We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP238: NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg (Business Podcast)

Episode Date: April 14, 2019

On today's show, Stig interviews the founder of Netsuite Evan Goldberg. Evan sold his company to Oracle for 9.3 billion dollars in 2016. IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN: How and why you want to pivo...t your company Which skills you need to acquire while you grow with your company How and why you should keep looking for the right mentors throughout your life How Evan Goldberg started an accounting company without reading an accounting book  BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Watch the video of the live interview on Preston's Youtube Channel or on The Investor's Podcast Youtube Channel TIP238 Show Notes at The Investor's Podcast Website NEW TO THE SHOW? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts.  SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Bluehost Fintool PrizePicks Vanta Onramp SimpleMining Fundrise TurboTax HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! It takes less than 30 seconds, and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

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Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. On today's show, we bring you a fascinating interview with Evan Goldberg, who's the founder and executive vice president of NetSuite. Evan created NetSuite in 1998, and it's a company that creates web-hosted software that handles e-commerce, human capital management, enterprise resource planning, customer relations, and much, much more. The software is used all over the world, and in 2016, Evan sold the company to Oracle for $9.3 billion. dollars. Evan holds a degree in applied mathematics from Harvard University and he was kind enough to sit down with Stig in Las Vegas to have a 30 minute conversation. During the conversation, Evan talks about his involvement with Larry Ellison, how to manage rapid growth, the skills he needed to develop and build a billion dollar company and much, much more. During the interview, the first minute of the recording has a little bit of background noise, but after that it's a great cut. So without further delay, here's Stig's conversation with NetSuite founder Evan Goldberg and,
Starting point is 00:00:57 in Las Vegas, Nevada. You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Evan, thank you so much for making yourself available
Starting point is 00:01:24 for the Investors podcast. My pleasure. Upon graduation, you spent eight years at Oracle, first as a software engineer, and then later you served as a vice president. I think most people would say you, you made it. keep climbing that corporate ladder. Why did you start your own company in the first place?
Starting point is 00:01:41 There's a couple reasons. It really, it was 1995, so it was sort of the advent to the Internet. It had been only a couple years since most of us had sort of experienced the Internet for the first time. So I just saw an incredible opportunity there. I mean, it was clear to me that it did sort of change everything. I mean, that's a cliche, but I could tell that there are amazing opportunities out there and I wanted to take advantage of them. It was a time that I'd learned a ton from my first job,
Starting point is 00:02:09 and I thought I could bring it to bear on solving some interested problems. So what did you see? You saw some indications that there was a massive opportunity out there, but what did you see? Everyone was so connected. It was possible to get information out to people in a new format as easily as possible. And so for me, what I've been working on, for the last things I worked on at Oracle was,
Starting point is 00:02:32 Larry's interactive television effort. A lot of times he's right on target with a lot of his ideas about how things are changing the world. But it was a little early on this one. I remember watching, like, you know, video on demand, as it were in 2008, 15 years later and going, oh, yeah, okay, we were only 15 years off. But that notion of everybody being connected and being able to control more of what they see, everything we take for granted now that, you know, my generation, we sort of,
Starting point is 00:03:02 that when we drove in a car, like if we wanted to talk to someone, we had to stop the car, we had to hope that we had change and we had to go to a phone booth and call them and hope that they were at home because that was the only place you could talk to people on the phone. So, you know, just the fact that the world was getting way more connected. And for me, what was interesting is kind of my career had been animated by this idea that we could bring powerful capabilities to sort of ordinary end users. That's what I sort of saw is that these powerful applications, business applications, other types of applications could be brought
Starting point is 00:03:42 in a really compelling way to end users all over the world with the Internet. So that's what sort of animated me and thinking I wanted to do something on my own. And tell us about your very first company because it was far away from NetSuite. Yeah, well, so I've been involved in this sort of multimedia stuff with the interactive television, and I wanted to bring more compelling experiences to people. You know, one of the things that caused the Internet to take off was just that, you know, as legend has it, you know, Mark Andreessen decided he'd put pictures into HTML pages and the browser. And so for me, it was more interactive content.
Starting point is 00:04:20 And the stuff, some of the stuff we take for granted now that you can use in web pages, It was sort of really popularized by Flash. That was the same kind of thing that we were trying to do. Just make websites more interactive, easier for people to use. So take some of that power, these really powerful systems, and use the Internet and multimedia and animation and interactivity to make it come alive. Now, unfortunately, there was another company that had that idea. They were called Future Splash.
Starting point is 00:04:47 And they were eventually bought by Macromedia at the time, which is now Adobe, to create Flash. And, you know, Macromedia really had the audience of multimedia and interactive developers. And so they really sort of took over that market. And then, you know, so after about three years of running that company, while we had a very devoted following, it was pretty clear to me that it wasn't going to take off like I hoped. So tell us about that process of doing that pivot. Like how obvious it was that it that it was going that route? You know, I learned about running a company.
Starting point is 00:05:16 I mean, I'd run a group at Oracle and I'd been a manager, but it's a little bit. different when you have to make payroll, you have to raise money, you're really on your own out there. And so one of the things you hope to do is sort of run your business based on data. You want to know what's happening, what's working, what's not working. I mean, a lot of the things I've talked about today and getting that visibility in what's happening in your company. And so as I was running my company, and we were sort of a traditional software company, It was not, the advent of software as a service had not happened yet, and that was sort of what NetSuite tapped into.
Starting point is 00:05:57 But we were delivering traditional software, but, you know, we were running our operation off of like a smorgas board of applications. QuickBooks for finance. We were using Yahoo stores to distribute our package software, and people who used packaged sales automation tool. It wasn't even an automation tool more of a contact management tool. We did our support in email. So, you know, the data was everywhere. It was not integrated. We had five different customer lists.
Starting point is 00:06:26 And it definitely appeared to me that there had to be a better way. So that's what really caused the pivot. You know, and I was lucky enough that Larry Ellison actually helped me with this company, even though it was more, you know, sort of my idea. His later joke was, well, we did your idea and I'll do my idea. And I told, you know, he called, because he periodically called and he'd say, how's your graphics stuff going because that's how he sort of summed it up. And I said, you know, not great, kind of getting clobbered by the competition.
Starting point is 00:06:55 But I see this other kind of direction, and I really want to get involved in business software. So it was in the course of a five-minute phone conversation that, you know, Larry and I decided to, that we'd go in a different direction, and then I'd start NetSuite. It was called NetLegger at the time. And it really was his insight. You know, I knew that small businesses needed a bunch of different types of systems and that wanted to work together. That was sort of my insight. His insight was that really the best way to start.
Starting point is 00:07:27 And he said, if I were to start a company right now, it would be sort of small business accounting delivered as a web, you know, service, as a web application. And I said, well, I don't really know that much about accounting, but, you know, I can see how it accounting would be important, but I really want to get into sales, sales software delivered over the web. So I think that's kind of what I wanted to know as a business owner was, where's my next deal coming from? You know, what's my pipeline look like? And he said, oh, yeah, you want to do the front office stuff. But first, we should start with the back office because that includes all your key information about your customers, your products, your employees, et cetera. And we're going to want to have a web store because these businesses are going to run web stores. The most important thing,
Starting point is 00:08:11 he said is that we want to run it on the web they shouldn't have to manage their own databases and manage their own machines and all that stuff and deal with upgrades and database software and so at least he had the insight that Oracle software wasn't necessarily easy for the average small business to implement so that sort of was the whole idea of the company in a five-minute phone call you know it's amazing you can all be traced back to such a short phone call how profound was it for you at the time. I'm sure speaking to a ton of different people. But looking back, how much do you think, wow, this is what shaped everything or was it just business as usual? Well, I mean, it was a fulfillment of me wanting to move into business software, but I didn't really
Starting point is 00:08:57 know whether this was the right approach right away. Starting with accounting, I sort of took that to some degree on faith. I didn't know anything about accounting. I was a quick books user, but like the first day we started the company, I had to go out and buy an accounting book. Fortunately, I got some other people later in the company that actually knew what they were doing on accounting. You know, it really actually came clear to me just a few months later. I was at a party actually at Larry's house and Steve Jobs walked up and he said, well, you know, Larry's super excited about this accounting and a browser thing. But does anyone want to do accounting in a browser?
Starting point is 00:09:32 And at that point, you know, I was sure. So I honestly said, I don't know, maybe I think so. I don't know. Larry seems to think so, but it was actually only seriously days later that we actually finished our first iteration of the accounting system. This was NetLetcher, and we took our financials from QuickBooks, and we uploaded them into NetLedger. And I remember distinctly the first night taking a look at our financials of the company in the browser. And that was sort of the aha moment where I recognized, yeah, this is going to work. I mean, the fact that I can have my finger on the pulse of my business anytime, anywhere. From my experience running a company, I knew this was going to be huge.
Starting point is 00:10:17 And it was just a matter of time. And of course, Larry never doubted for a second. He used to tell me, well, you know, there's been mainframes and there's been a client server. But this sort of web application thing, this is how applications are going to be run for the next thousand years. I don't know what's going to happen after that, but definitely for the next thousand years. And so he saw it. And you have to give Larry Ellison credit for his foresight. He was thinking about web application before.
Starting point is 00:10:45 I don't even know if you could spell replication of the time. So how did you develop a business model around something that, you know, a handful perhaps of people knew would be the future? You hardly weren't convinced at the time. How did you develop a business model around that? Well, simple. We charged like, I don't know, $9.99 a month or something. It was kind of flying by the seat of our pants to some degree just to see who would. I mean, whenever you start a company, you know, you know it's a really cool idea.
Starting point is 00:11:14 You know there's going to be some people out there that gravitate to it, but you don't know who they are, how much they're going to be willing to pay, what they're going to do with us. And, you know, we learned a lot in those first few years. There was certainly a bunch of early adopters that got it. And, you know, a lot of times those would be companies that were very geographically dispersed that needed lots of people to be able to have access to the information and the fact that you can do it on the web. Again, this is only four or five years from the advent of the internet. There were definitely a lot of people that got it.
Starting point is 00:11:46 Software as a service was definitely popularized by Salesforce.com and the whole no software movement. And the thing that we had to deal with is that salespeople are a little less risk-averse or more risk-tolerant than, say, CFOs. we were starting with accounting. I mean, we were ultimately delivering an entire suite, an entire system to run your business. But it was definitely starting with financials. And CFOs are inherently a more conservative bunch. So, you know, over the next few years, the challenge was to find those sort of forward-looking CFOs, CEOs, that were willing to take the leap into, you know, putting their data on the Internet.
Starting point is 00:12:24 Now, for me, it was an easy conversation. I don't know that they always bought it, but it was pretty easy to convince them that rather than storing their key customer information on a computer under somebody's desk that anyone could like stick a back then it was a disc in or a USB flash drive or whatever and steal all your business information
Starting point is 00:12:44 that maybe we could run it a little more securely than that. So it was clear to me that they were going to get an increase in security when they went to that to software as a service but it really took people getting used to it. Certainly people getting more familiar with
Starting point is 00:13:01 the internet and their personal lives and to really start to trust it. And, you know, after a time, you know, the CFOs, you know, they did come along. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year, bringing together activists, technologists, journalists, investors, and builders from all over the world, many of them operating on the front lines of history. This is where you hear firsthand stories from people using Bitcoin to survive currency collapse, using AI to expose human rights abuses, and building technology under censorship and authoritarian pressures. These aren't abstract ideas. These are tools real people are using.
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Starting point is 00:17:28 how do you not only preserve the right culture but also grow the right culture in a company that is growing so fast? It definitely starts with having a clear vision and mission that you're consistent with through the history of the company. I mean, we were lucky enough that in five minutes we came up with the idea of the company, really one system to run your business. All aspects of your key business processes, your sales, your accounting, your commerce. So being able to, you know, get people to gravitate around a very clear mission and vision,
Starting point is 00:18:01 a vision of how you want things to be. You want people to be able to run their business, you know, securely on the web with one application, everybody working from the same playbook. That definitely helps. I mean, certainly, you know, a lot of the culture comes from just alignment. We were kind of in an interesting place. I mean, we'd come from Oracle, a lot of us, and Oracle sells to enterprises.
Starting point is 00:18:22 I'd run a small business. I had some understanding of small business. We kind of, you know, our culture was kind of, we mashed up that more consumery culture, you know, that a company like Intuit needs to reach the millions and millions of the Fortune 5 million, as it were, of smaller businesses. And the culture of Oracle,
Starting point is 00:18:41 which is about building these powerful systems. Our first ad, We did a billboard because everybody in 2000 did a billboard, and our billboard was a baby and a fighter jet. So this notion of kind of mashing up this ease of use with this incredible power. So I think that our culture really played off of that, that we needed to have a culture that was very approachable for smaller companies. They don't necessarily want this sort of hard-driving enterprise culture, but also needed to be scalable. We were obviously planning to build a big company and reach. We wanted to reach tens of thousands, you know, hundreds of thousands.
Starting point is 00:19:13 now, you know, hundreds of thousands ultimately of businesses. So, you know, I think the vision and the mission and just kind of staying true to who our customers were and really sort of mirroring our customers is what I think led to a great culture that lives on today. But it's difficult to attract the right employees. I mean, it's different today. You're established brand, but at the time, no one knew you. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:19:35 Well, you know, there's always people that want to take a leap. And I think, you know, I mean, Silicon Valley was immersed in the inner. internet and so I think it was easy to explain it was easier to explain what we were doing it kind of just makes sense and you just show someone how it works and they're like oh yeah that's probably how application should be for at least the next thousand years so that was sort of helpful to attract some you know amazing people into the organization and certainly if you treat your employees right and you make sure that they're you know they're motivated that they you know can work the way they want to work and that they're learning and that they feel a sense of purpose you know
Starting point is 00:20:12 it's just like a product. Your company is sort of a product in some sense and you want them to recommend it to a friend or colleague just like you want your product to be recommended. So that's certainly a part of growing your company is just the word of them up you get from, you know, hiring great employees, treating them like the great employees they are and making them feel at home and motivated to succeed. That's how you can build up an organization. So you said that one of the most important things you have learned while building NETSRETA, how important it is that you can make changes, necessary changes, even though it might be painful.
Starting point is 00:20:48 So how do we build a negotiation where the right people have the right information, the right time, and the right authority to make those perhaps painful changes that needs to be done? You know, you need the visibility, first of all, so you need to know what's happening in your business. I talk about knowing, you know, past, precedent and future, knowing what's happened historically,
Starting point is 00:21:07 what's happening right now, and being able to visualize trends that indicate what might happen in the future. So it starts with that. So you have the visibility into what might happen. And then as you see it happening, you have to respond. And so that's where agility comes in. And everybody talks about agile, actual software development, agile everything.
Starting point is 00:21:28 And, you know, it can't be emphasized enough that you need to be able to respond to things that are happening that you see out there in the world. And there's a real tension. There's definitely a tension between making sure you're staying on mission, on vision, going towards your sort of true north, and the tension between that and responding to things that you're seeing in the marketplace. But you don't want to get diverted.
Starting point is 00:21:50 And so, you know, in growing our company, I think, you know, it's definitely part of leadership to be able to identify those times that you do need to pivot and then identifying those times where it's best not to pivot. It's just leadership. You know, it's interesting you would say that, New Smith of Google. He said, you know, the best companies that can die from, from having too many opportunities instead of too few. How do you see that North Star?
Starting point is 00:22:15 How do you see that process of being true to what you want to achieve and not being diverted into shining new items like all entrepreneurs can be? Yeah, it takes some degree of courage because you'll get some amazing opportunities, huge customers that will come along and they'll try to get you going where they want to go. And the allure of the big customer and the big deal is one that's hard to resist.
Starting point is 00:22:38 And sometimes it's the right thing to do. A lot of what we had to do in building NetSuite was figure out how to sort of mitigate the fact that some of our biggest customers could potentially take us into directions that we didn't want to go. And I think is trying to figure out a way that you can be flexible. And that may involve developing a partner channel or partners that can extend what you have. And this could be, this is not just in software, in anything. Partnerships are incredibly important. Partners can be a critical part of addressing some of these needs that are going to bring a bunch of resources into your company. without getting off your path towards what your true North start.
Starting point is 00:23:14 So the solution is different in every case, but obviously that's the major balance that you have to have. And every company obviously struggles, which making sure they can get funded, they can invest in what they want to do in the long term, but you also want to stay on track and on point. I mean, I think at the end of the day, the focus is the most important thing,
Starting point is 00:23:39 and I would always argue that entrepreneurs should ultimately weigh staying on track and avoid things that risk going off-trop. So could you please elaborate more on your decision-making process? By definition, we don't know what would have happened if we made another decision. And your job today is to make big decisions. How do you use other people as a sounding board? How do you think for yourself about the right solution to a problem that you're facing? Well, you know, no person is an island.
Starting point is 00:24:12 And I, you know, certainly if I look at the growth of NetSuite and what's made us successful, a lot of it has been that we've built a lot of the company by consensus. It's not by committee. That's different. That's, you know, you take a vote. But by consensus is, you know, ultimately a leader has to decide. But a leader that does this in a vacuum is going to fail. And there's so many resources out there.
Starting point is 00:24:32 I mean, great resources for me. For me, was Larry. And, you know, we generally did what Larry says. not maybe on the exact time frame that he said it, but he was always really incredibly supportive saying you're there every day running that business and I don't see everything that you see. And I know it's terrifically hard to make some of these sort of wrenching, wrenching changes. You know, so at the end of the day, I do think it's getting all the data in from all the stakeholders, being really willing to listen, knowing when you might be wrong, but, you know, also having that
Starting point is 00:25:04 persistence to stick with something that you truly know is right. And again, it comes down to that focus. When people try to distract you, give you advice about getting off track, you know, you really have to come back to that center of what you're really trying to do in the world. And this is true for for for for for profit companies, for, you know, social enterprises, organizations that are trying to do great things in the world. I mean, always come back to why you started in the first place of what you were trying to accomplish. And I think that's where success comes from. Interesting. So if you look at the tech industry, they had some very charismatic leaders. your bouquet, your base of,
Starting point is 00:25:36 Larry Ellison comes to mind. And they're taking the company from their humble beginning into a billion-dollar companies. You have gone through that journey yourself personally and professionally. Which skills would you have to acquire along the way in which faces?
Starting point is 00:25:50 Oh, I mean, well, for me, I mean, I was only three years into running my own company. You know, I was like, you know, 30 years old. That's old now for an entrepreneur, but back then it was relatively young. You know, there's so much you learn all the way. And again, a lot of it is about mentors, I had a great mentor in Larry, I had a great board, people that could advise me and make liberal use of that. Only so much time you have in a day, but time that you spend with someone who's seen the type of thing that you've seen before is time really, really, really, really well spent.
Starting point is 00:26:24 And so as I said, you know, I think it's ultimately, it devolves on you to make the hard decisions. And no one is going to care about it more than you. I mean, I'm still at NetSuite because we care about it very, very deeply. I mean, I like working at Oracle, but people say, you know, well, you know, once you're bought by Oracle, why didn't you go off into the sunset? It's because I truly, truly care about what we do. I really believe in it. I think we have so much more left to do.
Starting point is 00:26:48 And that, to me, is what it's really all about. I mean, that was our vision. Our vision wasn't a dollar figure or a number of users or whatever. Our vision was changing the world in our own way. How do you think about opportunity cost? the sense that you only have so limited time. There are skills you would like to acquire. It's tempting to delegate things because you don't have time, but then again, you need to keep on developing as a human being. How do you see that? Well, I mean, it's definitely got to
Starting point is 00:27:17 figure out the things you're not going to learn and that you're not going to do. And, you know, one of the things for me is that I programmed for a very large history of NetSuite. I mean, one of the things because it kept me really, really close to the technology. I loved doing it. You know, it became less and less of the amount of time I could do it, but that was something that I was not, you know, I was not going to easily give up. And I think in the early days, I had a big impact on the organization with that role. But at the end of the day, you've got to figure out which are the things that someone else should be doing because you can't do everything. And, you know, as someone that's an expert in a particular area, I mean, a lot of great entrepreneurs didn't necessarily
Starting point is 00:27:54 grow up as general managers, you know, some may have. But a lot of them grew up doing, doing it, you know, really being in there and seeing what worked and what didn't work and having a great idea. And so if you're one of those people, like for me, it was programming. I started as a programmer when I was a kid and that's why all my, you know, company is really built out of programming. When you know something very, very deeply, I think that helps you recognize other people that know something very, very deeply. And I think identifying that talent, not necessarily understanding everything that they do, but identifying that those people are as good at what they do as what you do and letting them go and do their job is absolutely critical
Starting point is 00:28:35 because absolutely you can't do everything and you can't learn everything. But then figuring out the areas that you are actually the expert in. And for me, I really, you know, I was an expert in how to develop NetSuite. So even when I stopped programming, I stayed very involved in how, and remained very involved in how we develop NetSuite because that's an area that I know so deeply. And ultimately, you build a great team of people that are experts in their area that you trust that you believe in and you let them go and do what they have to do. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination.
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Starting point is 00:32:12 investing, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. This and other information can be found in the income fund fund's prospectus at fundrise.com slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right, back to the show. So you've been mentored by, you know, Larry Erison, you had fantastic mentors in your career. What would your piece of advice be for next generation entrepreneurs who might also be looking for a mentor? That's a good question. I mean, obviously you should be looking for them your old career from sort of from day one. And there's a lot of things that go into that mentorship. I mean, you obviously need to have chemistry. I mean, it's any relationship in your life.
Starting point is 00:32:56 You obviously have to have an enormous amount of respect, but you have to see that they respect you and that you kind of each sort of grok each other. And so I think it's just a process of just being out there, you know, get out of your hole or whatever, you know, your cube or your table or whatever. Get out in the world. And, you know, you don't know where it's going to come from.
Starting point is 00:33:19 And it might not even be in the same industry. I definitely hear stories of people with mentors in completely different industries, you know, and that's not going to suffice. You're going to need people that understand very, very deeply what you do. But a lot of times, some of the hardest decisions are people decisions, and you might find people in other industries that have, you know, you might find people in the military. You might find people, you know, that are teachers.
Starting point is 00:33:43 I mean, you might find people or principals of schools or whatever, what have you, to have amazing people experience. And ultimately, as I said, leadership, you know, is, so much of it is attracting, retaining great people, getting them to be working towards that same vision and mission towards that same North Star. So mentorship in that regard can come from a lot of different places. Which piece of advice would you give yourself if you have to go back to 1998 whenever you founded NetSuite? Chill out. It's all going to be fine. I look back and, you know, I look back more and not so much what I
Starting point is 00:34:22 wish I hadn't done, but what I'm happy that I did. And I think this is the most important advice I can give everybody is that success is fantastic, but only because you're delivering on the sort of promise that you made yourself to make a difference in the world and make a dent in the universe, what have you. And so I think staying focused on the little victories, you know, the first customer, the 10th customer, the 100th customer in some sense is more important than the thousands of customer and will probably have a bigger impact on you. That first time you see the product that you built make a difference in people's lives is way more important, really at the end of the day, that it's a million people. I mean, that's, you know, our brains did not evolve to even
Starting point is 00:35:07 understand what a million people is. I mean, so it's a million people use your product or a billion people use your product. I mean, we tell the numbers all the time. But at the end of the day, you know, what's most satisfying is the one person that you're with, that you're seeing that's using the product and is telling you how it's made an impact on life. And the first one that does that in some sense is the most impactful. So I guess appreciating all the milestones along the way, because you're never done. And, you know, for anybody that's an entrepreneur, you know, it's like, you know, it's just like the Golden State Warriors. You know, they win a championship and then they're like, they celebrate for, you know, Bob Myers. I talked to Bob Myers. He's like, yeah, I celebrate for like an hour.
Starting point is 00:35:45 And then I'm like, what are we going to do? You know, what are we going to do next year? And so, realize that that is going to happen. And if you can take the time, especially in the early days, to really appreciate those initial victories, because that's as big as anything you'll ever do, no matter how big your product or service becomes. You are extremely successful and have worked with extremely successful people. And I know I'm just putting you on the spot here, but how much is luck and how much is skill in your experience?
Starting point is 00:36:13 Luck has a huge impact. and, you know, that I landed at Oracle and I met Larry Ellison and we hit it off and we, you know, had some similar thoughts about what to do. I mean, you know, that my business was sort of failing at the time that Larry had this idea that we needed to deliver software over the web. I mean, that's serendipity. You know, if my business was sort of succeeding in a couple years later, I realized that, you know, someone else may have started NetSuite. And so there's a ton of luck. And nevertheless, you know, being a lot of money. out there, working hard, and kind of just keeping your eyes open about what's happening in the
Starting point is 00:36:51 world. I mean, that's going to only help you get that luck. Fantastic. Evan Goldberg, thank you so much for making yourself available for the Investors Podcast. Thank you very much for having me. Thanks for listening to TIP. To access the show notes, courses, or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. To get your questions played on the show, go to AsktheInvesters.com and win a free subscription to any of our courses on TIP Academy. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making investment decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the TIP network.
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