[00:00:00] Thanks for doing this. Um, so I guess, um, one of the things I heard you say that I thought was interesting, uh, and maybe is relevant to [00:01:00] people at this moment, um, was, uh, when you were struggling in some ways, that's when you actually making, you can make incredible improvements to your company. Uh, and I think you lived through two major crises.
Logan: Is that right? Um, what, What did you learn about managing through crisis that, uh, kind of gives you this power to make
Evan: Yeah, well, the obvious thing is when the orders are coming in over the transom and you're just basically order taking, there's not a lot of, uh, time or desire for introspection. Um, when they slow down and when your customers themselves are having significant issues because of, um, you know, economic headwinds and the like, um, which then ends up sort of transferring to you.
Um, that's the time where you start looking at things that you could safely ignore in the past. You know, the, that phrase that's been massively overused, never let a crisis go to waste. If you, um, are smart about it. You're going to make some changes that are going [00:02:00] to endure and you'll be able to look back.
And I look back on several of the things we did during both of those crises, um, that endured and really became, um, important components of our success going forward.
Logan: Is there a specific one that, that stands out?
Evan: mean, the most obvious one is that I think that's true. And we see this.
Evan: You know, I get, I'm fortunate enough, um, with NetSuite to get to see a lot of companies in various times of their journey from, you know, from startup to, you know, past going public and, and sometimes to get acquired.
And um, what I've seen in the maturation process of so many companies is that they come to the realization that there's so much more they can do with their existing customers. Um, the allure of the new customer and growing your customer base and. Keeping track of that customer count. And look, we love to do it at NetSuite too.
We have 40, 000, uh, companies now, um, that can be something that you chase to the detriment [00:03:00] of how much, you know, everything you can get from your existing customers, not only to, um, get more revenue from them, but to learn from them. And what we learned, and this was especially during the financial crisis of, you know, 08, 09, um.
Was that, you know, our customers wanted to get more out of NetSuite to just help them be more successful. Now, of course we started NetSuite to help companies be more successful, but we always thought of it like, Oh, they're going to be fast growing startups like us. And really all they need to do is make sure that they can take all those orders and that they can, you know, find out who their best sales reps are, et cetera.
Not so much. You know what our customers want to figure out how they can run more efficiently and where they can cut. I mean, And without necessarily, you know, ultimately impacting what little growth they have. So we had a lot of customers in crisis and we partnered with them and learned the power of really partnering with our existing customers.
We started an entire organization which exists to this day. very day called our account management organization, which [00:04:00] is all about, you know, really the care and feeding of our existing customers. It sounds obvious, but for fast growing startups, I think it's something that it's not a muscle that sort of comes, uh, that comes naturally.
And it's something that you have to build over time. And that was probably the biggest lesson and improvement that we made to NetSuite in, in one of those
Logan: And, and so for people that don't know, so NetSuite was founded what year?
Evan: 1998,
Logan: 1998. So you, you, you were applied math out of Harvard and then went directly to work for Oracle. You were there for how long?
Evan: I was there for eight years and, um, That was, you know, that turned, you know, it was 1995, um, sort of the dawn of the internet. And I, you know, I'd always wanted to do my own software company and build my own software company. So that's when I made the leap, um, started a company, you know, to, um, kind of capitalize on the explosion of internet sites and how people wanted to make them more interactive.
And, uh, the first company didn't work out. Um, The legacy of that company is [00:05:00] we were a competitor to flash, um, which some of you may remember, uh, you know, in the audience, some of them maybe weren't born yet, um, but it was a way to make sites more interactive. They out competed us, um, and we realized that, uh, you know, we weren't going to achieve that wild success we had hoped for, but out of the ashes of that, I learned a ton about running a company and that was sort of the, um, the raw materials with which we built
Logan: And so then the, the insight for what was NetLedger was Larry Ellison's, uh, in the original days, or was it
Evan: was a combination because in, in running that company, which Larry did, um, invest in, um, which was great, uh, though he wasn't particularly interested in site interactivity tools. He used to call it my gr the graphic stuff, how Evan, how's your graphic stuff going? But in running that company, you know, it was my first, obviously my first stint as CEO.
And really, you know, I mean, I had just been another, you know, kind of employee at Oracle. And all of a sudden I was thrown into the pressure cooker world of, [00:06:00] uh, you're responsible for everything. And, you know, what I learned among other things was that the tools available to entrepreneurs were woefully lacking.
And we had QuickBooks and we had Yahoo stores for people that remember that, that we were selling because we were selling sort of a shrink wrapped software product on a CD, uh, bringing up really old, the old terms here. And, um, But I, you know, and, and I could never figure out who our real customers were.
I could, you know, I didn't have access to the data half the time because it was on someone's computer that I didn't have access to. And I was like, there has to be a better way.
Evan: So when Larry called me one day and said, how's your graphics stuff going? I said, I think I want to do a pivot into business software and specifically software to help companies like mine, um, you know, grow and, and, There was really a mind meld because Larry was like, well, I was just thinking about this.
If I, you know, want, was going to start a company right now, I do something like accounting for small businesses. Um, but it has to run on the web. And that was his really key insight is to make it run on the [00:07:00] web. My answer to him was, well, okay. Yeah. Accounting, you know, I know That's useful, but I'm really interested in sales and the overall picture of my business.
And he said, Oh yeah, well, we'll do accounting first cause it's the thing that's sort of the basis of all your products and your sales and your people, but then we'll expand into other things. So it really was that that sweet idea of doing more than accounting that sort of came from my desire to have sort of a comprehensive system, one place that I could go to get all the information about my business.
Cause that's what I was so frustrated by in, um, in my first company.
Logan: And so, so NetSuite, uh, when, when did Salesforce get going around?
Evan: About three months later.
Logan: Three months later. Okay.
Evan: No, Mark and I were very close. Uh, Mark actually performed my wedding ceremony, um, and, uh, yeah, he, uh, came a couple, uh, weeks later now, cause I was really interested in doing
Logan: that's what I was going to say. You wanted to do
Evan: and Mark, Mark knew that and he came to me somewhat sheepishly and said, yeah, I'm going to do one of these internet startups too.
And it's going to be, you know, sales. And he said, you know, [00:08:00] sales for, you know, small companies, you know, sort of like Siebel, which was the. Um, sort of the de facto choice, at least for bigger companies at the time, and my response was great. I think that will be very successful.
Logan: Yeah. I like that idea so much. Um, and so did you pick like, as you imagine what. become, were you picking some point in inevitability that you sort of felt that everyone will be running their systems like this at some point in the future, or do you
Evan: mean, I will give Larry 100 percent credit on being the visionary on running software sort of in the cloud. It wasn't called that back then. You know, I was very focused on what's it's going to do for the entrepreneur. Let's get everything all in one place. He said, these companies, they're small companies.
They don't want to have to run software databases, that sort of thing, which I thought showed some decent self awareness that they didn't want to run databases. Um, that being his, you know, his business. And, um, I sort of went along with that. [00:09:00] And Larry was so excited about it. I mean, he really, he said to me probably a few weeks after we started, Oh yeah, this sort of internet model running software.
Well, first we had mainframe computers and then we had client server and this model, this is what we're going to do for the next thousand years. I don't know. I don't know. What's going to happen after that, definitely for the next thousand. So he was quite excited about it. He told his friend, Steve jobs about how excited he was.
And I happened to see Steve at one of Larry's parties and he said, Oh, Larry's super excited about this accounting in a browser thing, but does anyone want to do accounting in a browser? And I was sort of like, um, he seems to think so. I'm not sure. I guess we'll see. And, uh, fortunately it was just a couple of weeks later that we actually were able to load our financial information from our QuickBooks file into NetLedger because we got it working.
And so we loaded it in and I was at home. In my browser looking at, you know, [00:10:00] sort of all the key information about my business. We didn't have any sales yet. So really the key information was like, what are we paying our employees and how much are, how much is our rent? Um, but all in one place, everything I needed to know in a browser at my house, not on some person's computer at the office and they might be using it, you know, um, to play doom.
Um, and so, uh, yeah, I was like, wow. Yeah. This is going to work.
Logan: When I've heard you tell like elements of the early days before, it seems like we go from there to IPO to M& A. That seems like a pretty linear path.
Evan: Oh yeah. We were an overnight success in eight years.
Logan: eight year overnight success. But, but in those early days, like, who was it? You said, I don't know if anyone, or you told, uh, Steve Jobs, like, we'll see if anyone wants to do it.
Larry seems to think so. Did, was there resonance in the early days once you got it up
Evan: Yes. And you know what it was is that there were a lot of companies that were struggling. I mean, I even saw it in our local PTA, our local PTA, [00:11:00] because people want, you know, there wasn't really an office for it. My wife was the president of the PTA. One person dealt with the incoming donations. And one person dealt with the expenses to do, you know, events, et cetera.
And they were literally in two different QuickBooks files because people wanted to work on it with their own computers. So there were definitely, you know, this sort of, um, silent mass of people that were struggling with the fact that they had to use it in one place on one computer and they had distributed operations, even if they were a tiny company, because net.
I mean, NetLedger was originally for very small companies. It was 4. 95 a month. Later in the company's history, I said, you know, our vision was 5 million companies. Um, paying us, you know, 5, you know, 50 a year, and now it's more like 50 companies paying us 5 million a year. Not, that wasn't exactly true, but we definitely moved up market.
And what was that? Was that just
Logan: the customer demand? These people grow, grew with you and started to ask for different
Evan: Well, I mean, we just didn't, you know, have the features yet. You know, you have to [00:12:00] build in it. And one of the things You know, we've done over 26 years is build an enormous feature set for all different kinds of business.
And very, very deep in terms of what they need to do as they grow. They need more and more sort of systematic, you know, software and, and, and a systematic systems for lack of a better word, um, as they grow. And so we've built so much of that, but at the time we had not built very much of it. It was, you know, your basic, you know, basic financials, you know, you could run an income statement, you know, do a basic balance sheet.
So. It was for small companies that, that's all they needed. Um, but we found out that there were a decent number of them that loved the sort of anytime, anywhere access. And that those were our initial, um, fans. And they were big fans. They came, they came running. It was really amazing.
Logan: What was the, uh, the thought process? You sort of talked about like this suite vision and ultimately what was net ledger became net suite, uh, as, uh, as the name would apply. And so it no longer was, um, just a general ledger product. Um, did you have all the [00:13:00] aspects of what you were going to build? And at what point did you start thinking about integrating additional products into
Evan: Yeah. Well, right in that first five minute phone conversation that I described earlier, Larry, you know, we agreed we needed front office software in addition to back office and Larry said, and we're going to need a web store because everybody sells on the web. And, and so we did have a map at really at the beginning that we would start with accounting, then we would add CRM.
And also, um, at the same time, which is related to CRM, add a way to sell online. So those were sort of our next two components. And we moved to build those rapidly. And within a couple of years, we did really have a suite. And, and, um, that's why it was my second sort of epiphany when I saw all that information.
And by now NetSuite was selling and we were using NetSuite. So I, we really needed, um, those capabilities for ourselves. And, um, And, uh, we used to talk about where a company designed by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. And, um, when I saw a dashboard that had my, um, that had my, uh, information, everything I needed to know about where my [00:14:00] sales were coming from, my opportunities, my pipeline, in addition to how many sales we'd actually made and, you know, how those payments were coming in, where people actually paying for the things that they agreed to pay for.
When I could get that all in one place in one dashboard, we called it the executive dashboard. That was really the sort of the culmination of my vision. And then from there it was really just filling it out over the next, you know, 20 odd years.
Logan: Yeah, a rounding error of time. Um, and so, so, so through that period of time, though, in the, um, when you were actually going through the dot com stretch, and I assume a lot of your customers went bankrupt during that period of
Evan: mean, we, we initially, we actually had a great variety of customers, so it wasn't just software companies. I mean, that was a core for us always has been because that's what we were, you know, internet, you know, uh, web based software companies. So we definitely attracted a lot of those and always have. And that's, you know, they, You know, the fact that some such high percentage of companies that go public are on NetSuite or because that [00:15:00] was such a core, um, constituency for us.
But we really attracted all different kinds of companies. I mean, I mean, I remember one of the earliest companies was a combination. Um, they did tech consulting and lima limousine. Um, you know, they, they did limos. I mean, like they were, they were like transportation plus. Yeah, exactly.
Logan: the concentric circles
Evan: I mean, and they were like, yeah.
And I have, you know, I, and I don't even have an office. You know, I just go to people's places and I have my drivers. And so I need to be able to use this, you know, kind of anywhere on my laptop. And, um, and if I, you know, in an internet cafe or whatever. So we had some pretty interesting companies that ran sort of the gamut.
Logan: And were most of these people finding you inbound or where?
Evan: I'm, um, Scott cook of Intuit once said, you guys get more PR per customer than I've ever seen. And you know, one of the reasons was, is because every time we talked to any journalist, um, the first and last words out of our [00:16:00] mouth were Larry and Ellison.
Logan: Yeah. And,
Evan: So that we drove, I mean, PR was such an amazingly effective, uh, vehicle for us.
And I still, you know, it's, it's harder now. I mean, it's such a, um, it's explosion of, of media and, and, and all the. Platforms and channels, but I still think that PR, if you can do it right and not, you know, and you can find an angle that interests people is such an amazing way for startups to spend very little and get a lot of eyeballs.
And that really drove a lot of those early customers.
Logan: And your role within the business in the early days, uh, evolves CEO to CTO to CEO to chair,
Evan: Chair and CTO.
Logan: Um, was that, were you just egoless about what responsibility you had and whatever made the most sense at the opportunity?
Evan: I mean, I, you know, and I encourage everybody to be very introspective and, and, um, and clear eyed about, you know, where your strengths are [00:17:00] and where your weaknesses are and where you need to supplement them. And I think the best leaders know that and they're willing to bring in people that are better than them in certain ways and listen to them and let them, you know, sort of, you know, hand them the ball and let them run with it.
So. Um, you know, I'm, I, my role has changed. I think I've developed, I've built skills sort of in the external facing like I'm doing right now. Uh, that took time. I knew that there were people that had it and I was most interested in building the technology. Honestly, at that point in my career, I wanted to dig in and I was writing code for the first time.
at least 15 years of the company's history. Um, I was just reminiscing with my wife about how she was going for, um, a, uh, scheduled C section, um, at Stanford hospital. And, uh, but I had driver there and I was on the computer and I'm like, look, I just have to check in this feature and then I can like, Take two days and, and deal with the baby.
Logan: Was this, [00:18:00] was this 98 or was this a
Evan: subsequent? This was 2001. Okay. Second child, second child.
Logan: first child was, you had a busy 1998.
Evan: exactly. So,
Logan: married, founding a business and having a child all within
Evan: year, 1998. So my golf ball says 98 on it. That was a big
Logan: in case you, in case you don't, uh,
Evan: in case I
Logan: yeah. In case you forget which one it is. Um, in terms of one of the things I heard you say about operating, um, that suite that maybe was, I don't know. I haven't heard anyone say this before, was that a lot of the features were built, uh, By consensus, not that it was a committee necessarily, but you actually take a vote and have people weigh in and ultimately decide as a leader what makes the most sense.
Evan: in terms of features, we certainly relied very much on listening to our customers. And you know, one of the challenges is listening to your biggest customers versus listening to all your customers. And your biggest customers can kind of, they have a very big microphone.
So really in terms of features, it was it from the very beginning, very customer driven. Of course, we wanna have innovation, which comes from within. [00:19:00] Sometimes we're gonna think of things first and, and you have to sort of. Sell the customer on it ultimately, because they have to see it in action and they have to try it to really see it.
But most of the things we added were because our customers said, this is what we wanted, and it was really just navigating, um, and, and making the right decisions there for the direction of the company. And, you know, when I've been CEO and chairman and on the board, I, I feel like we've always run it, you know, In a very consensual way, there's a leader has to decide at the end of the day, but it's the best situation is when you don't, you don't have to pull rank, you don't have to sort of, you know, Lord over, um, the realm and you talk it out and you, you know, and, and you get to a point where everybody's like, I'm behind this, or if I'm not behind it, I can get behind it. And that's, you know, what we've always tried to do in running NetSuite. And I think that's why we've had people stay for 15, 20, 25
Logan: Yeah. I mean, so you're, you're 26 years in, in now, and, um, I'm curious, I mean, the different cycles [00:20:00] you've, you've gone through starting at Oracle, ending up back at Oracle along the way. I'm curious what keeps you going now, 26,
Evan: Yeah, no, that's a great question. I get that question a lot. Um, you know, NetSuite is my baby, um, and I really believe it holds, it has, um, delivered trim on its tremendous promise to businesses, but there's so much more we can do.
Evan: Um, before even this most recent AI revolution, I've been really interested in AI.
Um, I left Oracle for about, two weeks to go to graduate school in AI until Larry lured me back. I've always been interested in it. That's, you know, that's the next revolution. You know, the internet, um, gave this us, this ability to give these very, very powerful tools to small companies that had never been able to have that power before.
And AI is the, you know, kind of the next game changer, um, and giving this enormous power to people. To entrepreneurs, [00:21:00] um, to run their businesses better and achieve their goals faster. And so that is certainly a major driving force. Also, after 25 years, we've learned a ton. And so we're in the process of sort of reinventing NetSuite, um, from the ground up, we talked about it most recently in our major user conference suite world.
And, uh, you know, it's delivering a business user experience that's delightful. Um, that people actually want to use, um, business software is kind of hobbled by this reputation of you have to use it. Someone's forcing you to use it, but you don't really want to use it. I mean, we want all our users to say, it helps me.
I like using it. You know, I come in on Monday morning and I'm. Excited to lock into NetSuite. And I think AI is going to be a big part of how we do that. So we're kind of trying to do the heart transplant in the moving ambulance and rebuild NetSuite sort of from the inside out. But ultimately users are going to see this tremendous new, um, business user experience.
And we're, you know, we're, we, our goal is, uh, like every company that sort of reaches the Uh, a point where you kind of [00:22:00] can just rest on your laurels and you'll have a couple more decades of success that'll just sort of diminish over time as you become less and less relevant. Our goal is to have as much success over the next 25 years that we did in the first 25 years.
Logan: What having lived through and seen the journey of the Internet explosion and now still being active in, uh, as a practitioner in the world that we're in right now, what, what parallels do you draw for people that maybe forget or weren't even alive when the Internet was, was booming? Thanks
Evan: Well, it's, it's alike in many ways and it's very, very different in other ways. I mean, you know, AI goes to the heart of what these systems do. For business software, the internet did change how systems work to some degree. It obviously allowed more connectivity, but it was a new medium with which you could, you know, use these systems and, and democratize them, let more, you know, more companies have, have these [00:23:00] systems that couldn't have them before.
But now AI. It's really going to fundamentally change how these systems work. Um, it's going to be able to automate so much. It's going to be able to, uh, deliver you insights that, you know, you've never been able to have before. Even the bigger companies that have all these analysts, I mean, AI's ability to process and look at data, uh, in a deep way.
in a deep way is sort of unparalleled. So, so that way it's, it's, it's quite different, but I do think obviously the excitement level is there. The hype level may be higher just because there's so much, even more ability to generate hype than there was before. Um, so that, that, you know, that aspect of it is similarity.
There'll obviously be some disappointments. Um, for people's great ideas, you know, I went through it in between 1995 and 98, what I thought was a great idea, I still think is a great idea, um, about helping people build highly interactive sites. I'm sure there's going to be a lot, and that was embed, and I'm sure there's going to be a lot of embeds, um, that are great ideas but can't get the traction.
When
Logan: when you went back and took that AI [00:24:00] class, was that, uh, that was
Evan: No, I was at the AI lab at MIT, you know, ready to spend like eight years getting a PhD I like to say, you know now I'd be in my heyday to which people generally answer. Yeah, I think it worked out. Okay
Logan: What year was that? That you, uh,
Evan: 1990 1990
Logan: Oh, wow. Okay.
Evan: was right I was three years out of undergrad and I felt, you know, you know My Jewish family wanted to me to get a PhD As many degrees as I possibly could because, you know, they can't take that away from you.
And I'm like, who is they and why do they want to take it away from me? But, um, so yeah,
Logan: Yeah. Uh, uh,
Evan: but Larry of, of the, you know, more of the drop out of college, uh, mindset was like, you don't need any of that. Come back. Right.
Logan: heard that, uh, as you were starting to think about the. Uh, the modern opportunity that existed within artificial intelligence. You, you focused on maybe some quick wins with NetSuite. How did you, [00:25:00] how did you think about the surface area or where to start?
Evan: I mean, You know, we didn't have the benefit of, of this technology that looks like it can be applied to anything. And obviously I think it's getting over applied in some cases, but it obviously is massively useful in so many different ways. We didn't have that sort of juggernaut in 2019 and before, I mean, we really started on that before.
Our first idea was just what we called an upsell manager that would be able to look at the patterns of your selling and suggest. Which of your customers might wanna buy something more from you and what might they wanna buy? Um, and so we've applied, you know, we started applying traditional AI to that particular problem because it looked like a problem that most, uh, small companies have.
And it looked like AI might be able to do a good job at it. And it has. We, so we developed a feature with traditional AI called intelligent. Um. Item recommendations, which we're continuing to improve, and we're starting to see how, you know, LLM technologies could help, um, with that, and, and, uh, but yeah, I mean, there just [00:26:00] wasn't that all encompassing, um, you know, technology asset that we have with large language models now to apply, so we had to look at it, I think, a little more in depth.
Logan: And now as the large language models are prevalent or present in the world, has that, has that changed the approach to the incrementality of the development?
Evan: because we are looking at every single aspect of our system and seeing where that technology can apply and maybe where it doesn't apply. There's still lots of role for traditional AI. I mean, large language models were trained on language, but business information, to a large degree as numbers. And so I think there's still some advances to be made in terms of taking some of the techniques and approaches of LLMs, but applying them to business data.
And that's something that we're, um, you know, very eager, um, to pioneer at Oracle and at, and at NetSuite. But, um, certainly there are so many incredible possibilities for the uses of large language models. So we're taking more of a, um, all [00:27:00] encompassing view, assuming Basically before it was kind of like prove that AI would help.
Now it's like prove that AI wouldn't
Logan: count. Yeah, the default. Um, and so, so then from a team organizational standpoint, like you have an existing business that's doing exceptionally well, but you need to rethink maybe how the customer is going to approach some of these problems or by default is AI going to like prove to me it's not going to change what it is you're doing.
How do you embed that culture within the organization?
Evan: Well, the AI hype cycle certainly helps because, um, our employees do read the newspapers, so to
Logan: Helps them at cocktail parties. I
Evan: Exactly. Um, Part of it, of course, is making sure they have the training. So we, um, We have a great customer of NetSuite called Coursera, and they, and Andrew Ng has this amazing, um, sort of introductory course to machine learning, and we got basically every engineer.
This is, you know, way before 2020. Um, Uh, when did, [00:28:00] when, 2020, it was several years ago, it was pre pandemic, um, to, uh, to take that course. And so, you know, they need to know what's possible first of all, and they need the basics of the techniques. Um, and then, you know, we are really kind of, you know, internally, uh, evangelizing, uh, 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, you know, that's an, that's an important part of it.
And, and, um, you know, the other thing is we hire a lot of kids right out of
Logan: Yeah, that helps. That helps. Yeah, they want to think about all this stuff. And so, so, um, as you look at, um, how the, the opportunity set is presenting itself and how it can manifest across [00:29:00] all these different verticals, and you guys have a, but. A vertical approach to a lot of the different applications.
Have there been things or moments that have stood out to you as like, wow, this is really fundamentally going to change the way at which we, we operate or anything you've been exposed to that kind of stands
Evan: stands out? Yeah, I mean, and it hasn't really been verticalized yet. It certainly will be, um. The things that I've seen is the experiments we've done, um, where it's, uh, you know, well, the first experiment we did, which turned into our first product, um, which we call text enhance was I got a very quick demo.
This is right after, you know, chat GPT. You know, kind of made its day, its massive world debut. Um, and on the one hand it was like, you know, um, hallucinating and trying to convince journalists to leave their wives. But at NetSuite, someone rigged it up so that it said, uh, write an introductory, introductory email about [00:30:00] this sales order.
And here's the fields that are important in the sales order. Um, it wrote an amazing
Logan: It's
Evan: email. It 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 and here's how much it'll cost over this many years. And here's the terms and et cetera.
And here's the key items that, you know, that was the immediate aha moment that like just. 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, um, the LLM, um, 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, you know, the other parts of the salary, other things in the record. So we kind of pre wired it up, um, so that anywhere you used it, it really gave you more relevant information than if you had just basically gone [00:31:00] to chat GPT and said, Hey, Here's, you know, write me an introduction, introductory email.
And then the next advance that we've made, um, that we just announced recently is that we're now letting, um, 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, you know, we haven't really talked about this, but one of the huge drivers of NetSuite success was our customizability.
That's what I really brought to the game. I 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. Um, but what I did know is how to make really customizable systems, sort of application development systems. So NetSuite from the beginning has been extremely customizable, tailorable, and that's been a big driver of our success.
Um, 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 the large language models, extremely tailorable by company or your, you know, if you were implemented by a partner, they can [00:32:00] do it for you.
Um, different 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 customizable, customizable, sort of the next advance we've made in what started as a very simple kind of just plug in the LLM into NetSuite.
Logan: didn't realize customizability was, uh, was such an important element of
Evan: Even for the smallest
Logan: And so was that, was that something that like contemporaneous companies that had similar insights just didn't build the, that framework of customizability and it ended up falling down or did that, uh, how much did that provide your initial success versus allow you to sustain it?
Evan: one thing is that, you know, most in the US, most customers that adopt NetSuite are coming from QuickBooks and it's, customizable. We have several orders of magnitude more customizability. And we heard from [00:33:00] small companies that, you know, the minute we added the ability to, to do custom fields, we saw all 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, um, to make the system work in ways that match what your company does. And you don't do that across the board. Um, that's too much customization.
You know, you definitely can too. It's a weapon that you can, or, you know, you can use, um, to your detriment for sure. Um, too much of a good thing. And, but we use it actually to develop versions of NetSuite for particular vert, 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. Um, and then they can go that last mile for what's unique about your company. Like all companies in many ways, they all have needed [00:34:00] income savings. And then, you know, for companies that are distributors, they all need warehouse management capabilities.
So, you know, and then that last 10 percent is like what's unique. And maybe they have this Mike is sort of micro vertical features, breweries need particular things. But then there's that sort of, you know, your secret sauce, what? You know, 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 need to, you know, that they'll tell us, they say, no, everything else, we're willing to sort of go with how the industry does it. Cause it makes a lot of sense and it's replacing our old crufty way of doing it, which made sort of no sense.
Cause we designed it on the back of a napkin when we first started the company. But in this area, we have a very unique process and we want NetSuite to, you know, um, adapt to that process. And that's where kind of the fact that you can do this no code customizability, things like anybody can go in and rewire how the LLM works, um, within NetSuite.
That's where that stuff becomes extremely
Logan: where that stuff becomes extremely [00:35:00] difficult. That's a great question. You know, what happened was, there was
Evan: That's a great question. And You know, what happened was there was one day when I looked at our feature list for our next release and basically, you know, feature a was for comp for big company B. We had some big customers. They were demanding things.
The allure of keeping them happy and getting them to pay you more money can get cause you to drift away from sort of what you know that you're larger customers. 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, and that path, traveling that path was a huge part of, of our success. And, you know, [00:36:00] interestingly it became, one of our biggest selling points is how much you could adapt the system if you needed to for
Logan: There's this phrase now.
I don't know if you've heard it, uh, pop up more and more, but companies talk about building compound startups. I don't know if you've, if you've heard this, but it's, it's basically building a suite in some ways that, that it's the new, uh, uh, named Azure, I guess, and thinking about having these platforms and then building the different applications on top of it.
I I'm curious. I mean, I think NetSuite, probably Microsoft, we could probably come up with a handful of ones that
Evan: It's nice that you put
Logan: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't know. Uh, The two immediate ones that come to mind, two very successful businesses. Um, I'm curious, uh, how you, how you thought about, uh, that, that, that framework of like the platform and the applications and all of that and building in those other incremental products to one another.
Uh, how did you decide that to stop there? How did you not to go do the next 10 things on the path of the journey? Like what became enough for [00:37:00] you all?
Evan: to decide what is core to you and what do you want sort of your, your partner community to build. And, um, you know, another decision we made was like, what do we want our extensibility platform to be for? Salesforce. com developed force. com, which was for any kind of application development. That was something where we were like, that's not, we don't have the resources to necessarily support anybody building any random application.
So we really focused our extents, our extensibility platform, not as a general purpose application development platform, but something to let companies extend NetSuite. And that became our singular focus. And um, you know, uh, 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, you know, that's sort of how we thought about it. Um, so we can't do everything when you say, you know, everything you need to grow all in one place for a company, that's a lot of stuff. And, um, ultimately we needed a [00:38:00] partner community for us to really. achieve that vision. And now when you go to our suite world user conference and you look in the expo floor, you see hundreds, you know, of, of, of partners that are doing amazing things that they found that white space.
Um, and we have a, obviously have a, a discussion with them so that they can kind of understand what our direction is and they don't, you know, and, and we together can kind of have the ships aligned to expand what customers can, uh, can get out of the entire net suite ecosystem.
Logan: You, you, you, you had shared an article I had seen about four major levers for, uh, to pull for profitability and efficient growth. I'm curious. We've, we've gone in these cycles of, uh, infinite capital and then feeling like scarcity and then elements of infinite capital again. I'm curious.
Logan: How you thought of setting the orientation for the business of what The appropriate balance between profitability and efficiency was and and growth over the [00:39:00] years
Evan: 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.
Logan: wish
Evan: Um, 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'll, you know, the people will come and it'll, uh, and so we, you know, we blew a lot of money like a lot of companies did.
Yeah. Um, we were able to fail relatively fast, I think, because we used our own system, um, very thoroughly to see how these things were working. And we typically, unfortunately, sometimes we signed contracts that were too long, but, um, you know, so I don't think we necessarily quite got the balance right. And that's really challenging.
Um, 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. We're, I'm gonna Help, [00:40:00] I'm going to build this idea and this kind of relentless consistency on driving that idea.
And 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 from at least from our, uh, from our perspective. And so that was very helpful. Um, not something that every company, unfortunately, um, has access to, but hopefully you do have investors that are willing to take the long view and can help you, you know, really help you weather that, weather that storm, knowing that it inevitably is going to pass.
And if your idea is great, um, it might take a little longer, um, to have it come to fruition, but that belief, having the investors have that sort of same belief that you do is critical.
Logan: You spoke about, um, maybe your evolution as a leader or a more willingness to do, I don't know, stuff like this, but also, but also not, not coding, uh, as much. I don't know if that's the right way of phrasing
Evan: [00:41:00] Sometimes I want to rip the keyboard away, but I generally have been able to resist the temptation
Logan: Uh, so what, what have you learned about leading and managing people over the years that maybe you could go back and tell yourself in 98?
Evan: I mean, I, I think my management philosophy has remained primarily the same. I mean, I already had, you know, 10 years of experience and, and Oracle was such a fast growing, um, organization. You could learn a lot really quickly. And I probably
Logan: High hundreds when you joined, a couple of thousand
Evan: 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. Um, and so I, I feel like. I, my management philosophy was, 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 um, 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 [00:42:00] you're going to do it. That's how we're going to do it. And um, I still feel to this very day. Um, and I look at my key leaders and in their domain, they know a lot more than I do. And um, 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, well, the success you've had, you must be right. And I've, I've, you know, I do think that, um, I have some insights. In a lot of areas, and especially as I look at an area over time, um, but I think again, and I, we talked about this earlier, I think one of the reasons people stay is because I do give people, um, the ability to sort of stretch their wings in their area.
And, um, so that to me is, is a critical, critical part of leadership to surround yourself with the people and the best people. You can find, um, make, you know, in any area that is critical for your organization. If you don't have that capability, you definitely need to hire, [00:43:00] you know, the best possible person you can have and, and, and then, and let them run, run with the ball.
Logan: I feel like a lot of leaders I talked to, um, 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. Uh,
Evan: did you,
Logan: Was there any means of getting up to speed so that you could figure out and learn what you didn't know?
Evan: Well, your network and your mentors, I mean, and hopefully you have mentors that are not just, you know, sort of. the next generation of you in 20 years. That's not particularly helpful.
Uh, it's somewhat helpful. But I mean, what's much more helpful is having mentors that are in very different areas from you and bring a completely different perspective. And, you know, Larry had a lot more wide ranging, uh, uh, experience in me. So that was certainly, certainly one, but I sought out people, um, you know, from various [00:44:00] aspects of my life, you know, that, We're great at sales.
You know, 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, advanced. In fact, um, when, um, our original CEO, sorry, our CEO that I hired in 2002, Zach Nelson, who is the CEO, um, for the entire rest of the history of NetSuite, um, He came, he and his wife came over for dinner and 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, 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, [00:45:00] you can use your network to at least become enough
Logan: just become
Evan: of an expert that you can identify real experts.
Logan: Give you some
Evan: Yeah. Just give you just, you know, just enough to be dangerous.
Logan: Zach, Zach was CEO through how long
Evan: until, until, uh, the acquisition
Logan: the acquisition? What, what allowed that partnership to work as well as it did?
Evan: Yeah. I mean, we, um, we're very complimentary and I think our goals were very complimentary. I mean, he, 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. I still, you know, I'm, I've gotten better. But I'm no Zach Nelson. Um, 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, um, scalable.
And so that was just, it was very complimentary. I think [00:46:00] we, um. 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, has really, have really felt that the power of partnerships, um, is, is, it's more powerful than, than any single individual.
Logan: any single. In terms of, uh, I guess, uh, uh, you've mentioned your, your management style was largely set through, through Oracle and that, that
Evan: And then my experience running my own company, which was like, that is the crash course. Yes, digesting,
Logan: digesting quite a bit through that. Um, I'm curious for. Entrepreneurs that are, that are maybe listening about, um, just different tactics of management or giving feedback or anything that comes with like leading people. Are there things that you've particularly internalized that, that are broadly applicable and not maybe personally
Evan: [00:47:00] 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. 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 sometimes 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. Um, 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 That's to me.
That's the best way to do it is just really stay in touch with the bigger [00:48:00] picture of How your people are thinking about their role You the company, everything going on in the world, whatever it is. And sometimes out of those questions will come here's something that, you know, I'm dealing with, you know, in my world, not necessarily related to NetSuite, but that is affecting me in a big way.
And so, um, You know, again, it's, 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 a number one success factor in management. It's the number one success factor in building a great product for our customers. Um, that would be the one word I'd sort of leave every entrepreneur with
Logan: One of the things that, um, I think a lot of companies, uh, when they're in this, this hyper growth, uh, mode, they, uh, they, they often will hit a point in some certain functional areas that maybe the people that got them there might not be the people that will, will We'll get them there [00:49:00] along the way. And I'm sure you've lived some, some different parts of that journey.
Are there, it's always a tough question to ask and it's a tough thing to go through. Um, as you sort of reflect, um, are, are there things that you learned, uh, or maybe questions you asked yourself when you felt it, or maybe knew in your gut the, uh, that, that it might be time to move on that ultimately got you over that.
Uh, hump.
Evan: It's hard to fire people. I mean, especially if you have empathy,
Logan: Yes, back to the earlier
Evan: um, you know, you know how that's going to, you know, potentially affect their lives. One thing I'll say is that, you know, for yourself personally. It's usually a huge sense of relief when you do it because you've know you've waited too long.
It's often a huge sense of relief for the individual. Not always. And so you got to be prepared for that. Don't, you know, um, 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, um, if something's not working, it's not good for either [00:50:00] 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.
Um, probably both parties are going to benefit from
Logan: it's, it's hard. You, you almost never hear about people saying they fired someone too early.
Evan: Or I always get it right. I know exactly when to cut the cord.
Logan: it's, it's always, it's always, I, I waited too long and I think that's human nature. If you're empathetic at all, uh, 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,
Evan: so I think
Logan: Knowing that that's our inclination as, as humans, uh, is you don't want
Evan: 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, um, you know, you generally don't fire your family. Sometimes I [00:51:00] guess people have to, but, um, so that, that makes it doubly hard when the organization is small and very, very tight knit.
But to this very day, you know, with thousands of people, um, it's still hard.
Logan: I, 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, um, you, you all have prided yourself on trying to bring elements of consumer quality to your product. To enterprise software. And I, I, I know, uh, that it's, it's probably hard in all the different ways that, 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 that suite, have there been primitives or lessons about this, maybe getting feedback from customers that you sort of think
Evan: no, I mean, um, yeah, we've said for the long time, you know, we want, you know, people, there's people on, 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 [00:52:00] eight hours a day plus using these applications, you know, half of your waking hours. If you can make, if you can make it enjoyable, I mean, it's such a weird thing to talk. It seemed like a weird 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.
Um, it was more like we build great technology and we dare you to use it.
Evan: Um, when I, and so when I talked to Larry about coming back to Oracle, he said, well, maybe you'll see that Oracle's changed and it, you know, I had the typical, 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. Um, 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 [00:53:00] was not true at all. Um, Oracle had seen the light, so to speak, and, uh, had an incredible organization devoted to making business software enjoyable to use.
I 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 and build real consumer grade interactions into the product. And we'd been working on this for several years. I got a presentation, um, for, from the gentleman who runs the organization, uh, the, you know, kind of 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. And it, um, it's a complete about face, uh, from what I experienced back in, you know, Oracle. The late 20th century. And, [00:54:00] uh, it's, it's incredibly inspiring.
And we're so happy to be partnering with them and that because they have this exact same mentality that we do that. Why should you go into work and and hate using this stuff and then go home and love using this stuff? You know, why? Why should that be the case? And so it's an ambitious goal. Um, but I think we're, we're tracking and AI is just going to make it easier.
Logan: easier.
I'm curious. I mean, I realized you weren't there for the, for that journey or that transformation, you sort of walked into it, but
Evan: Did I, I mean, he, that group was hired after I got back, but I hadn't really noticed that, I mean, like, um, the idea was already there. I mean, Oracle has gotten much more deeply. Um,
Logan: was
Evan: uh, kind of in, in the space of business applications, they've had business applications for a long time, but now it's really central to Oracle strategy.
I mean, it's applications and infrastructure and they play off of each other, the fact that, you know, you can. use these business applications from Oracle, they run in [00:55:00] Oracle's infrastructure, and then you can build the extensions to them on Oracle infrastructure. It's very sort of symbiotic relationship.
So that changed to where business applications became so central to Oracle strategy, they realized that, you know, people, So that mentality was already there, but, uh, that group, uh, came into being soon after we, we came and, you know, I, I, I met, um, with their leadership like very, very soon after they came into the company.
So it was, uh, it was an aha. It was an aha moment for sure.
Logan: was that a top down directive of, Hey, we need to get more, you know, consumer friendly and all that, or is
Evan: Well, here's what I'll say. The Redwood design system is because Larry had a love, lovely Redwood grove
Logan: okay.
Evan: in Woodside, um, that, uh, he felt was a great inspiration for the sort of look and feel of Oracle's applications, you know, for the coming years and, and we're still going strong on that idea that was driven by him.
Yeah.
Logan: the things that I think all our companies, um, [00:56:00] struggle with at some point along the way is, um, focus and trying to stay focused on the company's core mission when there's, um, countless other things that can be distractions. How, how did you think about finding signal from noise and making sure you're pursuing staying consistent?
You're, I mean, you know,
Evan: Larry is great at this, but at one point he said, you know, 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. And because there was nothing really, I mean, ultimately there was mint, but there wasn't really anything like that yet.
Um, that was sort of mass adopted. And, 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 relentless, you know, kind of like belligerently, uh, consistent about that. Um, And so now, you know, when I [00:57:00] advise companies now kind of putting myself in that position, I, I see that drift and I, you know, 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. Maybe 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 to, discipline is incredibly important, and again, I think it's the role of advisors. in companies, um, to, you know,
Logan: keep
Evan: keep people on the straight and narrow towards that, towards that North star. And always be asking the question is, is this a distraction? Is this going to get us off track? Um, you know, 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
Logan: are. And in the example of the Mint. com or the personal, uh, [00:58:00] NetSuite, did you have some, some sample customers that you thought about, like, hey,
Evan: Well, all our little companies were pretty much, you know, a lot of them were sole proprietorship. So they were pretty close to that. They were probably using like, you know, the same system to pay their personal bills as they were using to pay their business bills. So, yeah, we had some, uh, we already had some sort of almost sample customers and that, you know, and, and it was an interesting, uh, approach, but it took us really in the, I mean, the success I joked earlier about, you know, 50 million companies versus paying us 50 a month.
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, um, was absolutely critical.
And this was going to take us completely in the opposite direction as, as attractive as a. Of [00:59:00] a possibility as it may have been,
Logan: of that opportunity that exists today. So, uh, I mean, Mint, Mint is no longer, right? I think it's officially shut
Evan: or it was. Yeah. I thought they, did they get bought by they
Logan: into it, but then I think they've like
Evan: yeah, I mean I, yeah. I, I don't think there's necessarily a, a, a great player there yet, but, um, maybe next company. Yeah.
Logan: Yeah. Well, it seems like you're enjoying, you're enjoying what you're, what you're doing these days.
Um, one of the things, I guess we sort of talked about the bottoms up element or, or trusting your existing employees to help set some of the directive or provide feedback and guardrails by which you make decisions.
Logan: How, how did you think about culture and, and what the codify versus what was kind of implicit within the organization?
Which
Evan: starts at the top, no doubt about it. And you and your key leaders, um, 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 [01:00:00] bottom, um, or just, you know, there's just the, the, there's a, it's 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.
So 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, um, which means, you know, obviously as little drama as possible.
Um, we're doing very important stuff. It's, it's critical for our customers. It's their lifeblood, but there's no reason that we have to make it unpleasant to do. Um, try to bring in people that you sort of, you know, want to have lunch with. [01:01:00] Um, And then the second aspect of it was humor. And I think humor is a critical part of, of management and, uh, being open to having those kinds 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 you I think that's such a fun and that 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 in their little kids sweet pea And so I think you know, it's a little bit cheesy.
I'll admit it
Logan: it
Evan: People laugh. And, um, so that's that part of the culture. 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 [01:02:00] laughter there, that's soul sucking.
Logan: soul sucking.
Well, Jack
Evan: Well, Zach Nelson is one of the funniest people I know. So I don't know, maybe
Logan: I know, so I don't know, maybe. I think, you know, it grows
Evan: probably, it was certainly wasn't written down. Um, but I think, you know, it, 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 that I want to be here.
You're like in our office right now, we have prominently displayed cereal boxes with sweet Stanley replace. We have someone called Sweeties instead of Wheaties. We have sweet loops. I mean, that's always how it's been at NetSuite. So you go. So I think when you go into that office, you kind of are attracted to that or not.
Logan: And so, so, um, that suite now has stayed it's within Oracle, but it's still its [01:03:00] own unique culture as a, as a part of Oracle
Evan: I mean, it's a it's a what's called a global business unit. Um, 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 team. 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.
Um, so, and, and we, um, have collaborated with Pretty much every other group at Oracle to enhance NetSuite. As 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 the 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. Um, and you know, the fact that Larry was the founder, [01:04:00] when Larry came and talked to our entire, um, 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. So it's, it's kind of a unique, uh, 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 kind of make NetSuite feel small again, um, because that's what people love and they love hearing about all the, the history and, and want to sort of, you know, while we're not going to be a five person startup.
Um, we can take some aspects of that and perpetuate it. I hopefully for the entire history of NetSuite so people can feel some of that sort of excitement that you have as a startup.
Logan: Yeah, I, I don't need you to go through the blow by blow machinations. There's proxy statements for this stuff and [01:05:00] all of that, but was it, was a little surreal, like at the coming full circle, how many years later, 20 years later,
Evan: Yeah, it was about 18, 18 years later. You know, life, uh, has a lot of twists and turns. And as I said, I came back. Larry asked me to stay a year. I, you know, I expected, um, that's what I, um, might do. Um, and then at the, uh, the next time, Um, 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.
Logan: Yeah. You made that decision, uh, declarative,
Evan: so far I'm proving him right.
Logan: Yeah. Well, I mean, at that point in time, were you, uh, did you have any opinion on how long you were sort of looking ahead or
Evan: 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. I, you know, I was starting to see, um, the focus on user experience and the [01:06:00] 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
Logan: in the middle of the interview. 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.
Um, is there, is there something that you find on a regular basis that's like most fulfilling about the job or little moments you enjoy
Evan: of exactly what you just said. 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 and, and, 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, on all the things [01:07:00] of that so I can bring, you know, the what's possible to the table, but also, you know, bring what's the right thing to the table that the merging of those two things, I think is what's most exciting about technology
Logan: As you, you advise startups today, invest in startups, and you've, you've lived two journeys, I guess, three, if you want to count at Oracle early days, but also you had embed and you had NetLedger and NetSuite, uh, in the, in that whole very successful journey, are there, um, things about being a founder or, or, 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 or should I go down this path or are there questions that you would have them ask themselves to sort of reflect on that?
Evan: Well, we talked about how you need to be open to, um, you need to know what you don't. No. And, and, and what isn't a strength and, um, [01:08:00] your ability 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, you know, sort of polymaths and they can do a lot of things.
But I also look for people that are open to bringing in the right people for things that they don't know. And, you know, there's a tendency. And I see so many people that try to project their success in one area to another area. And um, to me, you know, 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?
Um, are, do you have, um, 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. Um, so do you kind of have the stomach for that? [01:09:00] And, um, and do you truly, truly believe in your idea?
Now we, I was fortunate enough that I was sort of building for myself and I, 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. Um, but I think in general, that's an advantage is to sort of being able to eat your own dog food as the, 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. Like 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, that I sort of look for when I look, whether I think someone is going to be able to, uh, to do it.
And then they're still probably going to fail,
Logan: still problems with that. Statistically, that's uh, yeah, it seems like that's the most likely scenario. Um, you mentioned 98, [01:10:00] Larry came to you and said, Hey, if I could do another company, I would be doing this. Are there things you, you look at today and said, hey, say, Hey, if I wasn't. Doing NetSuite, I would be doing XYZ or
Evan: Well, I mean, I think there's personal reasons that I would say if I wasn't doing NetSuite, I'd probably try and be working at a company or an institution that's trying to cure cancer. Um, I'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.
Um, my family's been impacted by it. So, you know, just kind of from the, on that basis, I'd do something, you know, 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, um, you know, out how to do that, because I'd probably, if I went off and did a company halfway in, I'd be like, ah,
Logan: We should
Evan: we should just do this [01:11:00] at NetSuite.
Logan: yeah, yeah. That can be hard. I'm curious, the, the V Foundation, how'd you get involved with that?
Evan: V's speech at the
Logan: SEC.
Sure, we can, we can link it
Evan: yeah, I mean, it's
Logan: Valvano is the coach of NC State. Won,
Evan: an expert.
Logan: two national titles or
Evan: One national title in crazy,
Logan: unpredictable
Evan: unpredictable fashion. Like every, every game was a cliffhanger and they were the underdog.
Logan: was playing Hakeem Olajuwon and Houston. Who else was on that team? Uh,
Evan: was an amazing
Logan: they too. Yeah, it was, it was a big underdogs in
Evan: everybody you
Logan: Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Evan: But it, you know, it's one game. And, um, so that was incredible. And then, um, very tragically, uh, developed cancer at an early age. And, um, He, uh, did a speech on the SBs when he was really, really suffering, I mean, late stages
Logan: Past, past a couple months
Evan: Just a few months. Yeah. It passed a few months after that. And, uh, an absolutely incredible speech that has so much wisdom in a few [01:12:00] minutes. And, and so, uh, 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. Um, and, uh, it was, it just was like, And, and it, and it was, um, NetSuite had recently gone public or was soon, or about to go public.
So I figured there was a good chance I was actually gonna have some resources to apply, uh, to, to that challenge. And, um, so, uh, and, and they happened to have an amazing, uh, uh, celebration, wine celebration in Napa. And my wife and I love Napa. And so we, uh, 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, um, 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 [01:13:00] the analogy with NetSuite. It was, it started in 1993, still had that sort of real family feel, you know, a decade or so later.
And, um, so I got, Got more and more involved and eventually the, uh, Steve Bornstein, who was the original, you know, one of the originators of the foundation, he, he joked one day, he's like, I, I see you as the next chairman. I'm like, ha ha ha. And then a few years later, he's like, no, I'm serious.
Logan: Hmm. So how long have you been doing it?
Evan: Uh, four years now.
Logan: well, that's great. Well, that's a,
Evan: 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 it's, you know, it's got legendary people. Coach K is an incredible supporter of the organization. And um, 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 because unfortunately we're, you know, we've been doing it at the V Foundation for, um, 30 years and, and unfortunately it's probably going to, you know, end.
Logan: there's a silver
Evan: But I, I hope there's a silver bullet, but it doesn't quite look that way.
Logan: Yeah. Well, that's great to hear. Um, well, I guess [01:14:00] as, as we sort of, uh, wrap, um, I'm curious, you've, you've, you've lived a very interesting journey, Oracle and NetSuite.
You've come across a bunch of interesting people along the way. Um, as we wrap, uh, one of your friends, Mark Benioff. I'm curious what, what you maybe learned. From him or about startups that uh that you would pass along to people that are listening in
Evan: Well, I mean, the guy can create hype like no one ever. I mean, so, um, that's one of those things that, you know, uh, I'm not that great at that, uh, because maybe because I'm, uh, I'm, I'm a little more sort of inwardly, inwardly focused. So, um, that's something that we had to kind of, you know, that was a muscle that we have to, 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, R60, you know, even though we started three months earlier, I mean, we rode on the coattails of Mark's hype machine because [01:15:00] he.
Logan: um
Evan: promoted this very pithy idea that is not completely accurate, called no software.
Um, our engineers would be like, wow, it feels like I'm writing software, but I guess I'm not. Um, but it caught on and it was, you know, it may have been It was true in spirit, if not in letter. And so, um,
Logan: let a good
Evan: exactly, exactly. So that was definitely something, um, that, that I learned from, from,
Logan: and we've talked about a lot of, uh, lessons or things that you've, uh, you've learned from Larry Ellison.
But I guess, is there anything that, that, uh, we haven't said or anything that bubbles to the top about,
Evan: You know, one of the things he, 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. And one of the things he told me is, Um, you know, always be just brutal about making sure that in your core [01:16:00] 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.
And 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, still, I still use that.
Logan: That's great. Well, thank you for doing this. This was fun.
Evan: It was great. Thanks for having me.
Logan: Thanks 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, [01:17:00] everyone.