YouSaid · the spoken record

Evan Goldberg

lines on the record: 34
first: 2019-04-14
most recent: 2019-04-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Luck has a huge impact, and that I landed at Oracle and I met Larry Ellison and we hit it off and we had some similar thoughts about what to do. That my business was sort of failing at the time that Larry had this idea that we needed to deliver software over the web. I mean, that's serendipity. You know, if my business was sort of succeeding and a couple years later, I realized that someone else may have started NetSuite. And so there's a ton of luck and nevertheless being out there and working hard and kind of just keeping your eyes open about what's happening in the world. I mean, that's going to only help you get that luck.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chill out All going to be fine. I look back, and I look back more and not so much what I wish I hadn't done, but what I'm happy that I did. And I think this is the most important advice I can give everybody is that success is fantastic, but only because you're delivering on the sort of promise that you made yourself to make a difference in the world and make a dent in the universe, what have you. And so I think Staying focused on the little victories, you know, the first customer, the 10th customer, the 100th customer in some sense is”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you might find people in other industries that have, you know, you might find people in the military. You might find people that are teachers. I mean, you might find people or principals of schools or whatever, what have you that have amazing people experience. And ultimately, as I said, leadership is so much of it is attracting, retaining great people, getting them to be working towards that same vision and mission towards that same North Star. Mentorship in that regard can come from a lot of different places.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a good question. Obviously, you should be looking for them your whole career from sort of from day one. And there's a lot of things that go into that mentorship. I mean, you obviously need to have chemistry. I mean, it's like any relationship in your life. You obviously have to have an enormous amount of respect, but you have to see that they respect you and that you kind of each sort of grock each other. And so I think it's just a process of just being out there, you know, get out of your hole or where you do your cube or your table or whatever. Get out in the world. And you don't know where it's going to come from. And it might not even be in the same industry. I definitely hear stories of people with mentors in completely different industries. And that's not going to suffice. You're going to need people that understand very, very deeply what you do. But a lot of times some of the hardest decisions are people decisive.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a programmer, when I was a kid, and that's where all my company is really built out of programming. When you know something very, very deeply, I think that helps you recognize other people that know something very, very deeply. And I think identifying that talent, not necessarily understanding everything that they do. But identifying that those people are as good at what they do as what you do and letting them go and do their job is absolutely critical because absolutely you can't do everything and you can't learn everything. But then figuring out the areas that you are actually the expert in. And for me, I really, you know, I was an expert in how to develop NetSuite. So even when I stopped programming, I stayed very involved in and remained very involved in how we develop NetSuite because that's an area that I know so deeply. And ultimately, you build a great team of people that are experts in their area that you trust that you believe in and you let them go and do what they have to do.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, it's definitely got to figure out the things you're not going to learn and that you're not going to do. And, you know, one of the things for me is that I programmed for a very large history of NetSuite. I mean, one of the things, because it kept me really, really close to the technology. I loved doing it. You know, it became less and less of the amount of time I could do it. But that was something that I was not, you know, I was not going to easily give up. And I think in the early days, I had a big impact on the organization with that role. But at the end of the day, you've got to figure out which of the things that someone else should be doing because you can't do everything. And as someone that's an expert in a particular area, I mean, a lot of great entrepreneurs didn't necessarily grow up as general managers. You know, some may have, but a lot of them grew up doing it, really being in there and seeing what worked and what didn't work and having a great idea. And so if you're one of those people, like for me, it was programming.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I really believe in it. I think we have so much more left to do. And that to me is what it's really all about. I mean, that was our vision. Our vision wasn't a dollar figure or a number of users or whatever. Our vision was changing the world in our own way.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, well, for me, I was only three years into running my own company, I was like, you know, 30 years old. That's old now for an entrepreneur, but back then it was relatively young. There's so much you learn all the way. And again, a lot of it is about mentors. I had a great mentor in Larry, I had a great board. People that could advise me and make liberal use of that. Only so much time you have in a day, but time that you spend with someone who's seen the type of thing that you've seen before is time really, really, really, really well spent. And so as I said, I think it's ultimately, it devolves on you to make the hard decisions. And no one is going to care about it more than you. I mean, I'm still at Net Suite because we care about it very, very deeply. I mean, I like working at Oracle, but people say, you know, well, once you're bought by Oracle, why didn't you go off into the sunset? It's because I truly, truly care about what we do.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But also having that persistence to stick with something that you truly know is right. And again, it comes down to that focus. When people try to distract you, give you advice about getting off track. You really have to come back to that center of what you're really trying to do in the world. And this is true for for-profit companies, for social enterprises organizations that are trying to do great things in the world. I mean, always come back to why you started in the first place and what you were trying to accomplish. And I think that's where success comes from.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, no person is an island. And certainly if I look at the growth of NetSuite and what's made us successful, a lot of it has been that we've built a lot of the company by consensus. It's not by committee. That's different. You take a vote. But by consensus is, you know, ultimately a leader has to decide, but a leader that does this in a vacuum is going to fail. And there's so many resources out there. I mean, great resources for me was Larry. And, you know, we generally did what Larry said, not maybe on the exact sign frame that he said it, but he was always really incredibly supportive, saying, you're there every day running that business, and I don't see everything that you see. And I know it's terrifically hard to make some of these sort of wrenching changes. So at the end of the day, I do think it's getting all the data in from all the stakeholders, being really willing to listen, knowing when you might be wrong.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the major balance that you have to have. And every company obviously struggles with making sure they can get funded. They can invest in what they want to do in the long term, but you also want to stay on track and on point. I mean, I think at the end of the day, the focus is the most important thing, and I would always argue that entrepreneurs should ultimately weigh staying on track and avoid things that risk going off drop.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Entrepreneurs can be takes some degree of courage because you'll get some amazing opportunities, huge customers that'll come along and they'll try to get you going where they want to go. And the allure of the big customer and the big deal is one that's hard to resist. And sometimes it's the right thing to do. A lot of what we had to do in building NetSuite was figure out how to sort of mitigate the fact that some of our biggest customers could potentially take us into directions that we didn't want to go. And I think is trying to figure out a way that you can be flexible and that may involve developing a partner channel or partners that can extend what you have. And this could be this is not just in software, in anything. Partnerships are incredibly important. And partners can be a critical part of addressing some of these needs that are going to bring a bunch of resources into your company without getting off your path towards what your true North Star is. So the solution is different in every case.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's definitely part of leadership to be able to identify those times that you do need to pivot and then identifying those times where it's best not to pivot. It's just leadership.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You need the visibility, first of all, so you need to know what's happening in your business. I talk about knowing past, present, and future, knowing what's happened historically, what's happening right now, and being able to visualize trends that indicate what might happen in the future. So it starts with that. So you have the visibility into what might happen. And then as you see it happening, you have to respond. And so that's where agility comes in. And everybody talks about Agile, Agile software development, agile, everything. And, you know, it can't be emphasized enough that you need to be able to respond to things that are happening that you see out there in the world. And there's a real tension. There's definitely a tension between making sure you're staying on mission, on vision, going towards your sort of true north. And the tension between that and responding to things that you're seeing in the marketplace. But you don't want to get diverted. And so in growing our company,”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like the great employees they are, and make them feel at home and motivated to succeed. That's how you can build up an organization.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, there's always people that want to take a leap. And I think, you know, I mean, Silicon Valley was immersed in the internet, and so I think it was easier to explain. It was easier to explain what we were doing. It kind of just makes sense. And just show someone how it works. And they're like, oh yeah, that's probably how applications should be for at least the next thousand years. So that was sort of helpful to attract some amazing people into the organization. And certainly if you treat your employees right and you make sure that they're motivated, that they can work the way they want to work and that they're learning and that they feel a sense of purpose. You know, it's just like a product. Your company is sort of a product in some sense and you want them to recommend it to a friend or colleague, just like you want your product to be recommended. So that's certainly a part of growing your company is just the word of mouth you get from hiring grade employees treating them.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, that a company like Intuit needs to reach the millions and millions of the Fortune 5 million, as it were, of smaller businesses. And the culture of Oracle, which is about building”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It definitely starts with having a clear vision and mission that you're consistent with through the history of the company. I mean, we were lucky enough that in five minutes we came up with the idea of the company, really one system to run your business. All aspects of your key business processes, your sales, your accounting, your commerce. So being able to get people to gravitate around a very clear mission and vision of how you want things to be. You want people to be able to run their business securely on the web with one application, everybody working from the safe playbook. That definitely helps. I mean, certainly, you know, a lot of the culture comes from just alignment. We were kind of in an interesting place. I mean, we'd come from Oracle, a lot of us, and Oracle sells to sold to enterprises. I run a small business. I had some understanding of small business. We kind of, you know, our culture was kind of, we mashed up that more consumer-y culture.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Increase in security when they went to software as a service. But it really took people getting used to it. Certainly people getting more familiar with the internet in their personal lives and to really start to trust it. And, you know, after a time, the CFOs, they did come along.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are a little less risk averse or more risk tolerant than, say, CFOs. And we were starting with accounting. I mean, we were ultimately delivering an entire suite, an entire system to run your business, but it was definitely starting with financials, and CFOs are inherently a more conservative bunch. So, you know, over the next few years, the challenge was to find those sort of forward-looking CFOs, CEOs that were willing to take the leap into putting their data on the internet. Now, for me, it was an easy conversation. I don't know that they always bought it, but it was pretty easy to convince them that rather than storing their key customer information on a computer under somebody's desk that anyone could back then it was a disk in or a USB flash drive or whatever and steal all your business information that maybe we could run it a little more securely than that so it was clear to me that they were going to get it”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Simple, we charged like, I don't know, $9.99 a month or something. I mean, it was kind of flying by the seat of our pants to some degree just to see who would, you know, I mean, whenever you start a company, you know it's a really cool idea. You know there's going to be some people out there that gravitate to it, but you don't know who they are, how much they're going to be willing to pay, what they're going to do with us. And, you know, we learned a lot in those first few years. It was certainly a bunch of early adopters that got it. And, you know, a lot of times those would be companies that were very geographically dispersed, that needed lots of people to be able to have access to the information and the fact that you could do it on the web. Again, this is only four or five years from the advent of the internet. There were definitely a lot of people that got it. You know, software as a service was definitely popularized by Salesforce.com and the whole no software movement. And while the thing that we had to deal with is that Salesforce”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From QuickBooks, and we uploaded them into NetLedger. And I remember distinctly the first night taking a look at our financials of the company in the browser. And that was sort of the aha moment where I recognized, yeah, this is going to work. I mean, the fact that I can have my finger on the pulse of my business anytime, anywhere, from my experience running a company, I knew this was going to be huge. And it was just a matter of time. Of course, Larry never doubted for a second. He used to tell me, well, you know, there's been mainframes and there's been client server, but this sort of web application thing, this is how applications are going to be run for the next thousand years. I don't know what's going to happen after that, but definitely for the next thousand years. And so he saw it.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, it was a fulfillment of me wanting to move into business software, but I didn't really know. Whether this was the right approach right away, starting with accounting, I sort of took that to some degree on faith. I didn't know anything about accounting. I was a QuickBooks user, but like the first day we started the company, I had to go out and buy an accounting book. Fortunately, I got some other people later in the company that actually knew what they were doing on accounting. It really actually came clear to me just a few months later. I was at a party actually at Larry's house and Steve Jobs walked up and he said, well, you know, Larry's super excited about this accounting in a browser thing. But does anyone want to do accounting in a browser? And at that point, I was sure. So I honestly said, I don't know. Maybe I think so. I don't know. Larry seems to think so. But it was actually only seriously days later that we actually finished our first iteration of the accounting system. This was Net Ledger. And we took our finances, financials.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we're going to want to have a web store because these businesses are going to run web stores. The most important thing, he said, is that we want to run it on the web. They shouldn't have to manage their own databases and manage their own machines and all that stuff and deal with upgrades and database software. And so at least you have the insight that Oracle software wasn't necessarily easy for the average small business to implement. So that sort of was the whole idea of the company in a five-minute phone call.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really was his insight. I knew that small businesses needed a bunch of different types of systems and that wanted to work together. That was sort of my insight. His insight was that really the best way to start, and he said, if I were to start a company right now, it would be sort of small business accounting Delivered as a web service, as a web application. I said, well, I don't really know that much about counting, but I can see how accounting would be important, but I really want to get into sales software delivered over the web. So I think that's kind of what I wanted to know as a business owner was where's my next deal coming from? You know, what's my pipeline look like? And he said, oh yeah, you want to do the front office stuff, but first we should start with the back office.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Help me with this company, even though it was more, you know, sort of my idea. His later joke was well, we did your idea and I will do my idea. And he called because he periodically called and he'd say, How's your graphics stuff going? Because that's how he sort of summed it up. And I said, you know, not great, kind of getting clobbered by the competition, but I see this other kind of direction and I really want to get involved in business software. So it was in the course of a five-minute phone conversation that Larry and I decided to that we'd go in a different direction and then I'd start NetSuite. It was called Netger at the time.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Getting that visibility in what's happening in your company. And so as I was running my company, and we were sort of a traditional software company, it was not the advent of software as a service had not happened yet, and that was sort of what NetSuite tapped into. But we were delivering traditional software, but we were running our operation off of like a smorgasbord of applications. So we'd QuickBooks for Finance, and we were using Yahoo stores to distribute our package software. And people, we used packaged sales automation tools and even an automation tool more of a contact management tool. We did our support and email. The data was everywhere. It was not integrated. We had five different customer lists. And it definitely appeared to me that there had to be a better way. So that's what really caused the pivot. And I was lucky enough that Larry Ellison actually...”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I learned about running a company. I'd run a group at Oracle and I'd been a manager, but it's a little different when you have to make payroll, you have to raise money. Have to, you know, you're really on your own out there So, what are the things you hope to do is sort of run your business based on data? You want to know what's happening, what's working, what's not working. I mean, a lot of the things I've talked about today.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Macromedia really had the audience of multimedia and interactive developers, and so they really sort of took over that market. And then, you know, so after about three years of running that company, while we had a very devoted following, it was pretty clear to me that it wasn't going to take off like I hope.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, so I've been involved in this sort of multimedia stuff with the Interactive Television, and I wanted to bring more compelling experiences to people. One of the things that caused the Internet to take off was just that, as legend has it, Mark Andreessen decided he'd put pictures into HTML pages and the browser. For me, it was more interactive content. And the stuff, some of the stuff we take for granted now that you can use in web pages, it was sort of really popularized by Flash. That was the same kind of thing that we were trying to do, just make websites more interactive, easier for people to use. So take some of that power, these really powerful systems, and use the internet and multimedia and animation and interactivity to make it come alive. Now, unfortunately, there was another company that had that idea they were called Future Splash, and they were eventually bought by Macromedia at the time, which is now Adobe, to create Flash.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We could bring powerful capabilities, sort of ordinary end users. That's what I sort of saw is that these powerful applications, business applications, other types of applications could be brought in a really compelling way to end users all over the world with the Internet. So that's what sort of animated me thinking I wanted to do something on my own.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interactive television effort. A lot of times he's right on Target with a lot of his ideas about how things are changing the world. But it was a little early on this one. I remember watching video on demand, as it were, in 2008, 15 years later, and going, oh, yeah, okay, we were only 15 years off. But that notion of everybody being connected and being able to control more of what they see, everything we take for granted now that in my generation, we sort of that when we drove in a car, if we wanted to talk to someone, we had to stop the car, we had to hope that we had change and we had to go to a phone booth and call them and hope that they were at home because that was the only place you could talk to people on the phone. So, you know, just the fact that the world was getting way more connected, that, and for me, what was interesting, because kind of my career had been animated by this idea.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone was so connected, it was possible to get information out to people. A new format as easily as possible. And so for me, what I've been working on, one of the last things I worked on at Oracle was”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A couple reasons it really was 1995, so it was sort of the advent of the internet. It had been only a couple years since most of us had sort of experienced the internet for the first time. So I just saw incredible opportunity there. I mean, it was clear to me that it did sort of change everything. I mean, that's a cliche, but I could tell that there were amazing opportunities out there and I wanted to take advantage of them. And, you know, it was a time that I'd learned a ton from my first job and I thought I could bring it to bear on some solving some interesting problems.”
2019-04-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT