Hearing from changemakers and innovative leaders can inspire students to become the leaders of tomorrow.

In this episode, Evan Goldberg, NetSuite founder and Oracle Executive Vice President, speaks with Oracle Academy Vice President, William McCabe, about what it’s like to be a leader today, and the skills students need to succeed.

As NetSuite celebrates its 25th anniversary as the first cloud company, Evan will also talk about the challenges of being the disrupter and what he thinks is next for the technology industry.

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Episode Transcript:

00;00;09;03 - 00;00;35;03 

Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps prepare our next generation's workforce. 

  

00;00;35;17 - 00;01;00;04 

I'm your host, Tyra Crockett Peirce and this special two part episode of the Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast. Oracle Academy Vice President Willie McCabe speaks with Oracle Executive Vice President and NetSuite founder Evan Goldberg on what it's like to be a creator and leader and the skills students need to succeed as they become the technology innovators of the future. 

  

00;01;00;12 - 00;01;33;01 

Hello, everybody. Welcome to our Oracle Academy Fireside chat with Oracle EVP. NetSuite Founder, Evan Goldberg. I'm Oracle Academy Vice President Willie McCabe, and I'll be your host for today. Evan and I will focus our discussion on net suite key qualities of leadership and skills. Students need to succeed in today's workforce. As Net Suite celebrates its 25 year anniversary as a first cloud company. 

  

00;01;33;13 - 00;02;14;13 

Evan and I will also talk about the challenge of being a disruptor and what he thinks is next for the technology industry. A little bit about our guest, Evan Goldberg, Executive Vice President, Oracle NetSuite, Global Business Unit. Evan leads the Oracle next week, Global Business Unit. He and his team are responsible for the product strategy, development and delivery of next week's Unified Business Management Suite, encompassing ERP, financials, CRM, e-commerce and many more. 

  

00;02;15;03 - 00;02;50;15 

In 1998, Evan co-founded NetSuite, and as mentioned, it was the first cloud computing company ushering in a new era of cloud computing. Prior to Oracle's acquisition of NetSuite, Evan was CTO and chairman of the next Suite board, and before founding that suite, he spent eight years at Oracle Corporation as a vice president. Credit He was involved in a variety of projects, all focused on making powerful database technology more accessible to users. 

  

00;02;51;26 - 00;03;04;11 

Evan holds a B.A. and Summa Technology and Applied Mathematics from Harvard College. Welcome, Evan. Thank you for joining us today. 

  

00;03;04;24 - 00;03;05;19 

Thanks for having me. 

  

00;03;06;04 - 00;03;30;04 

We're all very privileged to have you join us and also to share your experiences. Today, we have an audience of faculty, students and colleagues from around the world joining us. And while I'm sure they all know you as a creator of NetSuite and for leading the Oracle Net Suite Global Business Unit today, we'd like to delve a little bit more into your thoughts around skills that students might need. 

  

00;03;31;07 - 00;03;43;09 

I'd like to start with some specific questions. First off, and I'm sure this is an easy one for you. Can you tell me a little bit more about your career path? 

  

00;03;43;10 - 00;04;26;03 

Yeah, well, I've always been interested in technology programing applications would have been a dream from an early age that someday I'd be able to use my programing skills and product design skills to build something that would make life easier for people. And I sort of fortunately, was very I've been very fortunate to be able to achieve that dream in that, you know, we now have nets, we helping, you know, tens of thousands of organizations and hundreds of thousands of people within those organizations achieve their whatever their dream is. 

  

00;04;26;18 - 00;04;57;24 

So the path hasn't been straight and narrow and narrow, but eventually got there through, you know, probably some luck and a lot of hard work. Yeah. You know, I came out of college. That's college on the East Coast, as you as you mentioned, and immediately moved out here to California, seeing that there sort of was a tectonic shift in our you know, just to use another metaphor, the center of gravity for the technology industry was rapidly moving west. 

  

00;04;58;14 - 00;05;25;26 

And I got connected with Oracle, actually from my sister, who was working in the financial industry at Fidelity and was investing in Oracle and was really high on their on their prospects, you know, really bullish about their prospects and said, if you're going to go out there, that's a company you should work for. This guy, Larry Ellison, he's going to change the industry. 

  

00;05;25;26 - 00;05;49;22 

So again, I was fortunate that she had that insight and that led me out here. I started in the database team at Oracle where I was working on sort of the core database software, and Larry kind of handpicked me to go in there over the objections of the management and were like, he doesn't even know see, which was the programing language that Oracle was built in. 

  

00;05;50;04 - 00;06;11;22 

And Larry said, Oh, he'll get a book. It's kind of like when I started that suite and I was getting an accounting book on the first day. But anyway, but actually I and this is a it was an important point in my career, I think, you know, I was always attracted, as I said to building applications that people will use to make their daily life easier. 

  

00;06;11;29 - 00;06;42;09 

And of course, at its core, Oracle does that. But I was so deep within the innards that I felt disconnected from users. And again, serendipity to some degree. Marc Benioff We ended up starting Salesforce.com and building got into a great company three months after we started. Next week, the second Cloud Company was starting a group to make Oracle available on the Mac and make it much easier to use and and build next generation kind of applications on top of Oracle. 

  

00;06;42;18 - 00;07;04;11 

And I was really attracted to that and I was torn which direction should I go? Because I felt like I was in this great position that was every was very desirable for programmers to be working in the group. It was called the kernel group at the time. Was I going to let that all go to test these new waters? 

  

00;07;04;11 - 00;07;23;16 

Who knows whether it would work out? I had no idea who this Marc Benioff character was, and Larry passed me in the hall one day and he said, I hear you're thinking about going to work in the Mac group. And I you know, he said, if I were if I were getting out of call, you know, just out of college, that's where I would go work right now. 

  

00;07;24;04 - 00;07;44;06 

So, of course, you know, when he was anointed with Hall and did that kind of comment. And so, you know, that steered me in a direction I think was a really good one. And and you can kind of follow the line from there, because I got very interested in making applications that people could use every day build on these powerful databases. 

  

00;07;45;00 - 00;08;07;00 

I did another start up soon after that that was sort of related to that, making websites easier to use. And so that that's kind of the you know, I can't say that I had the vision that eventually I'd be building next week, but, you know, I did at that moment when I made that choice, I was kind of steering my ship towards what I think was really my northstar all along. 

  

00;08;07;01 - 00;08;13;26 

So those moments are important moments when you got to think long term, you know, where where do you want to do. 

  

00;08;14;20 - 00;08;24;08 

The amazing and that decision to move from coast to coast was that that's a difficult decision at the time. 

  

00;08;24;08 - 00;08;58;17 

AH yeah. I mean, I didn't know anybody in California. Fortunately, the year before I came out to Oracle. One student from Harvard had gone to Oracle. Oracle had typically hired from MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Harvard wasn't. I mean, you know, people now think of Harvard, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, obviously, you know, great computer science department, etc.. But back then, it was very much a fledgling department and people didn't really people were like this Harvard even do computer science. 

  

00;09;00;09 - 00;09;28;18 

But fortunately, one one student came the year before and it worked out so that the next year Larry decided to basically hire half the graduating computer science class and a few other stragglers like me from applied math. So I had lots of my classmates coming out to California, and that helped. And it was a great culture at Oracle in those early years were only 900 people there, lots of them young recent college grads like myself. 

  

00;09;28;18 - 00;09;52;23 

So that sort of became the the family, because as I said, I didn't really know anybody anywhere else. So I you know, and that's sweet. I think we've some in some cases created that sort of environment. Pe