EP 120: Evan Goldberg (Founder and EVP, Oracle NetSuite) on 26 Years of Operating Lessons Running NetSuite

27:25How do you embed that culture within the organization? Well, the AI hype cycle certainly helps because our employees do read the newspapers, so to speak. Helps them at cocktail parties, I imagine. Exactly. Part of it, of course, is making sure they have the training. So we have a great customer of NetSuite called Coursera, And Andrew Ng has this amazing sort of introductory course to machine learning. And we got basically every engineer. This is way before 2020.

27:59When did 2020? It was several years ago. It was pre-pandemic to take that course. And so they need to know what's possible, first of all. And they need the basics of the techniques. and then you know we are really kind of you know internally uh evangelizing uh and and and and and these wins that we already have show you know showing them internally so that you know every engineer and every product manager and user experience designer is has it in their head okay how can i do something like that because they've seen the successes from other parts of the organization. So that's an important part of it.

28:42And the other thing is we hire a lot of kids right out of college. Yeah, that helps. Yeah, they want to think about all this stuff. And so as you look at how the opportunity set is presenting itself and how it can manifest across all these different verticals, and you guys have a vertical approach to a lot of the different applications, have there been things or moments that have stood out to you as like, Like, wow, this is really fundamentally going to change the way at which we operate or anything you've been exposed to that kind of stands out? Yeah. I mean, and it hasn't really been verticalized yet.

29:19It certainly will be. The things that I've seen is the experiments we've done where it's, you know, well, the first experiment we did, which turned into our first product, which we call Text Enhance, was I got a very quick demo. this is right after, you know, ChatGPT, you know, kind of made its massive world debut. And on the one hand, it was like, you know, hallucinating and trying to convince journalists to leave their wives. But at NetSuite, someone rigged it up so that it said, write an introductory email about this sales order. And here's the fields that are important in the sales order. And it wrote an amazing introductory email that was like, exactly what you'd want to say, you know, dear customer, here's your sales order, we've prepared it to, you know, meet your needs.

30:15And here's how much it'll cost over this many years. And here's the terms and etc. And here's the key items that you know, that was the immediate aha moment that like, obviously, there's a very straightforward application within NetSuite. And what we did there, I think, was pretty interesting is that what we proceeded to do is to wire up the LLM so that wherever you're using it in NetSuite, it kind of knows what's relevant. So if you're using it in a sales order, it knows that the list of items and the terms, et cetera, is relevant. If you're using it in a job posting, it knows the other parts of the salary, other things in the record.

30:52So we kind of pre-wired it up so that anywhere you used it, it really gave you more relevant information than if you had just basically gone to ChatGPT and said, write me an introductory email. And then the next advance that we've made that we just announced recently is that we're now letting customers rewire it and say, you know what, for this use of the LLM, this is what's important for me. And here's some custom information because NetSuite, we haven't really talked about this, but one of the huge drivers of NetSuite's success was our customizability. That's what I really brought to the game.

31:26I didn't know anything about accounting. When Larry told me that we were going to start with accounting, I had to go out and buy an accounting textbook. But what I did know is how to make really customizable systems, sort of application development systems. NetSuite from the beginning has been extremely customizable, tailorable, and that's been a big driver of our success. We're able to easily tailor it to industries. They're able to easily tailor that last mile to their company. So that was a natural thing for us, is to make the use of large language models extremely tailorable by company or if you were implemented by a partner, they can do it for you.

32:01Different partners that serve different, you talked about verticals. This is a way that they can say, you know what, in this vertical, what's important when you're writing an email about a sales order is X, which may not be important in another vertical. So that level of customizability is sort of the next advance we've made in what started as a very simple kind of just plug in the LLM into NetSuite. I didn't realize customizability was such an important element of NetSuite. Even for the smallest companies. And so was that something that contemporaneous companies that had similar insights just didn't build that framework of customizability and it ended up falling down?

32:41Or how much did that provide your initial success versus allow you to sustain it? Well, one thing is that in the U.S., most customers that adopt NetSuite are coming from QuickBooks, and it's not particularly customizable. We have several orders of magnitude more customizability. And we heard from small companies that the minute we added the ability to do custom fields, we saw these companies using it in all kinds of unique ways. So then we added more capabilities, like adding your own custom records. And ultimately, you're able to write scripts. Or we have a workflow manager, so you can do no-code development to make the system work in ways that match what your company does.

33:21And you don't do that across the board. That's too much customization. You definitely can. It's a weapon that you can use to your detriment, for sure. Too much of a good thing. But we use it, actually, to develop versions of NetSuite for particular verticals. So they get sort of a standardized version that's still using our kind of extensibility layer to make it appropriate for them and, you know, a thousand other companies in their particular vertical. And then they can go that last mile for what's unique about your company. And, you know, companies are alike, like all companies in many ways, they all have needed income statement.

34:00And then, you know, for companies that are distributors, they all need warehouse management capabilities. and then that last 10 % is like what's unique and maybe they have this sort of micro vertical features breweries need particular things but then there's that sort of you're a secret sauce what do you do that's really different and how do you do things differently than other companies and that's what makes your company stand out and that's where they'll tell us, they'll say no everything else we're willing to sort of go with how the industry does it because it makes a lot of sense and it's replacing our old crufty way of doing it which made sort of no sense because we designed it on the back of a napkin when we first started the company.

34:38But in this area, we have a very unique process, and we want NetSuite to adapt to that process. And that's where the fact that you can do this no-code customizability, things like anybody can go in and rewire how the LLM works within NetSuite. That's where that stuff becomes extremely powerful. Did you have any framework in the early days of how to make the decisions on what were the primitives or the platform that you built out versus what were the more modular applications? That's a great question. What happened was there was one day when I looked at our feature list for our next release, and basically feature A was for big company B.

35:17We had some big customers. They were demanding things. The allure of keeping them happy and getting them to pay you more money can cause you to drift away from what you know that your larger asset companies wants to do. I took one look at that. I said, okay, this is not going to work. We need to be able to build more extensibility into the system so our professional services organization or a reseller partner can build what this big company needs because nobody else wants this. This is just for them. And we can really focus on what the massive companies want. And that path, traveling that path was a huge part of our success.

35:58And interestingly, it became one of our biggest selling points is how much you could adapt the system if you needed to. There's this phrase now, I don't know if you've heard it pop up more and more, but companies talk about building compound startups. I don't know if you've heard this, but it's basically building a suite in some ways. It's the new name du jour, I guess. and thinking about having these platforms and then building the different applications on top of it. I'm curious. I mean, I think NetSuite, probably Microsoft. We could probably come up with a handful of ones. It's nice that you put those.

36:31Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I don't know. The two immediate ones that come to mind, two very successful businesses. I'm curious how you thought about that framework of the platform and the applications and all of that and building in those other incremental products to one another. How did you decide to stop there? How did you not go do the next 10 things on the path of the journey? What became enough for you all? That's a great question. You've got to decide what is core to you and what do you want your partner community to build. Another decision we made was what do we want our extensibility platform to be for?

37:12Salesforce.com developed force.com, which was for any kind of application development. That was something where we were like, we don't have the resources to necessarily support anybody building any random application. So we really focused our extensibility platform not as a general purpose application development platform, but something to let companies extend NetSuite. And that became our singular focus.

37:39And what you have to, every company has to do this, what is core? What can you not let go of? because if it's not done right, it's going to jeopardize your company. So that's sort of how we thought about it. So we can't do everything. When you say everything you need to grow all in one place for a company, that's a lot of stuff. And ultimately, we needed a partner community for us to really achieve that vision. And now when you go to our Sweet World user conference and you look in the expo floor, you see hundreds of partners that are doing amazing things that they've found that white space. And we obviously have a discussion with them so that they can kind of understand what our direction is and we together can kind of have the ships aligned to expand what customers can get out of the entire NetSuite ecosystem.

38:30You had shared an article I had seen about four major levers to pull for profitability and efficient growth. I'm curious, we've gone in these cycles of infinite capital and then feeling like scarcity and then elements of infinite capital again. I'm curious how you thought of setting the orientation for the business of what the appropriate balance between profitability and efficiency was and growth over the years. Well, I don't think we necessarily got it right. We spent a lot of money on some things that I wish we hadn't. You know, and in the go-go days of that early, you know, internet boom, it was like, oh yeah, just do all this digital advertising and, you know, the people will come and it'll, and so we, you know, we blew a lot of money like a lot of companies did.

39:24We were able to fail relatively fast, I think, because we used our own system very thoroughly to see how these things were working. And we typically, unfortunately, sometimes we signed contracts that were too long, But, you know, so I don't think we necessarily quite got the balance right. And that's really challenging. We had one little cheat code, you might say. And it was called Larry Ellison because that guy doesn't really pay that close attention to the vicissitudes of the outside world. He's just like, I have an idea. I'm going to help. I'm going to build this idea and this kind of relentless consistency on driving that idea.

40:06And so that certainly helped us weather that first storm of the downturn. It's not like we kept hiring at the exact same rate, but it wasn't an extinction-level event, at least from our perspective. And so that was very helpful. Not something that every company, unfortunately, has access to. But hopefully you do have investors that are willing to take the long view and can really help you weather that storm, knowing that it inevitably is going to pass. And if your idea is great, it might take a little longer to have it come to fruition. But that belief, having the investors have that sort of same belief that you do is critical.

40:45You spoke about maybe your evolution as a leader or more willingness to do, I don't know, stuff like this, but also not coding as much. I don't know if that's the right way of phrasing it. Sometimes I want to rip the keyboard away, but I generally have been able to resist the temptation lately. So what have you learned about leading and managing people over the years that maybe you could go back and tell yourself in 98? I think my management philosophy has remained primarily the same. I already had 10 years of experience, and Oracle was such a fast-growing organization. You could learn a lot really quickly.

41:28High hundreds when you joined, a couple thousand when you left? Several thousand, several, I mean, probably 10 ,000 when I left. So that gave me the opportunity to make a lot of my mistakes in management early. And so I feel like my management philosophy was pretty well set when I got there. And I talked about, you know, surrounding yourself with people that are better than you in certain ways. And, you know, having the humility to listen to them and say, you know what, you know more about this than I do. That's how you're going to do it. that's how we're going to do it. And I still feel to this very day, and I look at my key leaders, and in their domain, they know a lot more than I do.

42:10And, you know, there's a temptation when you're a leader, and you've seen success, to assume that you're right about everything. And you're so smart, looking at while the success you've had, you must be right. And I've, you know, I do think that I have some insights in a lot of areas, and especially as I look at an area over time. But I think, again, and we talked about this earlier, I think one of the reasons people stay is because I do give people the ability to sort of stretch their wings in their area. And so that to me is a critical, critical part of leadership. Surround yourself with the people and the best people that you can find.

42:52in any area that is critical for your organization. If you don't have that capability, you definitely need to hire the best possible person you can have and let them run with the ball. I feel like a lot of leaders I talk to maybe recognize they're falling short in some way, shape, or form, but they don't know what good or excellent or the best possibly could look like in some functional area. Was there any means of getting up to speed so that you could figure out and learn what you didn't know? Well, your network and your mentors, and hopefully you have mentors that are not just the next generation, you in 20 years.

43:37That's not particularly helpful. It's somewhat helpful. But what's much more helpful is having mentors that are in very different areas from you and bring a completely different perspective. And Larry had a lot more wide-ranging experience than me, so that was certainly one. But I sought out people from various aspects of my life that were great at sales. It's fun to hang around. First of all, it's fun to hang around people that are great at sales. They happen to be very socially advanced. In fact, when our original CEO – sorry, our CEO that I hired in 2002, Zach Nelson, who was CEO for the entire rest of the history of NetSuite, he and his wife came over for dinner.

44:23And as we closed the door behind him at the end of the evening, Cindy turned to me and said, he's very socially advanced. You can learn a lot from him. so you know i mean just basically being open to learning from people that are very very different from you i think is absolutely critical for a leader because your responsibility as a ceo you have to be everything you have to be a psychiatrist psychologist you know you have to be an expert in code you have to be um a great marketing person i mean there's the is so many of these um sort of skill sets that you need to have you're not going to be able to get all of them yourself but um you You can use your network to at least become enough of an expert that you can identify real experts.

45:05Give you some calibration around. Yeah, just enough to be dangerous. Zach was CEO through, how long was it? Until the acquisition. Until the acquisition. What allowed that partnership to work as well as it did? Yeah, I mean, we were very complimentary, and I think our goals were very complimentary. I mean, he's an incredible communicator. He was uniquely equipped to go out. And I've never seen a guy who can do a presentation. And every presentation I've ever seen in Silicon Valley, I've never seen someone who can do a presentation as well as Zach Nelson. And he would go out there and really tell our story in a way that I never could and still can't.

45:44I still, you know, I've gotten better. But I'm no Zach Nelson. So we had really, and I, you know, wanted to really focus on the technology and where it was going to go and how we were going to make it scalable. And so that was just, it was very complimentary. I think we both saw the value of the partnership. And you have to, again, have the humility to say, you know what, I don't have to be the guy. Some people want to be the guy. And maybe there's good reason for that. But I, in my entire career, have really felt that the power of partnerships is more powerful than any single individual. In terms of, I guess, you mentioned your management style was largely set through Oracle and that experience.

46:32And then my experience running my own company, which was like, that is the crash course. Yes, digesting quite a bit through that. I'm curious for entrepreneurs that are maybe listening about just different tactics of management or giving feedback or anything that comes with leading people. Are there things that you've particularly internalized that are broadly applicable and not maybe personally applicable? Well, the most obvious one is empathy, and empathy can only come from listening. It is impossible to have empathy if you don't listen. but so, and, and it's more than just listening because you have to draw people out and typically, you know, you're, you won't, you have to, at the end of many one-on-ones and I think, you know, some of my, uh, my director, I mean, people that have worked for me will recognize this.

47:24Sometimes at the end of one-on-one, I'll just kind of pause and sit back and say, sort of, you know, basically, how are you doing? I mean, what's, you know, how are you thinking about your job right now? How do you feel about your world? And they didn't prepare for it. They didn't necessarily expect it. So you get to some degree unvarnished answers. And that's absolutely critical. If you want to be able to sort of head off problems early, to me, that's the best way to do it. is just really stay in touch with the bigger picture of how your people are thinking about their role, the company, everything going on in the world, whatever it is.

48:08And sometimes out of those questions will come, here's something that I'm dealing with in my world, not necessarily related to NetSuite, but that is affecting me in a big way. And so, again, it's about drawing people out and then really, really listening. And that's how you can have empathy, and empathy is the number by far. It's the number one success factor in management. It's the number one success factor in building a great product for our customers. That would be the one word I'd sort of leave every entrepreneur with. One of the things that I think a lot of companies, when they're in this hyper-growth mode, they often will hit a point in certain functional areas that maybe the people that got them there might not be the people that will get them there along the way.

49:00And I'm sure you've lived some different parts of that journey. It's always a tough question to ask, and it's a tough thing to go through. As you sort of reflect, are there things that you learned or maybe questions you asked yourself when you felt it or maybe knew in your gut that it might be time to move on that ultimately got you over that hump? It's hard to fire people. Yeah. I mean, especially if you have empathy. Yes, back to the earlier point. You know how that's going to potentially affect their lives. One thing I'll say is that for yourself personally, it's usually a huge sense of relief when you do it because you know you've waited too long.

49:44It's often a huge sense of relief for the individual. Not always. and so you got to be prepared for that. Don't try to fool yourself and think this isn't going to be really hard for them. In a lot of cases it will be. But if something's not working, it's not good for either party and sort of if you can steal yourself, don't do anything hasty, but if you can steal yourself and deal with the problem earlier even though you really don't want to and you'd rather be writing code or going out and talking to customers, probably both parties are going to benefit from it. It's hard. You almost never hear about people saying they fired someone too early.

50:24Yeah. Or I always get it right. I know exactly when to cut the cord. Yeah. It's always, it's always, I waited too long. And I think that's human nature, if you're empathetic at all, if you're not a sociopath, it's human nature to give people the benefit of the doubt and to wait a little bit. And so I think - If you, if, yeah, if. Knowing that that's our inclination as humans is, you don't want to pursue that conflict. And you know what? I mean, you're working, so everybody's working so hard. It does take on the feeling of a family. And, you know, you generally don't fire your family. Sometimes I guess people have to, but so that makes it doubly hard when the organization is small and very, very tight knit.

51:06But to this very day, you know, with thousands of people, it's still hard. Yeah. I think one of the things we talked about product and architecture and some of those decisions and having empathy for the customers. I think you all have prided yourself on trying to bring elements of consumer quality to enterprise software. And I know that it's probably hard in all the different ways that it can manifest itself. But I'm curious in terms of style and product design and some of the things that have been really successful for DebtSuite. Have there been primitives or lessons about this, maybe getting feedback from customers that you sort of think about?

51:47I mean, yeah, we've said for the long time, you know, there's applications on people's phones now that they love. Why can't NetSuite be an application that they love? There really is no reason, and you're spending eight hours a day plus using these applications, you know, half of your waking hours. If you can make it enjoyable, I mean, it's such a weird thing to talk. It seemed like a weird thing. Now, the good news is that we've been talking about this at NetSuite for years. I got back to Oracle, and let's just say that Oracle had not always prioritized user experience, is sort of the nice way of putting it.

52:27It was more like, we build great technology and we dare you to use it. And so when I talked to Larry about coming back to Oracle, he said, well, maybe you'll see that Oracle's changed. And I had the typical sort of eye roll on that. Because back in the day, when I first started Oracle, I mean, Mark and I started the Mac group at Oracle. And, you know, we were evangelists for making Oracle much easier, but we were always swimming upstream. And so I figured that's what I was going to be encountering when I got back to Oracle. Well, lo and behold, that was not true at all. Oracle had seen the light, so to speak, and had an incredible organization devoted to making business software enjoyable to use.

53:13I mean, it was unbelievable. And we had already been working on a brand new user experience framework for NetSuite towards this very goal of being able to really innovate and build real consumer-grade interactions into the product. And we'd been working on this for several years. I got a presentation from the gentleman who runs the organization, the user experience organization, Oracle, about what they were building and what they were going to do. And within about 10 minutes, I'm like, oh, we're just going to have to throw out everything we did and adopt this. And that's what we've done. It's called the Redwood Design System.

53:50And it's a complete about face from what I experienced back in the late 20th century. and it's incredibly inspiring and we're so happy to be partnering with them because they have this exact same mentality that we do that why should you go into work and hate using this stuff and then go home and love using this stuff why should that be the case and so it's an ambitious goal but I think we're tracking and AI is just going to make it easier I'm curious, I mean I realize you weren't there for that journey or that transformation You sort of walked into it. But it did. I mean, that group was hired after I got back, but I hadn't really noticed that.

54:35Got it. The idea was already there. I mean, Oracle has gotten much more deeply kind of in the space of business applications. They've had business applications for a long time, but now it's really central to Oracle's strategy. I mean, it's applications and infrastructure, and they play off of each other. The fact that you can use these business applications from Oracle, they run in Oracle's infrastructure, and then you can build the extensions to them on Oracle infrastructure. It's a very symbiotic relationship. So that changed to where business applications became so central to Oracle's strategy.

55:10They realized that people want to like these things. So that mentality was already there. but that group came into being soon after we came. And I met with their leadership very soon after they came into the company. So it was an aha moment for sure. Was that a top-down directive of, hey, we need to get more consumer-friendly and all that? Or is it bottom-down? Well, here's what I'll say. The Redwood design system is because Larry had a lovely Redwood Grove in Woodside that he felt was a great inspiration for the sort of look and feel of Oracle's applications for the coming years. And we're still going strong on that idea that was driven by him.

55:57One of the things that I think all our companies struggle with at some point along the way is focus and trying to stay focused on the company's core mission when there's countless other things that can be distractions. How did you think about finding signal from noise, making sure you're pursuing, staying consistent? I mean, Larry is great at this, but at one point he said, we should consider having a personal version of NetSuite so you could use it for your personal finances. And look, it would be pretty cool because there was nothing really, I mean, ultimately there was Mint, but there wasn't really anything like that yet that was sort of mass adopted.

56:39and um i was the one that had to basically say you know i think that's a bridge too far and um but generally you know larry has that in spades understanding the the value of focus and you know kind of like belligerently uh consistent about that um and so now you know when i advise companies now kind of putting myself in that position i i see that drift and i you know you You have so much energy and so much excitement about what you do. You see applications everywhere. It's very hard to resist the temptation to try to, you know, throw a lot of spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. And sometimes, you know, a trial balloon is not a bad idea.

57:22Maybe you'll discover something that is incredible and transforms your company, but most of the time it's going to be a distraction. And so you have, discipline is incredibly important. And again, I think it's the role of advisors in companies to, you know, keep people on the straight and narrow towards that North Star and always be asking the question, is this a distraction? Is this going to get us off track? Is this going to take away from what we really, really need to do, those core milestones that we need to achieve in order to get where we want to go? In the example of the Mint.com or the personal NetSuite, did you have some sample customers that you thought about?

58:06Well, all our little companies, a lot of them were sole proprietorship, so they were pretty close to that. They were probably using the same system to pay their personal bills as they were using to pay their business bills. So, yeah, we already had some sort of almost sample customers, and it was an interesting approach. But it took us really – I mean the success, I joked earlier about 50 million companies paying us$50 a year versus 50 companies paying us$50 million. I mean, the upmarket move for NetSuite was absolutely critical to our success. And getting to that mid-market, that vast chasm between small business software like QuickBooks and big company systems like SAP, getting sort of into the middle of that chasm was absolutely critical.

58:54And this was going to take us completely in the opposite direction, as attractive of a possibility as it may have been. I guess there's still kind of that opportunity that exists today. So, I mean, Mint is no longer, right? I think it's officially shut down. Or it was, yeah, I thought they, did they get bought? They got bought by IntoIt, but then I think they've like kind of sunset it. Yeah, I don't think there's necessarily a great player there yet, but maybe next company. Yeah, yeah. Well, it seems like you're enjoying what you're doing these days. One of the things, I guess, we sort of talked about the bottoms up element or trusting your existing employees to help set some of the directive or provide feedback and guardrails by which you make decisions.

59:39How did you think about culture and what the codify versus what was kind of implicit within the organization? Well, hopefully, culture starts at the top, no doubt about it. And you and your key leaders establish it. And so that happens naturally when you're small. When you're big and there's so many layers between the top and the bottom, or just, you know, there's just the telephone game, you know, in terms of like getting your notion of how a company should be out to hundreds of employees or thousands of employees. That's when you sort of have to put things in place and you develop the values and you make sure everybody sees them all the time and you live them in your communication and try to show examples of them.

1:00:24So we had a culture initially which I think was just driven personally from the type of people, the type of person that I was, the type of people that we brought into the company, Zach, for sure, which was number one, sort of a low-key intensity, which means, obviously, as little drama as possible. We're doing very important stuff. It's critical for our customers. It's their lifeblood, but there's no reason that we have to make it unpleasant to do.

1:00:55Try to bring in people that you sort of, you know, want to have lunch with. And then the second aspect of it was humor. And I think humor is a critical part of, of management and being open to having those kind of fun, humorous experiences, no matter what you're doing, if you're, you know, sending a person to the moon, or developing business software, or, you know, writing video games. I mean, I think that's such of fun and that, um, that ability to laugh and is important. So we have still to this very day, we have a mascot, sweet Stanley. I mean, I still laugh every time I see sweet Stanley and his wife, sweet Sally and their little kid, sweet pea.

1:01:38And so I think, you know, it's a little bit cheesy, I'll admit it, but people laugh. And, um, so that's that part of the culture. I, no matter how big you are, I think you got to have it. I mean, you're again, people are at your company, eight, 10 hours a day at the beginning of the company, they're working, you know, around the clock. If there's no laughter there, that's soul sucking. Yeah. Did you hire for that? Those characters? Zach Nelson is one of the funniest people I know. So I don't know, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. But it was, it wasn't a part of the rubric that you were, uh, that you were evaluating people on, or was that something you sort of thought about?

1:02:15Would they fit in? Probably it was certainly wasn't written down. But I think, you know, it grows on itself. I mean, there are people that are just really, really serious. And they probably got to NetSuite and looked around at our office and said, this looks more like, you know, Yahoo. I don't know. Like in our office right now, we have prominently displayed cereal boxes with Sweet Stanley replaced. We have one called Sweeties instead of Wheaties. We have Suite Loops. I mean, that's always how it's been at NetSuite. So I think when you go into that office, you kind of are attracted to that or not.

1:02:53Yeah. And so NetSuite now has stayed within Oracle, but it's still its own unique culture as a part of Oracle? I think so. I mean, it's what's called a global business unit. And we have our own, obviously all hands meetings and our own communication, but we are very, very much part of Oracle. I mean, we're part of Oracle's strategy, as I mentioned, which is to build applications for really for companies of basically all sizes, and then the infrastructure to run those applications and other applications that they need in their business. And we have collaborated with pretty much every other group at Oracle to enhance NetSuite.

1:03:36As I said, our core user experience enhancements that are going to be coming out over the next coming years are derived completely from a collaboration with Oracle team. So that's the balance. And we, you know, we kind of had a, to some degree, I guess you'd say a dream acquisition because we were already sort of cousins. I like to say it's like, was cousins marrying, but second cousins. And, you know, the fact that Larry was the founder, when Larry came and talked to our entire employee base a few months after the acquisition, I got so many comments where people were like, wow he really gets us i'm like um yeah he was the founder along with me so not surprising yeah so it's it's kind of a unique a unique situation um but it didn't have to end up that way it's always you know the the fact that so many people have stayed that there's people there across the all parts of the company that have been there for 20 years and can talk about the old days and try to We're always trying to make NetSuite feel small again because that's what people love.

1:04:38They love hearing about all the history and want to sort of – while we're not going to be a five-person startup, we can take some aspects of that and perpetuate it, hopefully, for the entire history of NetSuite so people can feel some of that sort of excitement that you have as a startup. Yeah, I don't need you to go through the blow-by-blow machinations. There's proxy statements for this stuff and all of that. But was it a little surreal at the coming full circle? How many years later? 20 years later? Yeah, it was about 18. 18 years later. You know, life has a lot of twists and turns. And as I said, I came back.

1:05:14Larry asked me to stay a year. I expected that's what I might do. And then the next time we talked about it, it was at the Oracle board meeting where he said, well, Evan's going to spend the rest of his career at Oracle. And I'm like, well, good to know, because now I don't have to worry about anything else. You made that decision. Done. But so far, I'm proving him right. Yeah. I mean, at that point in time, did you have any opinion on how long you were sort of looking ahead? I was warming up to the idea of staying longer. We were really starting to think about this sort of next generation of NetSuite technology.

1:05:54You know, I was starting to see the focus on user experience and the ability to do more at Oracle than I possibly could do independently. So I was getting there. I didn't contradict him in the middle of the board. Yeah, you're going to let that go by the wayside, I'm sure. I guess as you, we talked about like AI providing this new invigoration to it. And it seems like you uniquely enjoy the elements of both the technology as well as solving the business problems as well. Is there something that you find on a regular basis that's like most fulfilling about the job or little moments you enjoy? It's kind of exactly what you just said.

1:06:35Okay. The ability to know what can be done and what should be done, that's sort of, I think, what I bring to the table at NetSuite. And so I stay very involved in the design of the technology and what we're going to build, but also how we're going to build it and what's possible. And I'm staying current. I'm taking courses in AI. I'm staying current on all of that so I can bring the what's possible to the table. but also bring what's the right thing to the table. The merging of those two things, I think, is what's most exciting about technology. As you advise startups today, invest in startups, and you've lived two journeys, I guess three if you want to count it, Oracle early days, but also you had Embed and you had NetLedger and NetSuite and that whole very successful journey.

1:07:28are there things about being a founder or an operator that you look for uniquely in people today? And if there's someone listening that's sort of questioning, hey, should I be a founder? Should I go down this path? Are there questions that you would have them ask themselves to sort of reflect on that? Well, we talked about how you need to be open to, you need to know what you don't know and what isn't a strength. And to me, again, some people want to try to do everything. I don't look at that as a successful founder. Founders can do a lot of things. Successful founders are typically sort of polymaths, and they can do a lot of things.

1:08:13But I also look for people that are open to bringing in the right people for things that they don't know. And there's a tendency I see so many people that try to project their success in one area to another area. And to me, that's a big obstacle to success. So that's one of the first things I look for is do you know what you don't know? Do you have the fortitude to deal with the ups and downs, the intense ups and downs? I mean, like every email that comes in, you're either worried it's going to be terrible or it's going to propel your company to massive success. So do you kind of have the stomach for that?

1:09:00And do you truly, truly believe in your idea? Now, I was fortunate enough that I was sort of building for myself. And as an entrepreneur, I wanted what I was building. And that's great. and it can also be a burden because you're just one customer. You might not be typical. But I think in general that's an advantage is to sort of being able to eat your own dog food as the term goes. But it's not a requirement. But you do need to be passionate about, you know, if you're building for something that you wouldn't use, you still need, again, we talked about empathy. You sort of have to have passionate empathy for your customers.

1:09:37Like you are so excited to bring this to them. You really think it's going to change their world and change the world. You know, I think those are just some of the elements that I sort of look for when I look whether I think someone is going to be able to do it. And then they're still probably going to fail. Statistically, that's, yeah, it seems like that's the most likely scenario. You mentioned 98, Larry came to you and said, hey, if I could do another company, I would be doing this. Are there things you look at today and say, say, hey, if I wasn't doing NetSuite, I would be doing XYZ? Well, I mean, I think there's personal reasons that I would say if I wasn't doing NetSuite, I'd probably be working at a company or an institution that's trying to cure cancer.

1:10:24I'm the chairman of the board of the V Foundation, the Jimmy V Foundation for Cancer Research. And I, you know, from that vantage point, see how much suffering there is in the world due to cancer. My family has been impacted by it. So, So just kind of on that basis, I'd do something sort of outside high tech. Most things that I look at that I could do that are in my domain are probably features of NetSuite. So it's a little hard to figure out how to do that because I'd probably, if I went off and did a company halfway in, I'd be like, we should just do this at NetSuite. Yeah, that can be hard.

1:11:02I'm curious, the V Foundation, how did you get involved with that? Those of your listeners that have seen Jimmy V's speech at the ESPYs. We can link it. Yeah, I mean, it's unbelievable. Jim Balvano is the coach of NC State. Oh, you're an expert. He won two national titles or one? One national title in crazy, unpredictable fashion. Like every game was a cliffhanger and they were the underdog. He was playing Hakeem Olajuwon in Houston. Who else was on that team? It was an amazing team. Yeah, it was a big underdog. On everybody, you thought it was a shooter. But, you know, it's one game. Yes. And so that was incredible.

1:11:37And then very tragically developed cancer at an early age. And he did a speech on the ESPYs when he was really, really suffering. I mean, late stages of terminal cancer. Passed a couple months after. Yeah, passed a few months after that. And an absolutely incredible speech that has so much wisdom in a few minutes. And so I went over a friend's house, saw the speech. We already were getting involved in cancer research because of how cancer had affected our family. And it was, it just was like, and it was NetSuite had recently gone public or was soon or about to go public. So I figured there was a good chance I was actually going to have some resources to apply to that challenge.

1:12:27And they happened to have an amazing wine celebration in Napa. And my wife and I love Napa. And so we saw the speech, went to the wine celebration. I met the scientists because they bring all the scientists to this event every year. Incredible, incredible scientists from every major cancer center you could think of, who were so personable and so passionate about the cause from the science perspective. And then it really felt still like sort of a family. And I saw the analogy with NetSuite. It started in 1993, still had that sort of real family feel a decade or so later. and so I got more and more involved and eventually Steve Bornstein, who was one of the originators of the foundation, he joked one day, he's like, I see you as the next chairman.

1:13:19I'm like, ha, ha, ha. And then a few years later, he's like, no, I'm serious. So how long have you been doing it? Four years now. Oh, wow. That's great. I mean, but I've been involved in the organization, as I said, for 15 or so years. But I'm still sort of a newcomer because he's got legendary people. Coach K is an incredible supporter of the organization. And so I'm still a newcomer. I'm kind of, I feel like I'm kind of the bridge. I'm the Gen X bridge. Yes. Because unfortunately, we're, you know, we've been doing it at the V Foundation for 30 years. And unfortunately, it's probably going to, you know, be another few decades.

1:13:54But I hope there's a silver bullet, but it doesn't quite look that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's great to hear. Well, I guess as we sort of wrap, I'm curious, you've lived a very interesting journey, Oracle and NetSuite. You've come across a bunch of interesting people along the way. As we wrap, one of your friends, Mark Benioff, I'm curious what you maybe learned from him or about startups that you would pass along to people that are listening in a mind. Well, I mean, the guy can create hype like no one ever. I mean, so that's one of those things that, I'm not that great at that maybe because I'm a little more sort of inwardly focused so that's something that we had to kind of that was a muscle that we had to learn and one of the best ways to learn was to just sort of watch what Mark did I definitely think that to a certain degree even though we started three months earlier I mean we rode on the coattails of Mark's hype machine because he promoted this very pithy idea that is not completely accurate called no software.

1:15:07Our engineers would be like, wow, it feels like I'm writing software, but I guess I'm not. But it caught on and it was, you know, it may have been, it was true in spirit, if not in letter. And so... Don't let a good narrative get in the way. Exactly. Exactly. So that was definitely something that I learned from... And we've talked about a lot of lessons or things that you've learned from Larry Ellison, but I guess, is there anything that we haven't said or anything that bubbles to the top about? You know, one of the things, you know, if you hang out with the guy, you'll just get relatively more frequently than you'd expect something that you can carry for the rest of your life.

1:15:49And one of the things he told me is, you know, always be just brutal about making sure that in your core differentiator, you shine. You always shine. These other things that customers are asking for that your other customers have, you can fall behind and you can just sprint ahead every once in a while to make sure that you just sort of have the checkbox items. But no, you need to know what your key differentiator is and you need to be light years ahead of the competition in that. And, you know, he just kind of dropped that in one of our conversations and that was probably 25 years ago and I'm like, I still use that.

1:16:31That's great. Well, thank you for doing this. This was fun. It was great. Thanks for having me.

1:16:38Thanks for joining this episode of The Logan Bartlett Show with co-founder of NetSuite, Evan Goldberg. If you enjoyed this conversation, we really appreciate it if you subscribe to us on whatever platform you're listening to us on, as well as shared with anyone else that you think might find this interesting. We look forward to seeing you back here next week with another great episode of The Logan Bartlett Show. Have a good weekend, everyone. Bye.