was on somebody's desktop. And if they were like, you know, using the computer to whatever shop to surf the web, as it was called back then, I couldn't get in for any information about my business.

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So that was the problem that I set out to solve that like it's hard enough to build a company. You don't need all this technology standing in your way. What you want the technology to do is, is be easy fast to get information, to get insights and help you and stay out of your way in a lot of cases so that you can do the work and really building your business.

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So that was my vision, is to build software for start ups. And Larry called one day and he said, How's your graphic stuff doing? That's what he called it. Now, Larry, you know, I was very fortunate. Larry helped me out with that first company and I put all my savings in into it. And he put a very tiny amount of savings of his savings into it.

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Those are, by the way, equal amounts of money and so and yeah, so he was you know, he called me in to see how it was going. He wasn't super interested in it. But when I said, you know what I want to do next, Larry, I said, it's not working out great. We're getting crushed by the competition. Even though we have a great product, we just don't have the marketing muscle to keep up with them.

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And I said, what I want to do next is build software for businesses like mine that's out there. And he said, Oh my God, that's perfect. Because what I've been thinking about is that someone should build something like QuickBooks for Accounting and delivered over the Web, that that's how all software should be delivered. And I was like, Huh, Accounting.

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Okay, well, I was thinking of starting with sales because that's the most important thing to me as a CEO is where's my next deal coming from? How much am I going to do this for all of my sales? You know what? How can I help and help build the company faster or help the company grow faster? And he said, Oh, yeah, well, we'll have to do sales eventually, but we'll start with accounting because that's where all your core information about your business is your products, your sales, your people, all that information ultimately is in your financials and then we'll go the other things.

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And so we agreed that we'd start with financials or accounting and build an entire suite. And he was adamant that it should be delivered over the web. Mind you, this is in the course of a five minute, literally a five minute phone conversation. Maybe it was 6 minutes, it was not long. And he said, you know, these companies don't want to have to manage software and run their own computers and try to deal with upgrades and and run databases.

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I thought it was definitely was especially for, you know, self-aware of him to know that people did not want to run databases. That was not what most people considered fun, even though he might have it. And so yeah, and so the whole vision of the company came together in that one phone call, and it really was meant to solve the problem that I saw as an entrepreneur.

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And Larry and I used to joke, it's a company built by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs.

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Phenomenal on timing. Then next week was and is the first fully cloud based business management system. So timing wise code is a revolution, though. This was 25 years ago. So what we did next, we disrupt the entire software industry.

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Well, as I said, timing is everything, Larry got the timing wrong on interactive television. So he got the principle, the concept right. Well, in this case, we nailed the timing and we were the first mover. And that gave us the opportunity to over the years, you know, become a leader. That's not always the case. There's a first mover advantage, but that doesn't always play out that way.

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But the timing was right because ultimately we ended up sort of riding the wave of the growth of cloud technology at the beginning, using a lot of metaphors. Here at the beginning, it was like pushing a big rock up a hill. Yeah, but unlike in the Greek myth, where it rolls back down and you have to push it again, we pushed it for a while and then it started rolling down in the right direction, not backwards.

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We got it over the hump, as it were. And in those early years, you know, we had to convince customers that the right thing to do is put their data in the cloud. It was called the cloud back then, put it on the Internet, put it on the Web. There was a lot of skepticism there, especially when, you know, we always led with accounting.

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Like, that's the first thing you do is switch from QuickBooks to Net Suite and then you can expand into having your salespeople use it, having your, you know, h.r. People using what have you. I mean, that suite ultimately, for those in the audience that I'm familiar with, it is a system to help you manage your business as you grow.

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It's sort of everything you need as you grow. And it's all in one place. It one system. Everybody logs in and uses the same system. There's one source of information. Information sort of flows seamlessly across your organization because it's all there in one place. And so, you know, so we would be leading with financials and we'd talk to these controllers, for example, about switching their system and they'd say, Oh, I'm really nervous about putting my data in on the Internet.

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And I had two answers to that. Usually it would be like, Well, I've seen where you put your data because it's in this computer that's sitting right next to you that has a copy machine on it. And like anybody could just rip it out the plug out of the wall and take it home. We actually put your data in a professionally managed data center where you need to get a you need a hand for it to get in.

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I think you're going to get an improvement in security, not it's not going to be a negative. And then I'd also say and by the way, your salespeople are using Salesforce dot com, so all you need is already in the Internet. I mean, what do you think your competitors want? They want your customer list. They don't want your income statement.

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So anyway, we you know, we definitely wrote the sort of Marc Benioff hype machine for sure, which helped. I mean, he really made the world in some ways safe for Cloud solutions is his tagline No Software. While we would tease it at the time, did really, while not being completely accurate, did get at the fact that it was no longer we were no longer as software developers just making software and throwing it over the wall and daring you to use it.

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We were providing a service day in, day out. We as Larry said in that first phone call, we manage the computers, we manage the operating systems, we manage the upgrades so you don't have to and we have to do that day in, day out, 24, seven three, six, five, so that you can use that suite where we do things.

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We used to say at the time, any time, anywhere, that was a big part of our day. We had to and it really is the net and the suite. It really I mean, the company was the marriage of those two ideas. I gave Larry a lot of credit for the net, give myself a lot credit for the suite.

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And and so our two big things were we'd say one system, No Limits was one of our taglines, and that that was all about the suite. And the other thing we'd say is any time, anywhere. And that was all about the net. And so with that and with Marc Benioff Snow Software, it started the whole tide started changing.

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And when we'd go to controllers, they'd be, you know, we what we suddenly realized is that our competitors who were delivering software the old way, they were the ones that had to do the explanation. They would be getting the hard questions like, why would I want to manage my software, my interest in that? So when the terms of the debate changed, that's when that suite saw this sort of hyper growth that led us to go public.

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And in all the success we've had, we've had since that now, and for many of you in the audience, I think it's probably completely taken for granted. You would look at someone very strangely if they said you should. You know, we have a new social network, but you host it yourself on a computer and you have to manage in your in your house.

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I mean, there probably are such things, but they're not use above board. So yeah, that would be very strange for someone to tell you that. And so there's maybe and so I can just tell you that back then it was a not it was really a novel and sometimes strange concept to put it.

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And date but normality. No. And I a team as a disruption as as a leader within your organization and you're obviously tracking disruptors. What do you see as the next big disruption?

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Yeah, well, that's the key about disruptions. You usually don't see them coming until there's like this exponential growth. You know, it doesn't look like it's growing very fast and all of a sudden it's everywhere.

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And, you know, I hesitate to say all because I don't necessarily consider that a disruption for a couple of different reasons. Everybody is doing it. I mean, like literally everybody. So it's not the same kind of thing as the cloud where there were a few sort of obscure players that subtle, you know, So I mean, you could say to some degree of maybe open AI's is is that.

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But I just think the speed with which it's been adopted and become sort of just table stakes means more it's it's it maybe it's overall it's a disruption to the overall industry but it is an opportunity for everybody, not just the disruptors. And, you know, I think what's interesting about and I think it's as tech, it is as tectonic, a shift as the Internet was.

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And so but but everybody's sort of on board and it's a very, very exciting time is obviously going to be some amazing new companies. There's going to be lots of failures as as there always are in these situations. I was you know, I was an Internet failure. My mandatory sort of Silicon Valley startup failure. And, you know, that's okay.

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I mean, that's a thousand flowers bloom and not all of them turn into, you know, redwoods.

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So the disruption, maybe the creation of companies rather than rather than shaping the whole industry, maybe, though there are some key players that that.

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So I think it is reshaping the industry for sure. It's an enormous opportunity to deliver on the vision that I've had and that we've had for years, which is to give great advice and assistance to organizations to help them achieve their vision and transform their organizations. So that's how we're focusing on it at Net Suite as a great tool, but it just sort of embedded within our user experience to give great insights to help explain patterns in the data, help predict what might happen in the future, suggest courses of action that you might want to take, and then actually assist you on taking those courses of action.

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And across that and you know, it's it's sort of can become your dream shooting chief of staff. That person that knows everything about your business can see patterns, bring them to you, have you met them and if you decide to do something about them can go help you execute. Yeah. Amazing. And it's like sort of like every effort and what's and it can be very democratizing in that way because again, my whole vision and our whole vision early on was to give very powerful tools to organizations that otherwise wouldn't have access to them by using the cloud and by making them really easy to use.

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That was always a big focus for me in my career, is let's make stuff easy to use so that everybody can take advantage of it, not just the technologists. And we had our first, you know, back in the day when you were a budding Internet startup in 1998 or 1999, and where everybody was getting funded and had lots of money, the thing that sort of your coming out party was your billboard on the one on highway one on one in in the Bay Area.

00;25;43;12 - 00;26;20;20

This route that went from San Francisco down to San Jose populated on all sides by Internet startups. And so we had one. We got our mandatory one on one billboard and it had a baby in a fighter jet. And that got some hate mail. Yeah. So, you know, maybe I wouldn't do that again. But the the ultimate point of it was this powerful technology in the hands of people that don't necessarily how technical skills to do it, but it's available.

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It's available to them. And so thereby very democratizing. And that's exactly what where I think AI is headed to giving people this power that normally you'd have to hire, you know, an army of consultants or, you know, find, you know, just these all these assistants all over your company. Well, now and again, people are still incredibly important to your company.

00;26;43;20 - 00;27;04;28

You're going to still be hiring lots of people. Yeah, but they're going to be more productive. They're going to be more effective and and you're going to get better information. And so you're actually going to be able to grow faster, which means you're going to hire more people. People worried that AI's going to replace people. Yeah, I think the success it's going to drive in companies and the growth that it can help drive in companies is going to pop.

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It's going to employ more people.

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Fascinating. Well, thank you for that and a fabulous insight as well into your thinking of how it's going to to drive organizations. Moving on a little, I've been following you on socials for for many years and you continually to impress me as being an inspirational leader, someone who really focuses on inspiring and influencing people. And I like to tap into that a little, as I'm sure our attendees would like to know more too.

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So diving in, what individual qualities do you think helps make a great leader?

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Well, I would say the vision and the ability to communicate it and inspire people with it. And then empathy. Empathy is they're not orthogonal. They're very related. You have to have you know, it's a basic you know, there's a there's a process called design thinking. It's pioneered at the Stanford School. And empathy is a big part of it.

00;28;21;14 - 00;28;42;21

I mean, that's the first thing you have to understand is, you know, who am I doing this for? And what what what problems are they having? And I need to deeply understand those problems and then I can move on to a solution to those problems. Don't put the solution before the problem, which I think technology has a checkered history of doing.

00;28;43;28 - 00;29;06;02

Here's this great technology. Let's find some problems for it. And so that, you know, I think that's one of the ways you develop a great vision is by having that empathy. But furthermore, empathy is incredibly important in achieving your vision because just because you have it, you have to execute on this and build something to actually achieve this vision.

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And that involves people. Yes, it involves the people in your company. It involves the people that you're trying to sell your product to or it involves or if you are a nonprofit organization, it involves the people to whom you're delivering your mission. And so having empathy, the willingness and ability to really listen and understand which all of us fall short of that many times, and that's okay.

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But it's always something everyone can work on that's going to make it help you execute and deliver on your vision much more effectively. So I would put those those two together.

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Fabulous. Thank you.

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That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening. And stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.