The Accounting Podcast

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Evan Goldberg: [00:00:00] Yeah, that's a great question. Well, we of course, look at our analytics of our customer base and we have something called a Suite Score. And you've heard it, you heard it here first. I don't think I've ever told anybody outside of NetSuite that this thing exists. And it is, you know, it's something that just looks at and we don't look at your data like your actual data, but we can tell what modules you've turned on, what things you're you're using.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:26] This episode of The Cloud Accounting Podcast was recorded at the Oracle NetSuite SuiteWorld Conference in September of 2022. To learn more about NetSuite and the SuiteWorld Conference visit NetSuiteSuiteWorldCom. All right. We are live at SuiteWorld in Las Vegas. I'm Blake Oliver.

David Leary: [00:00:48] I'm David Leary.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:49] And this is The Cloud Accounting Podcast.

David Leary: [00:00:51] And it's our first interview at NetSuite's SuiteWorld Conference. 2022 is the year, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:00:57] That's right. It's great to be back. We are here with Evan Goldberg, founder, CEO of NetSuite. So great to see you.

Evan Goldberg: [00:01:05] Well, I'm proud to be your first interviewee.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:08] Oh, you know, the first normally it's the best is last saved the best for last. But we're doing the.

Evan Goldberg: [00:01:13] Nicer, nicer cover.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:16] Well, and I know that we are. I think the last thing between you and happy hour, that's for all of us. So let's get right to it, shall we?

Evan Goldberg: [00:01:24] Absolutely.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:25] So I have a question. David, do you mind if I go first? First? Okay. You know, Evan, it's been a long day. You've had a lot going on. So let's talk about what gets you excited, What gets you up in the morning? What are you excited about at NetSuite right now?

Evan Goldberg: [00:01:38] Well, this morning I was excited about the prospect of not plunging off the stage when I rode a bike onto the stage. So that was exciting this morning on a day to day basis. What gets me excited is just continuing to address our customers needs because there's such awesome companies. I mean, I hope you've gotten a chance to meet some of them since you've been here. You know, just amazing companies doing amazing stuff and, you know, for profit companies, not for profit companies. And that's what inspires me. And I know I can help them or we can help them accomplish their goals quicker and more effectively.

David Leary: [00:02:12] So we'll get into all the new features that you announced this morning. But what I loved about when you were going through the features is how you tie them. Every single feature you release, you show. It's tied back to the financials and that's being accounting people and accounting nerds. Like it's exciting, but how do you get your team to focus like that and deliver it to the end? Because it's easy just to shove a feature in and then it never not saying, I know any accounting package that might do this, but our listeners definitely know these kind of packages. They'll add features, you know, it doesn't really integrate with anything. How do you keep your team focused before you release something?

Evan Goldberg: [00:02:40] Right. Well, we have a term for it. It's called sweetness. And, you know, it helps that the company name is NetSuite, so it's kind of hard for them to forget. But we still have to keep driving at home because, yeah, it's easy. Just like in companies, it's easy to operate in silos. It's easy for product designers to operate in a silo. But we've certainly built a culture at NetSuite that that's job number one for everything to work seamlessly together, because we see that as really our differentiator against other solutions that say, okay, we'll integrate with Product A for this and product B for that.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:14] And one of the reasons we love speaking with you, Evan, is because you are an engineer at heart. That's your origin story, right? You coated the original NetSuite, which is unusual for an executive running one of these types of companies. And so we love to talk to you about the actual features because, you know, you know them very well, right? So there were quite a few that were announced today. Do you have a favorite?

Evan Goldberg: [00:03:36] Well, this probably won't be the engineer in me. This may be more the other side of the house. Ap Automation is the thing that's going to have the biggest impact over the widest array of companies. You know, the other two of them were sort of more aimed at product companies. And as I said, the world is a hybrid world where, you know, businesses, but still, you know, I think they were all a bit narrower in terms of who they're going to help. The shift scheduling, scheduling, time and attendance stuff is for companies that have hourly employees. But as I said in the keynote, everybody has to deal with AP. So I guess that's probably the one. And again, not from an engineering perspective necessarily, though there was plenty of interesting engineering and doing the OCR and the matching. I think that's the one that gets me most excited.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:18] Because has the broadest applicability a space. Gotcha. So this builds on top of suite banking, right. Which was announced last year. Tell us more about the API automation. What what will it help me do as a controller on suite?

Evan Goldberg: [00:04:32] Yeah, you know, as you know, depending on the size of your company, it'll either make things easier for you or it'll make things easier for people that work for you, which is a good thing. And either in either case, you know, I think the quote today from one of the design partners that we had, a customer that we worked with in designing API automation, that he was confident and he put real numbers to it, that he was going to be 45% automated, going to 95, going to 95% automated, suggest that he planned to take advantage of that by having his people work on more value add, whether it be more strategic things or various things in finance that have, you know, important but not urgent things that they've not been able to focus on because of just the manual drudgery of dealing dealing with.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:19] Ap And when you say manual drudgery, we're talking about taking that bill and manually entering it into the system. Ap Automation Now, based on what I saw. Will Well, I just drag and drop the the bill.

Evan Goldberg: [00:05:33] Or you can have it sent into an email and have the tell your vendor, send it to this email address from now on and it will be automatically scanned and entered into.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:41] The system. So you scan it, you OCR it, you pull in all the key data and then I can process it.

Evan Goldberg: [00:05:47] Yeah, there's a review step and we're going to keep working on the AI behind the, the, the OCR, so that that review step becomes more and more minor and, and in certain cases you'll be able to be able to skip it. But you know, we're obviously you want to get it right. Yeah. You don't want to be paying the wrong amount your vendor's not a good way to run a business so we're just making sure that we have the checks and balances and the approvals that we do the right thing. But still so still eliminating a bunch of work.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:16] Well that's that's good that you have those controls in place.

David Leary: [00:06:18] Because eliminating apps.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:19] Eliminating apps.

David Leary: [00:06:21] Because I mean, if you think about like how you really like to build your own ERP, like stacking apps, the app stack, the tech stack you're getting, that's three or four apps. Yeah. And and ultimately and I still think like accounts payable Bill pay like the natural home for that is in the accounting system and now it is you don't to do any of.

Evan Goldberg: [00:06:38] Bill pay into the accounting system than bill accounting into the bill pay system. I mean that's at least my observation.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:44] Well we've seen banks try to build accounting into there into you know.

Evan Goldberg: [00:06:47] And we and we saw how that worked.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:51] Yeah. We're in that situation right now with, you know, our business. Right. We have a separate bill document processing app. And I have to remember to go in there before I reconcile. And it's kind of a pain.

David Leary: [00:07:01] Just going back to the suite. Maybe we can talk about that for a second. Last year, obviously, Kevin O'Leary. Mr. Wonderful. And we can say it, you know, on Shark Tank, right here he is. He was the keynote speaker this year, a problem. And he said everything come after you. He said, everything is in everything business. Right. And I think some of the customers you had today and really every single customer you you showcase here isn't everything business. They have services and their e commerce. And even I look at our business and I'm like, wow, we offer like five or six different things. Now we're in everything business and But that's been your march since day one. Do you kind of feel like a genius now that, like the rest of the business world is caught up to your vision of the way accounting should be done?

Evan Goldberg: [00:07:41] Well, I would say, you know, initially, you know, what we seemed like a genius about was the cloud, because no one else had done it yet. And and there was a lot of skepticism. And then people sort of caught up there and that was not as much of a differentiator for us. That's when we started thinking about and we had already, because one of the reasons, I think, is because we were early to the cloud and basically we attracted so many different types of businesses because they were just the kind of forward looking businesses, whatever they did, we ended up serving so many different types. And then so when we looked and we said, okay, what's what's our differentiator now? I mean, obviously the suite was our are always big, but really we looked at our customer base and we saw, wow, we have a lot of product companies and we've done a lot for them. We have a lot of service companies, we've done a lot for them, and now we're just starting to see inklings of companies that are trying to do both. But it was probably ten years ago that the CEO of NetSuite, Zac Nelson, said product companies are becoming service companies and service companies are becoming product companies. And so, you know, for almost half of the history of the company, that's been kind of a mantra. And now it's sort of obvious. I mean, you know, you look at practically every company you can think of, they're doing everything right.

David Leary: [00:08:57] And e-commerce and.

Evan Goldberg: [00:08:58] Yeah, yeah, they're doing it. I mean, and they they're if they, if they have a product, they're like, but we're having a value added service that we sell as a subscription on top of this. And, and if they have a service they, they're like, well you know, you can use our service better if you buy this, you know, a piece of hardware, you know, whatever it is.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:14] So and we saw some of those new features today. Cpq is one that really a lot of times when we talk about accounting features, it's kind of hard to visualize, right? It's it's hard to have a visual to go with it. But you had a great one where it's somebody creating a quote for a customer and building a desk and putting together all the different pieces to get that quote. And as I understand it, with the new CPQ feature, which it's quote, configure in price, that's what those initials are for. I could connect that to my e-commerce site where I can actually have my e commerce site built on NetSuite and a customer could go in and configure what they want, get the price and buy it. And then it goes out to my manufacturing assembly plan.

Evan Goldberg: [00:09:57] I mean, the first thing we're releasing is, is for sales reps. But Veronika had a e commerce solution and we're just, you know, deliberately releasing these as NetSuite products. But it's a good point that when I try to explain CPQ, the simplest way to do it is say, you know how when you want to buy a car and you go in and it says build your X, well, that's configure pricing quote right there.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:20] Okay. So right now it's for sales reps to use it, but you're planning to automate your planning to make it self service too.

Evan Goldberg: [00:10:26] I mean, that's that'd be a better question. I don't know the exact time frame of when we're doing that, but it's absolutely our intention. Okay.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:34] Yeah. And then you also had Ship Central, which was announced. So tell me about what what that does.

Evan Goldberg: [00:10:42] Yeah, well, I mean, we've spent a lot of time on s warehouse management, which, you know, initially the first thing you do is just picking and have the optimal route to find, you know, your items, make sure that your items are optimally put into bins so that it's easy, that sort of stuff, and picking in waves. So, you know, that process, we'd really spend a lot of time optimizing. What happens after that was sort of the next thing that our customers are saying, okay, great. It's now a lot easier for us to pick items in the warehouse. Now, can you make it easier, easier for us to pack and ship them? And they really wanted sort of a one place, you know, on the tablet or on a kiosk that the people in the shipping part of the warehouse could just go to and see what do I have to do and and optimize it so there's fewer steps for them to complete. And one of the things that I thought, you know, was really most interesting was just, you know, a lot of companies, you know, margins are getting tough. I mean, you have higher costs and you're trying not to pass them on to your customers.

Evan Goldberg: [00:11:44] And one of the ways to do that is to just do just do things more efficiently so you don't necessarily have to do that. And this idea that you could save money by optimizing how you pack things and putting them in one box instead of having to put shipping labels on to boxes and all those things, they, you know, like my wife likes to say about the credit card statement where I'm like, how could it add up to that? That's impossible. And she's like, you know, it all adds up. All those little things add up. And so that's, you know, we're at a point now where we're trying to look at some of those things that maybe, you know, you look at one individual interaction and it might not save you that much. But when you look at the quantity of times, you're doing it as your business scales. And that's a typical thing that happens with businesses. They scale. They're like those things that they didn't worry about before you. After you actually look at it, you're like, Wow, it really does add up to a big amount of hours.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:29] Well, and that's really important for the customers you're serving because they're up against behemoths like Amazon, right. Which do have that incredible efficiency built in already. And you're giving them, you know, a fighting chance.

Evan Goldberg: [00:12:41] Yeah. I mean, they have advantages, obviously, over Amazon, you know, being able to, you know, be a more sort of bespoke have a more bespoke relationship with their customers. But you're exactly right that they at least want to minimize, you know, some of the costs that that they have that that that a bigger competitor might not have.

David Leary: [00:13:01] It's one things you guys not say you haven't it's not really an incubator, but kind of as an incubator, it's an accelerator for new startups. So you're getting them privacy funding now you're starting to have relationships.

Evan Goldberg: [00:13:11] Well, we, we're mostly focused on getting them NetSuite. We're helping them with also with sort of pro bono. We call it pro bono beyond. So not only are we giving some of these minority owned businesses business from underrepresented communities, giving them a version of NetSuite as they get started, We have employees that can help them implement it on a pro bono basis, and we have help that some of our other talented people at NetSuite can give them on a sort of volunteer basis. So this is really just an extension of our social impact program that we've done. And it's just to try to that we've done for non for profits for years. This is really about these are for profit businesses and they have big plans and we expect them to be great customers for that suite in the future. It's really just getting them early access to stuff that they normally might have to be a little bit bigger before they'd be able to take advantage of it.

David Leary: [00:14:04] So it's like coaching, mentoring, training, that type of thing.

Evan Goldberg: [00:14:07] And that suite itself.

David Leary: [00:14:08] And is there a cash as well, Is that right? I wasn't clear.

Evan Goldberg: [00:14:11] Well, that was it for today for the pitch competition. That was something that was donated by Silicon Hills and that wasn't something that we provided. I think I remember exactly the prizes we gave. We gave. But there was definitely, you know, that was that was prizes for today's.

David Leary: [00:14:25] For the contest.

Evan Goldberg: [00:14:26] But for the accelerator itself, that certainly will be a component of it. I mean, I think we have in our employee base, they are really eager to see diversity in our customers and see businesses from underrepresented groups succeed and they're motivated to help.

David Leary: [00:14:44] You have two slides today that went back to back here. This one slide that was this you call it the Bird's Nest, and it's just like.

Evan Goldberg: [00:14:49] I think I call it the the Hairball.

David Leary: [00:14:51] The hairball. I call it the Bird's Nest. Yeah. Misquoted you? Well, we might sue me I of the hair.

Evan Goldberg: [00:14:56] Hairball for a year. People know that hairball to change it up.

David Leary: [00:14:59] It's a hairball. And that's your current systems and processes. And the next slide you bring up is like this perfectly organized net sweep of all 20 of the. It's called marketing, right? And it's beautiful. But to do that, it's not as easy as just switching a slide. So and we understand it's work, but what is NetSuite doing to help people make that transition? Yeah, that's great.

Evan Goldberg: [00:15:16] That's a great question. And one of the biggest things we've done is changed how NetSuite is packaged. And this is something we've learned over many years. And what we used to do with customers is we kind of build this facade in a demo that we'd show them in the sales cycle and it would look really shiny and it would look great. But there was really sort of nothing behind it. And then once they bought and this is. Very, very typical for software implementations and software sales and implementations. Then once they bought, that's all gone. You have a blank sheet of paper. What do you want us to do? You know, what do you what do we need to automate for you? And then we end up to some degree trying to automate the hairball. But that's not what you want to do. It's really an opportunity because you really do want it to be the last ERP upgrade you ever do. It really is an opportunity to take a look at your processes and see how they can be better. And yes, there are things that are unique to your business and absolutely we need to automate those things. But there's a ton of more stuff that is very much like what other businesses in your same industry are doing.

Evan Goldberg: [00:16:23] And so what we've done with suite success is packaged those sort of best practices together. First of all, that's what we show you in the sales cycle and that's what we start with when we do your implementation. And so you don't get the surprise of all, you know, that's where cost overruns on software implementation start is when you just try to say boil the ocean. Instead, we say, okay, we know that these things have worked for other companies like you. Let's take a look at them and see if they'll work for you. And usually the answer is eight out of ten or nine out of ten will. And then this is when. No, we do this uniquely. Okay, let's focus our effort and energy on that one and make sure it's targeted to you. So that's one of the ways I think that we've been able to make it look like a lot prettier picture than it would otherwise if we just said, Hey, how do you do it before? We'll just kind of make it work the same way again. But now on that suite.

David Leary: [00:17:14] I think I'll take this last question because he's been asking this to me and he wonders and I'll let you go with, oh, I don't.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:19] Know what what question you.

David Leary: [00:17:21] The one about the how who how much of the suite is.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:25] Somebody using? Yes, well, actually, I'm going to rephrase it. So to your question, let's imagine that the suite is a progress bar and your vision is, as I understand it, is one app to run your whole business. How far has that progress bar gone?

Evan Goldberg: [00:17:40] Yeah, that's a great question. Well, we of course, look at our analytics of our customer base and we have something called a suite score. And you've heard it, you heard it here first. I don't think I've ever told anybody outside of NetSuite that this thing exists. And it is, you know, it's something that just looks at and we don't look at your data like your actual data, but we can tell what modules you've turned on, what things you're you're using. And and again, we do this on a on a non on a really on a customer by customer base. But we look at it more in aggregate to see what the trends are and what different industries, for example, how much of the suite is used by this industry versus another industry. So we actually have really good visibility. I mean, I can give you a great example and this will be not a shocker to you guys in software. Typically our customers don't use SFA from NetSuite. They typically use Salesforce.com in product companies. On the other hand, love our SFA because it's very, very tightly tied sort of to the order management cycle and inventory and things like that. And that's the type of stuff we see. So different industries use the suite differently and you know, we're just constantly trying to query that and see what can we do better in this industry, how can we have them use more of it? Because we truly do believe that you get exponential value. You know, the hairball gets untangled the more you use of it of NetSuite.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:02] Well, Evan, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us. Any final questions, David, before.

David Leary: [00:19:07] We go any.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:08] More, if people want to follow what you're up to online, do you do social media? Do you?

Evan Goldberg: [00:19:13] I believe we do social media. I think we're I think we're that advanced. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, we have you can do LinkedIn, Facebook, wherever you want to go and of course NetSuite dot com.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:25] At NetSuite. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your conference.

Evan Goldberg: [00:19:29] Thanks so much. Thanks for being here. And thanks for having me.

David Leary: [00:19:32] Thanks a.