Larry's Kids

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It was during this early phase that Goldberg was stunned to learn that his friend and former colleague at Oracle, Marc Ben-ioff, had decided to target the same market. "He came in three months after we started NetLedger and sheepishly said, 'Yeah, I'm doing a company. I'm going to do sales-force automation for small businesses delivered over the Web.' " It was precisely the plan Ellison had talked Goldberg out of pursuing. Benioff's business -- launched in 1999 with a $2 million investment from Ellison -- became SalesForce.com, which is now the market leader in the category and has a post-IPO market cap of $1.7 billion. "He went a different route," says Goldberg of Benioff, "with a different approach that allowed him to get to market quicker -- but focused on a more narrow area."

I've always allied myself with somebody who lives and breathes sales and marketing so I can live and breathe technology."
-Evan Goldberg

The news brought a heightened sense of urgency. By 2000, NetLedger had launched its Web-store application. By 2001, it had delivered its own sales-force-automation application. With that came the realization that it no longer made sense for Goldberg to serve as both CEO and chief technology officer. "My whole career," he says, "I've allied myself with somebody who lives and breathes sales and marketing so I can live and breathe the technology and product design." He knew he needed a professional CEO. His first choice lasted just a year and is now a VP at Intuit. After Goldberg dispatched a headhunter to try again, the executive recruiter sent an e-mail to virtually every executive at Intuit with a subject head reading: "Larry Ellison." The message said Ellison was starting a great company that was going to be huge. "I actually know some people over there," says Goldberg, "and Steve Bennett [the CEO] wrote me and said, 'Interesting way to recruit." Despite the aggressive approach, no successful candidates turned up.

In early 2002, Goldberg called Nelson. They had known each other at Oracle, and once they started talking, says Goldberg, "it was immediately apparent that this was exactly who I wanted -- he was the yin to my yang. And he gets into the company in a way that makes it really, really fun to work here."

Five years older than Goldberg, Nelson, 43, had already been on the scene in Silicon Valley when Goldberg arrived from the East. A graduate of Stanford, Nelson had bounced from Motorola to Sun Microsystems and eventually to Oracle, where he became VP of worldwide marketing at 31. But four years later, he left to join Network Associates, the security software company now known as McAfee. It was there that he morphed from marketing guy to chief executive, becoming CEO of McAfee's business-to-business online security firm MyCIO.com.

At McAfee, he developed a reputation for outlandish marketing stunts. It started with obtaining the naming rights for Oakland Coliseum, where the A's and Raiders play. Network Associates Coliseum proved to be an unpopular stadium name, but it was a marketing coup. In fact, the A's are now a NetSuite customer, and Nelson has already negotiated for ad space behind home plate. But he doesn't want to stop there. "Someday we'll have our own arena," he says. "That's my goal."

At MyCIO, Nelson pulled off another stunt, draping the company's entire 11-story building -- a la Christo -- in a billboard. "It was at the peak of the dot-com craziness," he says. "We broke every ordinance known to man. You could see it from five exits away. It was beautiful." Just before the company was set to go public, though, the bottom fell out of the market. So, here was Nelson, a former Oracle marketing whiz with CEO experience, looking for a new gig. And he had one other important advantage. Goldberg knew that any CEO he brought in would have to pass a crucial test: the Larry test. "And that's a relatively high bar," says Goldberg. "But Zach obviously had had a lot of exposure to Larry [at Oracle]."

While Ellison rarely sets foot in the offices at NetSuite, he is a constant presence. The background image on Nelson's PC is a photograph of Ellison at the helm of his America's Cup boat. "When Larry calls," says Nelson, "everything stops."

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