Evan Goldberg of NetSuite: 3 decades and 2 platform shifts
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There's no doubt that AI is going to be able to help synthesize data and harmonize data across multiple systems help. But just like human beings, it's fraught with difficulty. What a sale means in one system, what a customer means in one system, they can be really different and it's going to be hard even for AI to figure that out. But I used to liken it to like Cell phones. Did cell phones make it easier to talk to someone from France? No, because you still didn't know French.
Good evening everyone and welcome to HG's inaugural North American Office of the CFO dinner. Looking around this room tonight, I'm shocked and very impressed by the firepower that we've been able to assemble. We've gathered founders, CEOs, and C-level execs from every corner of the Office of the CFO, spanning from FP&A, accounting, tax, treasury, audit, close management, you name it, we've got it here in this room. And to put some numbers on it, we have a few empty seats, but when they fill up, we've got about 30 companies representing, without NetSuite, 2 billion in annual revenue, representing roughly 20 billion in enterprise value and 10,000 employees. That's pretty impressive. For HG, the office of the CFO is one of our most impressive and successful clusters or themes.
Over 20 years, we've made 30 investments representing almost $30 billion. And we have portfolio companies spanning from Lucanet, Empyrean here, Profix, and then most recently our take private of OneStream. A huge thank you to the Oracle team who's helped put together this evening. And so that brings me to our guest of honor tonight, someone who needs no introduction, but I will do so anyway. Evan Goldberg, co-founded NetSuite in 1998. He pioneered cloud-based business software long before SaaS was even a term. He has a very unique vantage point, having founded the business, scaled the business, sold the business to Oracle for over $9 billion, and then stayed at the helm for the subsequent decade. Today, NetSuite represents over 40,000 organizations and is running at a 4 billion annualized revenue run rate.
Evan will share some of his perspectives on AI in the office of the CFO. And so with that, I'm delighted to introduce Evan.
Thank you for having me. Thank you, everybody, for coming.
So Evan, I'd love to talk about the founding story. You're in a room full of founders who've all had that spark, that moment where an idea turns into an obsession. So let's talk a little bit about that famous phone call. So it's rumored that in 1998 you had a call with Larry Ellison, and obviously you'd worked with him for several years before as an engineer at Oracle. I left
Oracle when the internet sort of launched in 1995. It was really the year that it took off. And I'd always wanted to start a software company. And I knew that from an early age. So that seemed like the right moment. I'd had a bunch of experience from Oracle. So I started a company called Embed Software, which was dedicated to help build really interactive websites with animation and sound. and graphics. Those of you that are old enough to remember the product Flash, which was in the early days of the internet how everybody made their, that was a competitor of ours. It was a small company also that ended up getting bought ultimately by Adobe. And that kind of took the wind out of our sails with their marketing capabilities.
So after about three years, and Larry had helped me in this company, which was unusual, but we had a great relationship at Oracle. And so he decided to sort of stick with me. But he didn't really care about this stuff. It was just not in his sort of wheelhouse. So he'd always call me and say, how's your graphics stuff going? That's what he called it, my graphics stuff.
How did Evan Goldberg’s five‑minute call with Larry Ellison spark the creation of NetSuite?
I'm like, my graphics stuff is not going great. We're getting killed by this product flash now that's really becoming standard, even though we have customers that love us, but I don't think we can make it a ghost. But you've got to just pick yourself up and try again. So I learned a lot being the CEO of a mammoth 15-person software company.
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