Lessons from a Founder: Conversations with Oracle-NetSuite’s Evan Goldberg

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There's enormous opportunity. I'm always been a fan of what Bill Gates says that you, you know, always overestimate what you can do in a year and underestimate what you can do in 10 years. And I feel that we're, you know, we're sort of in that realm right now where people are expecting these technologies to solve all problems in the next year, but may not even have really an understanding yet. None of us do about what might be possible in 10 years.

This is the Launch youh Business podcast because we know starting a business is challenging, but it doesn't have to be confusing. Each week we'll give you the tactical advice and the necessary tools to scale your business without feeling burnt out. I'm Terry Rice, business development consultant and staff writer here at Entrepreneur Magazine. Let's dive in. This is going to sound a bit weird, but I don't like visiting Las Vegas. I don't drink, I don't gamble, and my partying days are thankfully well behind me. But I was there recently and I was surprised by how well it went. First of all, my old college roommate John Galvin was visiting at the same time, so I got a chance to catch up with him. And oddly enough, he actually lives in New York City too. But we don't see each other nearly as often as we should. Beyond that, I was there to attend Suite World Oracle, NetSuite's largest gathering of the NetSuite community. And in case you're not familiar, Oracle, NetSuite is a cloud based business management software suite that that helps organizations manage their financials, operations and customer relationships. So it's a turnkey solution for many of your business needs. And today's guest, Evan Goldberg, co founded NetSuite more than 25 years ago and it was the first cloud computing company which ushered in a new era of cloud computing. So Evan and his team are true trailblazers and he continues to be responsible for NetSuite's product strategy and development since its 2016 acquisition by Oracle. He's joining us on today's show. And here's what really stood out to me about Evan. He leads a company that brings in billions of dollars per year, but can still provide actual insights for other entrepreneurs like you and I who aren't quite at the billion dollar mark yet. So here's what we're going to cover during today's show. You'll learn how you can grow a company using a relatively small team, why using AI to grow is an automatic competitive advantage, and how you can learn from failure and bounce back even stronger. Evan, how's it going today?

It's terrific. Thanks a lot, Terry.

I'm glad to chat with you today because I was at Sweetworld in Las Vegas recently, your annual event, and I was just blown away not only by what Oracle is doing, Oracle, netsuite is doing, but what your customers are doing as well. And it was great getting a chance to actually sample some of the products that your customers use while I was there. And I'm already a fan of quite a few of them, so. So thank you for that experience.

We love highlighting our customers. That's why we exist. And their entrepreneurial journeys are always incredibly inspiring.

I agree. That's why we're chatting with you today to officially get started. Do you mind introducing yourself, please?

Yeah. My name is Evan Goldberg. I'm the founder and EVP of Oracle netsuite.

Awesome. So one thing I want to talk about, because I think it's Central to how NetSuite became so successful, is the first mover advantage of. And on my end these days, I'm really focusing on using AI and automation to grow my, my brands that I help because I feel like there's still an opportunity to have that first mover advantage in that space. But do you mind just explaining your operational definition of the first mover advantage and how you might have benefited from that early in your career?

Well, in some sense, nobody's really a first mover because everything builds off of the successes of the past. But what you can do is take whatever industry you're in, take your technology or your processes or whatever you're thinking would provide value to customers in a new direction, and sometimes in a radically new direction. And if you can do that and you can really execute on a vision that is disruptive to the status quo, that's where obviously some amazing companies begin.

And I think this is my opinion, but I think starting a company now is much easier than it used to be. And what I'm curious to get your opinion on is would you say that modern entrepreneurs have an advantage? And if so, why?

Yeah, I think there's a lot of advantages now. One being that you can, as you're building your company, you can recruit from all over the world. You can build a team much more easily than when you were sort of geographically limited. You can get the resources to run your company more easily. Now, cloud services are so easy to access. If you are delivering, for example, an Internet service, you can use a cloud computing provider to get that service up and running and scalable almost immediately, those kinds of things. In netsuite, we had to do all that, all that from scratch. You obviously have access to the Internet, which gives you enormous resources on which to do research and to see how others companies may be in your same space or operating. So all these things together provide a great platform if you have a great idea to operationalize it very quickly.

Yeah, I agree. And that's where I was going with it too, because the, the first job I had at a startup, I was doing digital marketing, but there was someone else who did trade show marketing, there was someone else who did coding, someone else who did design, someone else who did email marketing, so on, so forth nowadays. And I sound old even saying that one person can do all that stuff. So for everyone listening, the barrier has never been lower for you to enter entrepreneurship. And I will say this, one thing I appreciated about those times is having so many other coworkers. I was more connected with them because I had to talk to this person about their email, this person about trade shows, so and so forth. And that built a culture of collaboration. So what I'm wondering on your end is with, with Oracle being so huge now, right, and starting out with just you, how do you maintain that culture as you're scaling? And how could our audience do the same thing?

No, it, it's, it's a big challenge. And every time you make that big leap of growth, you're going, your culture is at risk. When you go from, you know, five people to 50 and then 50 to 500, you know, those kinds of leaps are definitely threats to a culture that you've built. And so you have to find better ways to cement it. I'd say it can't just be, it can't be an afterthought. It has to be very intentional. I know that word is used a lot, but that's really, I think, very appropriate here. You have to take action and have a plan. And of course, and a lot of it starts with hiring. Don't hire outside your cult. You know what I mean by that? Don't hire in a way that's going to be in opposition to your company culture. Make sure that the people that you bring into the organization fit and appreciate what's great about your company and will help enhance that and bring new ideas. And we'll break some glass, but not too much glass, I guess I'd say, because the culture is precious. And so we've worked really hard at that. We have something in our organization called Together at Netsuite, which is really all about making netsuite feel small again. And a lot of it has to do with making sure everybody's aware of the history of the company, that we also do lots and lots of communication that people get to hear what brought us to where we are today and what some of the things that we felt that we did in the early days that we can continue to do now to preserve that sense of possibility and that sense of togetherness that sort of makes us who we are.

I was going to ask you what you're doing to maintain the culture, but you just answered that, and I feel like part of it is making it clear to new employees, like, hey, you're part of this culture. You're part of the evolution of the culture, and that's what you're here for. There are certain guardrails that you have to stay between because we want to maintain this, but we're not looking for people to be copycats for what we've done before. We want you to help us move forward.

Absolutely. And I think some of the grassroots things that you'll see from people that are sort of steeped in the culture, they'll come up with new and exciting ways to preserve and new kinds of ways of engaging the new hybrid work culture definitely provides some challenges to preserving your culture when many of your employees may be completely remote. So what can you do? What kind of innovative, outside the box things can you do to make sure that those employees really engage and appreciate, you know, what's great about your company and help enhance and make it even better in the future?

Yeah, and I think that's to your point. It's. It's a different ball game with remote work. And I think that's why it's even more important to have a culture established initially. Because if you're scrambling to do it as people are, you know, onboarding in the remote, it's going to be a lot more challenging. But let's talk more about challenges, because I think you're the person that our audience needs to hear from. In regards to my next question, for. For any entrepreneur that's currently struggling to grow their business, what's the first thing they should do? Like, what are a few things they should look at to say, look, if I just analyze and optimize this, things will go better. But right now, they have no idea where to start. So what would you advise?

Well, I certainly think the first thing is just to have a very, very crisp plan. And to me, a plan begins with sort of three questions. The first being, who is my audience? Exactly? Really, who's the core? What is the Persona of the person that I am developing a product and service for, and what are the problems I'm trying to solve for them? And then how, you know, the next question is how am I going to solve those problems and communicate that I have a solution for them? And then what is the first step we want them to take? What is that critical first step, whether it be to try it or to attend a webinar, whatever are those things that are going to, you know, that you see and you have to obviously look at the data to figure out what those first actions are. What do we want that audience that has that problem for which we have a solution? What is the best way to engage them quickly and effectively and bring them into the fold? So I think that, you know, that getting that crispness that goes from vision to plan is really something that every entrepreneur needs to think long and hard about.

Yeah, and it's funny because that sounds like almost fundamental advice, but so many people just don't take it that if you can master those fundamentals, you'll be in a good spot to keep on iterating and improving. And along those lines, I want to talk about the future of Oracle. Let's Fast forward another five, 10 years. How do you want Oracle to be perceived by your general audience?

Well, what we're in the business of doing is providing tools for entrepreneurs and fast growing companies to get the best information they can, the best insights about their business and actually be able to act on them, to be able to control what's happening in their business. But, you know, enhance everybody's productivity, get further, faster towards your, towards your goal, Let people collaborate better, make sure you can remain agile. You know, these are the things that we think about and I think that certainly we're just going to keep innovating and learning from our customers about how we can do that better. But there's also new technologies that come along and the advances in AI. I mean, we've been looking at AI for several, many years because we know that that can provide great insights and great assistance to our customers. But now there seems to be a new leap of new ways that AI can do that. So I think if you look over the next five years, we're going to be working really hard to figure out the practical applications for an entrepreneur of these new technologies that again, really help them with the core of what they have to do in building their business and getting faster towards their North Star, whatever that is.

It's interesting because you mentioned having a vision and I can tell that right now you're taking steps today to live in the vision that you want to have in five to 10 years. And I think that's a good tip for everyone. But also just Getting very focused about the practical uses of AI, I think is super important because there's so many silly use cases you can spend your time on. It's like, wow, here's this filter that makes your nose look like a bunny. It's like, really? Do you really need to do that or do you want to sit down and think about the problem that you're solving with your business and how you can do that more effectively?

Absolutely. I mean, I think AI has an enormous. I mean, because it's a great pattern recognizer and so the ability to surface patterns in your business that you might not see just looking at the basic data that you're obviously looking at day to day, but getting behind the data, seeing the, seeing, seeing the patterns and explaining those patterns and predicting what might happen in the future in various aspects of your business, and then helping suggest courses of action that either, you know, other businesses have taken or that you have taken in the past that have been effective in a similar situation. Again, doing that pattern matching and seeing how what's happening in your business now may be the same or maybe different than what's happened in the past. This is something that we're really working hard on seeing whether these new AI tools, as well as more traditional AI tools can help with.

I mean, just that alone is so beneficial because I do a cleanse every year where I look at my business. I think, okay, what's the 20 that's getting me to 80 and what do I have to remove in order to double down on the 20 and keep on growing that? And I never thought of doing this, but just using a tool like AI, even ChatGPT could help me with that.

Right. I mean, like, if you look at companies that have lots of products and you can find relatively small companies that quickly have a lot of products, obviously if they're a distributor or, you know, various retailer, they could have lots of products. So to be able to get a handle on all your products by just trying to, you know, look at them, you know, just in a list or whatever, you're not going to be able to maybe unearth those patterns of the best. The products that are the hottest, that are providing the most profitability, that look like they, you know, could be great upsells to existing customers based on the patterns that we see. Those are the kinds of things that I think AI has been able to do in the past will do better and will also be better at explaining it. And obviously the new large language model technology will hopefully help these systems like NetSuite be better at explaining those patterns. And you don't have to be a data scientist to understand what it's seeing.

It's funny, I'm definitely not a data scientist, but as you were talking, it gave me an idea. So we can, yes, use AI to find the best selling products, best margins and all that stuff, but also say, well, if our audience wants this, what are three more similar products we should also offer? Right. So using the tool for product development as well would be another option there.

Yeah. So there's enormous opportunity. I've always been a fan of what Bill Gates says, that you always overestimate what you can do in a year and underestimate what you can do in 10 years. And I feel that we're sort of in that realm right now where people are expecting these technologies to solve all problems in the next year, but may not even have really an understanding yet, none of us do about what might be possible in 10 years.

So we're talking about 10 years in the future. But let's go in the past. And this is one of my favorite questions to ask people. What is one lesson about entrepreneurship that you, you wish you learned sooner? And I know we often say there's no regrets, but let's pretend I don't say there's a regret, but a lesson you wish you learned sooner.

You can build a company over 25 years without having. I wouldn't say they're regrets because everything you know, you learn, if you're learning from your failures, then you don't need to regret them because you'll have opportunities in the future to get benefit from, from that learning. So I think, you know, we, one of the biggest lessons we learned is how important it is to look at your existing customers and, and what their experience is and how you can serve them better and how you can certainly sell more to them, which starts with serving them better. And you know, there's always the allure of the new deal, the new customer, and those, of course, that helps grow your business. But I think sometimes people underestimate how much growth you can get by mining your existing customer base and really paying attention to them. So that's a lesson we learned. I certainly was one of those entrepreneurs that's like land grab, let's get as many customers as we can. And thinking about, you know, when you close a deal, it's like, okay, you know, who's next? What have you done for me lately? That sort of thing. So I think that's an important discipline is to that balance between expanding your customer base and nurturing your existing customers.

Yeah. I think strategic patience for the future, as well as curiosity about your current customers is one of the best ways to grow. So sort of lying there, and I know you're a busy man, so I don't want to take up too much of your time, but are there any parting thoughts or anything else you'd like to share before we part ways here?

Well, I mean, I go back to where we started, you know, where we talked at Sweetworld, and the enormous variety of entrepreneurs that are doing incredible things. And we feel like at Netsuite, you know, we're just giving them a leg up. But ultimately, the success really rides with them and their team, and it's super inspiring. And now in this world where we have new types of technology that really could impact practically every type of business, I mean, this is not just about software companies or Internet services. I mean, really, everybody can look at these new technologies and figure out how can they achieve their goals faster? And that's just a super exciting time for innovation. I think we're going to see some incredible products and services from our customers and from all of these. All entrepreneurs, all of your listeners that are entrepreneurs over the next few years.

Yeah. And I said that was gonna be the last thing. But one thing I realized when I was at Sweet world is how NetSuite Oracle is helping people avoid mistakes that they made in the past. And I'll explain this. I was talking to the CMO of Dude Wipes, and at a previous company, he said, look, we overhied on our team. We were so bogged down by payroll, we couldn't grow as quickly. So when he finally got a job at Dude Wipes, he's like. The first thing I did was say, look, we got to put in Oracle netsuite. That's gonna save us a lot of time and money. So I think sometimes when you've been burned in the past, you realize, look, there's got to be a better way.

That's just learning, Learning from your mistakes, learning from the past. And really, it is no regrets. That was part of my journey to where I am today. And I think about that when I look back on my entrepreneurial history, and I think that's a healthy way to not drive yourself crazy.

Yeah, agreed. So, Evan, thank you for this. Thank you for everything you've done. Thanks for the information you passed along to our audience as well. But it's been great chatting with you, and I appreciate it.

Thanks so much, Terry, for having me. Me.

And that's our show for today. You can learn more about Oracle NetSuite by visiting netsuite.com and also give Evan a follow on LinkedIn, where he constantly shares actionable advice. Thanks again for listening, and I'll catch up with you next time. Apply what you've learned on today's show. You'll find the show notes and more resources at. Terryrice Co. Podcast Again, that's Terryrice Co Podcast, and the best way to support this podcast is by subscribing, telling a friend, and leaving a review. Also, you can get more tips by following me on Instagram terryrice, or follow me on LinkedIn. This episode was produced by Josh Wilcox of Brooklyn Podcasting Studio and edited by Dan Lardy. Special thanks to my wife, Dominique, for keeping our kids relatively quiet as I record it. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you next time.