Hear from NetSuite founder and EVP Evan Goldberg on leadership and success Part 2

Oracle Academy Tech Chat

In this episode, Oracle Academy Vice President, Willie McCabe, continues his conversation with Evan Goldberg, NetSuite founder and Oracle Executive Vice President, on 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 disruptor and what he thinks is next for the technology industry. -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript:

00;00;09;03 - 00;00;27;21 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. 00;00;28;02 - 00;01;02;14 Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps prepare our next generation's workforce. I'm your host, Tyra Crockett Peirce And the second part of this special two part episode of the Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast. Oracle Academy Vice President Willie McCabe continues his conversation with Oracle executive vice president and naturally 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. 00;01;03;04 - 00;01;04;15 Please listen. 00;01;04;15 - 00;01;17;26 I'm reflecting back on your career to know other any key skills that that you've developed over time or any experiences that have been instrumental to your success. 00;01;18;17 - 00;01;46;14 Yeah, well, I mean, a skill that I think I've developed and still I'm a work in process on is stepping back. Yeah, stepping back is hard to do a lot of times. And when you're building a company, you're in the weeds a lot. I mean, you're doing a lot of work yourself, I mean, and that's as it should be. 00;01;46;14 - 00;02;13;00 And you can get caught up in a lot of day to day things that are urgent that keep you from doing the things that are important. And always that's something that I try to think about and balance in my daily work is, is what there are urgent things and there are important things, and sometimes there things are both, but in a lot of cases they fall pretty clearly into one category another. 00;02;13;00 - 00;02;39;21 I mean, people say tactical or strategic. Stepping back and seeing, you know, where you spending a lot of your time and where be where you should be spending more of your time thinking about what are we going to wish we did five years from now. That's a that's a really good that's a really good to me technique of stepping back and figuring out what is urgent and what is important. 00;02;41;18 - 00;03;19;19 And so, you know, I've always tried to do that. And it's it's and it comes obviously, it comes with the experience that you can differentiate the two that just comes from your experience in your career. If you're building companies or experience earlier in the company, with failure comes a lot of learning. Yeah. And so yeah, so that's one of the skills that I think finding the right time to do that sometimes, you know, sometimes you just need your nose to the grindstone and you can just focus and turn out, churn out great work. 00;03;19;19 - 00;03;42;04 And that's, that's, that's awesome. And like if you're a programmer or designer or salesperson and stuff, that's what you do. You're trying to when, where is the time that you step back and, and, and to and, and, and look and see is am I, am I working on the right am I working on the right things? 00;03;42;22 - 00;03;54;18 Yeah. That's a lesson for everyone. I think even, you know, managers and individual contributors, you know decide when to step back from and activities and projects. 00;03;54;25 - 00;04;24;29 Right. And a key part of management is helping your employees do that, helping your employees see what is my path, how is what I'm doing, getting me on that path, or what are some other things that I'm not doing that down that path. Or if I veer off, I wish I had done. And I think, you know, obviously one of those key things is stepping back and saying, hmm, am I getting the skills that I want to succeed in my career? 00;04;25;08 - 00;04;50;14 You know, I'm working really, really hard doing the same thing over and over again. And maybe that's okay right now because that's helping build. Yeah, but what am I going to need in five years and how am I getting it? And I'm getting it through what I'm doing right now. And, you know, I think most organizations have very rich opportunities to get those skills that people don't always take advantage of. 00;04;50;14 - 00;05;18;08 So then that's that stepping back and saying, you know what, I'm going to give 2 hours a week or 5 hours a week or whatever towards gaining this new skill that I know I don't need right now, but I think I may need down the road. I mean, for management itself, if that's where you see yourself going and you have that, you know, you feel like you enjoy the people part of the process and you enjoy mentoring and then that's great. 00;05;18;08 - 00;05;48;08 Not everybody should or or or can become a great manager. And that's okay. The world needs people doing lots of things, you know, great strategic thinkers. Maybe that's what they do. They, they do strategic thought, they architect, whatever. They don't necessarily need to manage big teams, but if that's where you want to go, then you should be. While of course, while you're an individual contributor, of course you should be delegating all those skills to be become better at that. 00;05;48;20 - 00;06;13;15 What about taking some time to do a management course? The world would be so much of a better place if managers were trained in, you know, I mean, like parents, you can't generally get trained in in being a parent. You can't generally get trained in advanced other than maybe babysitting and or having a pet. But management, you're inundated with management. 00;06;13;15 - 00;06;37;14 You have a manager, you see people managing. There's lots of opportunity to learn those skills, kind of like having a nephew or a niece, I guess. Yeah, lots of opportunity to gain those skills up front. And the thing is that the is speaking specifically about management, the resources are amazing because people have done it like a billion times. 00;06;38;04 - 00;07;04;09 There's really no excuse for you to make the mistakes that have already been made by the previous billion. So yeah, so I think that's again, I mean stepping back and, and, and seeing that path where you want to go, you got to know, you know, it's a great speech from basketball coach Jimmy Valvano where he says, you know, to get where you want to go, you know you have to know where you've been and where you are now. 00;07;04;09 - 00;07;21;03 And and and then, of course, you need that vision of where you want to be. And if you can keep that sort of in the back of your mind and step back and say, am I on the right path to where I want to be is where I am getting me where I want to be, and I'm full. 00;07;21;03 - 00;07;32;11 Usually it is, sometimes it's not. But there's, you know, you can get yourself accelerate down that path. I taking some time out of testing regular grind. 00;07;32;28 - 00;07;53;02 Yeah and I thank you for your candor on that as well I say refreshing to hear you you know be so open about these discussions as well because, you know, being a leader is is something that people aspire to be. And your openness on on you know, stepping back and when to step back, I think is a lesson for everybody. 00;07;53;03 - 00;08;23;29 As I already said. And our final series of questions before we go to the open, CUNY and lots of questions are coming through from our audience. I'd like to ask your insights and advice for the next generation of talent. Those students that are, you know, tuning in today with some questions relating to them and their faculty members on which skills they should be thinking about delivering to their students as well. 00;08;23;29 - 00;08;32;10 If you were a recent graduate, which skills would you be highlighting to your future employers and and why? 00;08;32;29 - 00;09;01;05 Well, the number one would be openness and willingness and ability to learn because things are changing so fast right now. They always have been. But with AI, it's faster than ever and no one can predict what's going to be. That is, our large language is going to be the center of of all AI for the foreseeable future or is something else going to come along? 00;09;01;05 - 00;09;29;09 I don't think anyone can predict. No one could have predicted really that large language models would move so quickly into the general purpose realm, even the people that built them. So number one is you have to be shown yourself to be adaptable, flexible ability to learn and and and adjust to changing conditions because it's only going to I think this breakneck pace is only going to continue for the foreseeable future. 00;09;29;26 - 00;10;04;13 And so obviously, you know, I think showing that, you know, you have to go, you know, you've got a diverse learning background is really important. And so those are the two, you know, from a technical standpoint, I guess that's that's where I, I focus from a people standpoint. I think more than ever, people see the value of teams and teams that are work really effectively together in our culture. 00;10;04;13 - 00;10;33;07 And that suite that's so critical and so continuing to build those skills and you know how you work in teams and then that you, you know, in some cases that you have the potential to become a leader is important in some roles. I think that that's a juggernaut for companies. If you have employees coming in with the skills, Yes. 00;10;33;10 - 00;10;56;26 That you also can see in them that they're people skills and they're the ability to think outside the box long term are going to be really great assets to a company. So I think, yeah, adaptable ability to think out of the box, ability to work really well with teams are sort of that's the name of the game. 00;10;57;06 - 00;11;25;07 Fabulous. And you know, it's interesting, those are outside of the technical skills that you may learn within your university course, but the really important that you're developing those as you develop as a young person in your in your education career, that you are developing those skills because those are what employers are looking for, is technology skills will see you, you know, do a really good job. 00;11;25;23 - 00;11;32;10 But these are the skills that that then embed you into that organization and allow you to thrive. So yeah. 00;11;32;16 - 00;12;00;06 Yeah. One other thing I doubt about that is that what is amazing to me and I see in our our new Nets leaders coming straight out of college or maybe or to experience, they come in with enormous understanding of what we do. I mean, when I started at Oracle, I was like databases, one of those for I mean, okay, it wasn't that bad. 00;12;00;06 - 00;12;21;18 But seriously, we had a three week training boot camp where we were immersed in what Oracle did, and that's how we learned it. And that's great. We did learn it, but it was that one sort of narrow piece. What I find now is that there's a lot more. But of course students are doing internships over the over the summer, which that there was some of that. 00;12;21;25 - 00;12;52;15 But now it's sort of taken for granted that you'll have done a couple internships and and so so students are coming into the working world with already a ton of knowledge and experience. It's really impressive. Yeah. And yeah and so just having that jumpstart and being able to go into a company already sort of knowing the landscape a little bit and knowing what businesses do and what businesses are all about and is really is, is really important. 00;12;53;04 - 00;13;22;09 The other thing about students coming into Net Suite is that I see is that there's a strong desire to do good in the world. And of course, I think, you know, people that come to NetSuite understand that we're helping businesses and that's great. What really, I think sometimes attracts in the net suite is we also do a lot for not for profits because not for profits or they have they want ROIC. 00;13;23;13 - 00;13;43;25 It's just that there are as measured in a different currencies impact, but they want to do that as efficiently as possible. And that's why so many end up adopting suite. And then one of the things we do is we do a pro-bono program where employees can help get that suite up and running or help them make the most out of that suite within these organizations that are doing great things in the world. 00;13;43;25 - 00;14;09;12 So that's more like our responsibility back to students that we hear people coming into the workforce. That's what they want. And so we build a program not just because of that. I mean, we believe in it at the highest levels of Net Suite and Oracle that it's, you know, that we have a lot to offer in terms of, you know, caring not just caring for each other, caring for the world. 00;14;09;22 - 00;14;30;17 Yes. And so, yeah, I mean, that's sort of tangentially related, but I did want to mention that that's an important attribute as you look at new companies that you may want to evaluate. So it's not necessarily a skill, but if that's something that's important to you. Yeah, something you certainly should be looking for. As you add, you're are evaluating companies. 00;14;31;06 - 00;14;59;21 Fantastic and something very close to the hearts of Oracle Academy because, you know, we are doing very similar research around their academics giving away you that amazing platform and, and, and others as well. So it's so fascinating. And final question before we tackle our audience, CUNY, we have some questions coming in. If there was one piece of advice that you could give yourself, if you are starting out all over again, what would it be? 00;15;00;08 - 00;15;21;09 That's a good question. And I'm not going to say that the road was easy, but I was fortunate in that sort of in some of it, as I said, it was serendipity that I got steered or I maybe I did a little bit of the steering, but also the current might have been steering me a bit in the right direction. 00;15;21;09 - 00;15;56;27 And some of that is luck. But I guess it really comes down to again, learning. I mean, use every opportunity, every success and every failure to learn and however you want to do that. I'm not a big note taker. I'm a big mental note taker. But how every however you memorialize this stuff, what did I learn from that experience and how can I not repeat the bad things and repeat the good from that experience? 00;15;57;21 - 00;16;14;21 And I think I would say and I, like everybody else, have done the wrong thing a few times over an hour. And I would again, I would advise my earlier self to step back and say, is there a pattern here that. 00;16;16;02 - 00;16;53;15 Creates this yourself? Thank you so much for answering our questions. We're going to to to move on to some of the questions that are coming in from our audience. And we are triaging. So if you have any more in the audience, then please, please send them through one. One just came through is that our net suite is the first truly code based business system and is incredibly successful is a something else that sets net suite apart from other business applications that that is making it so successful. 00;16;53;15 - 00;17;12;15 Yeah it's it's that it's everything you need to grow all in one place. Okay so I mean honestly that is our has been our long term competitive advantage because everybody's in the cloud now. We've sort of lost not everybody. It turns out that some of the people that say that they run their cloud in the cloud, they really aren't in the cloud. 00;17;12;15 - 00;17;29;04 I mean, to really be in the cloud, it means everybody's running the same version of software. Everybody gets the new features, everybody gets the upgrades. It doesn't just mean that you're running it in your browser. I feel like I shouldn't have to say that, but it turns out that there's still companies out there that claim that they run the cloud and they really aren't. 00;17;29;04 - 00;17;47;17 They have people's versions. You're not getting the new features necessarily. If you do want to get them, you have to deal with this painful, painful upgrade. And as opposed to what NetSuite does as we just do the upgrade for you, you wake up the next morning, you have tons of good new things, looks like Christmas morning every six months. 00;17;48;01 - 00;18;18;18 And so but beside, you know, but there are certainly many companies out there that do embody that approach. Yeah. So but they are typically focused on one area of your business. They help you with financials, they help you with sales, they help you with your e-commerce site. They help you with h.r. Your people management. And then if you buy all these systems, you end up like your old embed software. 00;18;18;19 - 00;18;49;05 My first company? Yeah. Like, you know, almost as many systems as people as people buy. Good. So that is our and we call that the hairball and because you're then you have to manage all these different connections between all these different systems and the connections are breaking. And this stuff data remains siloed in these systems where people that would like to get access to it get, you know, why a lot of startup companies love nest weed is because they're doing so many. 00;18;49;05 - 00;19;12;09 Everybody's doing so many things. It's kind of this blurring of of responsibilities. And there's also kind of a blurring of business models. We have product companies that also deliver a service. Everybody, I'm sure knows some of these you may be subscribers to services that you also buy some piece of hardware with, you know, so you can exercise, for example, or something like that. 00;19;12;09 - 00;19;40;15 I mean, those are the modern companies of the future. And so they have a blurring of different business models and a blurry blur of functions within their organization. And that's where the hairball just completely falls down. And that's yeah, so that that's what sets us apart. And in always and this is an important, I think principle is that you always need to keep what is your secret sauce, What makes you different? 00;19;40;15 - 00;19;59;27 Because there's a lot of things you're going to do when you have a product or a service that are sort of meta features, just because the customers are asking, do you do a do you do it? You do see and you have to check some of those off, there's no doubt. But you got to be careful that you're not spending all your time doing those checkbox features and neglecting what is your core competitive advantage. 00;19;59;27 - 00;20;20;04 And this is advice actually, that Larry Ellison gave me many years ago, that in that secret sauce, you must stay ahead at the essentially at the expense of everything else. It's sort of like the motley we call it the musts. You might do a few less checkbox features to make sure you maintain your lead in what is truly a competitive advantage. 00;20;20;13 - 00;20;39;15 And that's what we've done. We call it Sweetness Ma, which is always seeing whenever we're doing anything on how can we take advantage of the fact that all the data is the one place that all are used or that everybody in the company is using the system to make this feature or capability better than anybody else and deliver. 00;20;39;25 - 00;20;52;16 And so keeping that core sort of North Star of what you're all about in mind at all times and everything you do and making sure you don't get away from it and that you're nourishing it at all times, as I think is a key actually, to success. 00;20;52;28 - 00;21;16;18 Fabulous. I love that sweetness. Like some questions coming in. This one's really like something you said earlier around the introduction of AI and Openai. Do you think someone with who doesn't have great skills in programing and computing can be a successful leader in AI technology based industry? 00;21;16;18 - 00;21;41;17 The good news is that A.I. is going to be writing all the codes. You know what really need. I mean, fundamentally, I mean, I think programmers, highly skilled architects and programmers are going to be required for a very long time. But AI is going to give the ability for people without those necessarily those skills to actually do programing and actually build things. 00;21;41;28 - 00;22;07;24 So I think the ability to build is going to be democratized by A.I., So that's great. And then if you think about being a leader of a technology company, it runs the gamut what the skill sets that people have. I someone else gave me some advice that I think is really sound. As a leader, you kind of want to be you want to you want to be a T, That's what you want to be. 00;22;08;06 - 00;22;36;13 You want to be able to go deep in a particular area that's important to your organization so you know, and that you can add a lot of value with the skills that you've developed over many years, whatever they are, whether those are sales skills, marketing skills, technology skills. And then you need to surround yourself with people that can go deep in the other areas and know much more than you about it. 00;22;36;13 - 00;23;03;25 And you need to be humble enough to know that those people do know a lot more about it than you. But you you want to be able to learn from them. You want to be able to, as you and that's that that top of the T and not an organization that you sort of build around you. So at the end of the day, I don't think it matters whether your skills are you have super strong people skills and maybe you've done great sales in the past. 00;23;03;25 - 00;23;33;27 You have super technology skills. You can be a very effective leader of an organization and that suite has had a variety of different leaders of different backgrounds, some with one of our leaders over the years had more of a marketing background. That was Zac Nelson, who was our CEO for many years. One of our leaders, Jim Mcgeever, who was our leader when we first came back into Oracle, He came from the accounting background but had very great, developed great business skills. 00;23;34;07 - 00;23;54;10 And by the way, he's the one who told me about this together. And then I, as the leader of that suite, you know, early on as the CEO, chairman of the board and now leader of the next, we give you I come from a technical programing background, but I surrounded myself with people that have skills that I don't. 00;23;54;17 - 00;24;09;01 And I learned from them. And I can add value in a lot of different parts of this. I believe I can add value in a lot of different parts of the business now, but still understanding that when push comes to shove in some of these areas, my colleagues that I work with know more about it than I do. 00;24;09;21 - 00;24;12;25 So the key is to build that strong team around your skill set. 00;24;14;14 - 00;24;33;07 Nothing was built by one person. I mean, maybe the light bulb Thomas Edison had, you know, for assistance. But that's not how things work these days. It's just too everything is too complex for one person to be able to do it all. 00;24;33;18 - 00;24;50;20 We have two more questions for you, Evan, and then we will close for today. And one of them, I think is fabulous. How can students and young professionals actively engage with leaders of the cloud community in order to build a network of mentors and peers? 00;24;50;24 - 00;25;15;11 That's a great question. You know, again, I was very lucky to land in Oracle when it was still a relatively small company and develop a relationship with Larry Ellison. If you can do that, I highly recommend it. But it's not it doesn't come along every day. And so otherwise, you know, you need to be proactive. You need to come into the office. 00;25;15;19 - 00;25;47;18 I mean, you need to put yourself in a position where you're going to encounter people that may have more experience than you in the area that you want to go and can become mentors and you can learn from them. So just get out there and, you know, that's what happens next week. People that go to the come into the office and that go to the various we do lots of options for employers that those are the ones that get exposure to to the leaders of our organization. 00;25;47;29 - 00;25;55;10 So so put yourself out there, get yourself to conferences and and and any meetups and that you can get to. 00;25;55;25 - 00;26;25;27 Absolutely. And if you have a friend of a friend that you know is doing something that is sort of out of the shape of what you'd like to do someday, or you, you know, take advantage of that connection to learn and I mean, I doubt it is. Yes, I had, Larry, but there's been many other mentors that I've learned from over the years by making a connection with them and and and observing them and asking them questions. 00;26;26;11 - 00;26;43;15 Final question, and this is a great question as well from all the Crawshaw it's net sweet has gone through. Was there one defining moment that contributed to the success the most, and could this be applied to other businesses today? 00;26;44;04 - 00;27;16;05 Well, I have a couple answers for that. That one of them maybe would not was not necessarily a pivotal moment in our history, but it was a really important one. And maybe, you know, it'd be interesting to try to analogize this. That's a word for other industries besides technology. But I think there is I think this is a crossroads that a lot of companies come to where you have some big customers and they are driving your revenue and you're looking for more big customers. 00;27;16;23 - 00;27;39;28 And but you can't big customers like I need feature X and you look at feature X are like, that's not really what we're all about. I mean you could imagine and, and we got a lot of those and you look at our listed our roadmap and it's be like, well this big customer wants this feature and this big customer C wants this feature. 00;27;39;28 - 00;28;06;14 D And I looked at it and that was a moment to step back and say, This ain't working. I mean, these features are not what we should be building, leading to really satisfy the bulk of our customers, to be able to present something that will garner the attention of lots and lots of companies. They're sort of niche features that this company happens a lot, and yet we want that customer to be happy. 00;28;06;22 - 00;28;30;25 They can become a great reference. We can sell them more. They're important to our revenue. So what we did is we developed a platform whereby we could much more easily have them or partners build these capabilities that they wanted and keep our eyes focused on the things that really were going to have the most value for all of our customers. 00;28;30;25 - 00;29;11;19 And when we did that, when we developed the net suite, what's called the Suite cloud platform, that was transformational because then we were really able to move much more quickly towards our long term goal of, of of building a system for all companies that makes it really easy for them to manage their business as they grow. So I think that's there's a lot of moments like that in every industry, not just technology, where you have to balance the needs of some of your big stakeholders with what you really think you need to do to get to your North Star. 00;29;12;00 - 00;29;35;27 And those are those moments where if you step back, maybe you'll make a better decision. That's why they have that expression missing the forest for the trees. Maybe you'll make a better decision and you'll look back in five years or ten years and say that was a hard choice. But it was critical in getting me to where I am today. 00;29;36;07 - 00;30;04;28 Thank you. And your scores are. Thank you even for your openness. I'm sure you've inspired a lot of the future leaders of tomorrow. Today, and for sharing your thoughts on leadership. Net Sweet Cloud Skills. Students need to be successful as they enter our talent pipeline. Thank you to our audience for your questions and attendance today, and I sincerely hope you enjoyed the chat and learn as much as I have. 00;30;05;08 - 00;30;24;11 It's been a fabulous experience. To learn more about next week, please visit next week dot com. To learn more about Oracle Academy and our resources, visit Academy. Oracle and thank you. Have a great rest of day. I hope to see you all again soon. Thanksgiving. 00;30;24;25 - 00;30;25;11 Thank you. 00;30;25;25 - 00;30;34;09 That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.