it's a pleasure and an honor to be here 1979 is 30 years ago now it's amazing how quickly the time goes I'd like to start by thanking RJ View for for the wonderful leadership you've had when I was a student here and also for sponsoring this event as and bringing CFOs just back to Stanford I'd also like to thank Jim Jim Van Horn who was one of my finance professors back at Stanford and is one of the reasons why I was I've been able to have a successful finance career and Jack I I tried to get into your class and it was oversubscribed because it was too popular but I hope I'll get a chance to take your class now now that I'm back in the valley sure I still have a lot to learn so just what a wonderful faculty and leadership you all have the privilege of having and I I'm very grateful to to you all for having giving me this education and the opportunity that I've had as Jack said what I'd like to do is to start by talking to you about how I got from being a graduate student to being the CFO at Oracle it's I would say a unique career path it was not at all direct and you'll get a chance to see that if we have time I'll talk more about a little bit more about Oracle and I'd be happy to spend a fair amount of time on questions I'll start with let's see if I can get this slide to work I'll start with something that when I was a student I would attend these sessions with executives and what I always wanted to know is what's the secret of your success how did how did you get to be successful so I'll tell a story of when I was a student I attended a session like this and the speaker was Baron de Rothschild of the Rothschild banking family and we asked what was the secret of your success to him and he said that when he was a small boy he lived in the country outside of Paris and he noticed he was always interested in business he noticed that there was a price difference between the price of products in the country compared to the city and so one day he bought an apple for one franc in the country and he went to school in the city so every day he'd go to the school in the city and that that day he sold the Apple for two francs because the price difference and the second day he had his two francs he bought two apples and he went to the city and he sold it for 4 francs the next day he bought 4 apples and he said he did that every day for six months until his great-uncle died and left him 900 million francs so the the that was a very important lesson for me let's let's move on to to my career I want to start when I was in college is to give you a sense of the environment that I was in as I as after jack and I spoke and I decided to write this presentation about my career I realized how important what was going on in the economy in the world was two decisions that I made in my career and the code here is things that are in blue on the right are things that were happening in the world things that are black and on the left is what I did in terms of my career so while I was in college I was very interested in news and information and politics Watergate happened and Nixon resigned essentially because of the reporting from Woodward Bernstein I read all the president's men I saw the movie I thought this was fascinating and I wondered could that be part of my career and I'll show you in a little while how it came back to that in 1975 Apple was founded down the road from here I had no idea that Apple existed but now of course we all know Apple but this was going on in the environment in Silicon Valley also in 1975 I don't know if you could recognize the guy in the bottom left Bill Gates starting Microsoft when they were very early on had never didn't hear Microsoft and night until later on actually I'll tell that story now in I was the class of 79 Steve Ballmer was the class of 1980 and you may have heard him or her he's been here but he during the summer during the summer at between between his two years he won both a BCG and a Bane award to try it for us to try to recruit him and I was at BCG and he turned us both down to join Microsoft and be the thirtieth employee of Microsoft and we just thought that that was the most silly decision that someone could possibly do to drop that to turn down BCG to drop out of Stanford Business School to go work for this little company know when it heard of and we all we all thought that Steve had made a terrible career mistake but I guess twenty billion dollars later it turns out he was he was writing and we didn't see the future fair enough for now so then 1975 I watched a lot of television when I was growing up I didn't realize how important cable television and satellite television was HBO which had been available locally put its signal on the satellite Jerry Levin who was running HBO was responsible for that ultimately became the CEO of Time Warner because of this business decision again I didn't know this was happening but it became important later on in my career so I was sort of in on the beginning of these I sir was vaguely aware of the personal computer industry of the cable television industry and in 1977 the man on the right is Larry Ellison founded Oracle and I didn't I had never heard of Oracle either so that brings me up to that was what happened while I was in college I went straight to from college to business school that's me on the left there I was a little younger and thinner back in 1979 with my dad and and then I thought about okay well how did I get from 1979 being that skinny young kid to where I am now and of course the shortest distance between two points is a straight line and I will describe how my career has not quite been a straight line so what did I do I went right out of business school just up the road to 2180 Sand Hill Road remember that address because it turns out to be important I was a consultant at the Boston Consulting Group wonderful experience I learned a lot worked in lots of different cases they had in college we had HP calculators they didn't have personal computer in college in business school didn't have computers at by the time I got to BCG we started to use computers and they invented this wonderful new software called busy calc which let us do spreadsheets and models and calculations and I thought this was terrific as now I didn't have to actually handwrite information on physical spreadsheets which is how we used to do things so I was I was beginning to understand a little bit about technology as a user because I had a liberal arts undergraduate degree and and was not did not have an IT background in 1981 while I was at BCG IBM launched the PC so we all got IBM pcs and we thought that was pretty interesting this is one of the early versions of the PC and so I was having fun working on these lots of different projects the one on the left is KGMB channel 9 Honolulu one of my clients was Lee Enterprises which owned that TV station and I was doing Studies on understanding the television station business the television programming business flying back and forth to Honolulu we worked on two studies at the same time at BCG then and the other client was shale chemical company so I was flying to Houston to the Houston industrial port and working on the epoxy resin business which is poison and smells like poison and I was look at these two businesses saying one of these is more fun than the other and I said well this is pretty interesting I can think about my career I always wanted to work in a company as opposed to as an advisor and I said maybe there's a way I can take my interest in media and television and have that be a career the picture at the bottom right is Allen spoon who was a partner at the Boston Consulting Group at the time and for my good fortune the Washington Post Company hired Allen in 1982 to be the director to be the vice president of corporate development in charge of strategic planning Allen hired me and I moved to Washington I made the mistake of leaving Silicon Valley in a very exciting time in 1982 but that brought me back to the East Coast and I got to work with the Washington Post Company of course where Woodward Bernstein worked which was back why Watergate was important when I was in college so here I was in Washington working as director of business development strategy and acquisitions for what I felt was one of the greatest media companies in the world it was incredibly exciting to be working at this company with Ben Bradley was the editor and those of you who've read about that period of the post what an extraordinary time to be there Kathryn Graham's family controlled the company she was the chairman of the board actually she was the CEO when I first joined just a remarkable woman also on the board was Warren Buffett who was a major shareholder of the company and I had a chance to present to to the board and to Warren and bought my first share of of Berkshire Hathaway stock back in 1983 and of course another I think 19 year member of the Washington Post Board of Directors was RJ Miller so it was wonderful to have RJ on the Washington Post company board and have the connection back back to Stanford so this is I love the business I loved working at the post company and had a terrific time one of the things that Allen spoon decided to do was get involved in the mobile telephone business there were no mobile telephones in the United States in 1981 the technology was just developed the FCC decided to give away licenses for free now they sell these licenses for tens of billions of dollars at the time they were giving them away for free the Washington Post which had started out as a newspaper got in the radio business when radio was invented got in the television business of television was invented and Allen spoon said if they're giving away licenses for free I don't care what it's for we're going to make a lot of money if we get one and we had about a period of six weeks from the time we learned about this to the time the applications were due so I actually wrote the marketing plan for cellular telephones at a time when there were zero cellular customers the United States trying to predict how many mobile phone customers they're going to be and you can see that that was an early version of the mobile phone you can see how convenient compact they were back then and we all knew that the mobile phone industry was going to be huge so here's a chart in retrospect 20/20 hindsight just showing how courses started from nothing to the point where now everyone has mobile phones all around the world did I invest in this business personally no did I actually quit The Washington Post Company to go work full-time for a mobile phone company no why I didn't take advantage of this I have no idea I knew I was sitting there right there in the middle the birth of this entire industry I saw it and I somehow I just didn't make that leap in my own mind to say I can either as an investor or as an employee an executive become part of this phenomenal growth trend and I still can't figure out how I missed it but I missed it I just I was so focused on the excitement of being in the media business and the television newspaper business that I thought in a mobile phones communications that's really that's technical let's let someone else do that so I missed enormous opportunities by not taking advantage of that meanwhile Lotus came out and was invented and overtook visicalc so from a personal point of view of what I did every day doing spreadsheets and analysis this actually had a big impact in my life and I immediately started to use Lotus which is pretty interesting to see how that technology evolved and and then in 1984 prodigy came out which was an early version of sort of an internet like type of thing and I don't know why I was interested in this type of thing but it was sort of media sort of communications sort of involved in technology and I became an early subscriber to prodigy and I I wasn't using it every day but I had email I used that I was trying to figure out from a consumer point of view what this is all about and it was slow and clunky and terrible to use but you could tell the world was going to change you could tell that people eventually we're not going to cut down trees make paper print on that paper and take the take trucks and take that paper to people's homes to deliver news and information if you were if you're in the news and information business you knew that with computers and communication that our industry was going to change this is back in in 25 years ago now okay so I'm at the Washington Post company I have what I had a wonderful job I loved working there it was a terrific but Wall Street beckoned so 1984 I became an investment banker why you might ask well it's pretty easy to understand why they pay a lot of money so they offered to double my compensation and I went back to Allen spoon and I said I have this job offer to join first Boston they're gonna pay me twice as much how long will it take me to double my salary here he said a long time Jeff but it's a wonderful company it's a great place to work you have all these other benefits and I said I'm gonna go for the money so I moved to New York and became a media investment banker working for Bruce Washington on the left and Joe Pirela on the right at the first Boston Corporation two of the the marquee names in Wall Street investment banking just an extraordinary place to work in the mid 80s first Boston was one of the leading M&A shops and very interestingly if you go back and look at the history Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were the two probably leading investment banks at first Boston was it I said a teardown so all the clients were Goldman clients or Morgan Stanley clients which means that we at first Boston were always the insurgent we had to go in and get a client away from Goldman and Morgan Stanley which meant we were more aggressive we were I think we worked hard we were doing cold calls it was a very exciting time to be there and I learned a lot from Bruce and Jojo now has his own firm for many years was the head of Morgan Stanley's the best banking practice and Bruce ended up buying controlling interest in lazar and is now the chairman of lizard at the time bet back to that was my personal career back to what's happening in the world AOL starts in 1985 remember I was an early prodigy subscriber I then became an AOL subscriber and said well this is a lot better it was a Windows interface 1985 what's that 20 24 years ago now so it's it's amazing how long it's been but I I clearly had the sense that something was going on there so from a personal and consumer basis I was excited meanwhile I'm still working as an investment banker I represented the ABC network selling to capital cities communications sold the New Yorker magazine sold the Des Moines Register very a lot of activity in media I had a lot of fun I learned a lot and one of my clients was King world productions which distributes Wheel of Fortune jeopardy in the Oprah Winfrey Show and they actually the way I got King World as a client was I had a list of the top 100 media companies and I made a list of all the companies and who at first Boston was the partner who called on those companies and King world was the largest company without a first Boston partner calling on them because I couldn't call on the ones that already had a first Boston partner calling on so I called cold called them and said I'm from first Boston I want to talk to you about the great things we could do and they said come on over and meet with me I couldn't believe it it was I didn't really expect them to say yes so I got to know them and I ended up doing some work with them and then they ended up offering me to join them as chief financial officer so it's now 1988 so I'm nine years out of Business School and I think I've died and gone to heaven I'm now the chief financial officer of a New York Stock Exchange very profitable company with these wonderful shows small business at the time we had only 300 employees but we had the three highest-rated daily shows and television and ultimately I was there for six years we grew to about five hundred million in revenue with a hundred fifty million dollars in operating profit with five hundred employees so just incredibly profitable because of these wonderful shows run by Roger King who was an entrepreneur whose family had started the company and is now passed away but it's an extraordinarily sales talent just someone who dropped out of high school completely untrained unschooled but a great natural entrepreneur a great salesperson charismatic man and built built a company up and it was very successful company the stock price tripled during the six years that I was there and I learned how to be a CFO in retrospect I don't know that I would have hired me as a CFO because I didn't know what I was doing my first year but they had a good accountant good controller it was a simple company because it was small and I sort of learned on the job about a number of things having to do with how do you become a CFO while I was there Microsoft Office comes out takes over Lotus so here you have VisiCalc that essentially died Lotus isn't quite dead but clearly diminished and microsoft office took over the world 1993 was the probably the first time I heard about the internet this was a this is a cover story in broadcasting magazine so I'm hearing about the internet by reading a television trade magazine and television companies newspaper companies sort of had the sense that their world was going to change once the internet came out 1994 Netscape comes out and that really made a big difference people when Netscape went public all of a sudden it became front-page business news and it wasn't just sort of the industry trades it's now everyone was talking about the Internet and in 1995 do I join the Internet no I I know the Internet's gonna be huge it's clear that it's going to change the world but I was pretty risk-averse and I said you know what I want to do is I want to join an offline company that can migrate to online because I don't know if the Internet's going to take five years to develop or 25 years to develop and I want to have a profitable business which can can can tweak it where we can dial it up or down depending on the development of the business so I met socially at this guy Walter Forbes in the bottom right who is the CEO of CUC which was a large direct marketing company mostly direct mail and telemarketing and they were already on America Online but it was clear that their services could be sold through the internet and direct marketing I knew is going to be huge in the internet so I said this is great I can come in and I started in corporate development I then moved over to being a general manager to running Auto Vantage which is a triple-a type of service which also has a car buying service like auto buy tell which helps you buy cars through the AOL or through the internet and get discounts from car dealers so I put Auto Vantage on the internet for the first time I developed a new revenue stream of advertising from car dealers which supplemented the the membership that we're getting from consumers and got my first experience in being a general manager so I'd been a consultant and a banker then the CFO and I thought I wanted to be a CEO so the way to be a CEO is to move out of this finance sort of on the one hand being a CFO is terrific from from getting your I guess what I would say from a career point of view I got my my ticket punched so from then on anytime anyone was looking for a mid-cap media CFO they would call me because I had been a public company media CFO but to make the leap from being a CFO to CEO was difficult because people didn't want to hire CEO if you hadn't already been a CEO so I figured if I could become a general manager I get P&L responsibility I could eventually become a CEO that was the theory in the meantime Walter Forbes is committing accounting fraud and is now in jail CUC is became merged with Cendant and evidently this accounting fraud was going on during the time that I was there I fortunately didn't work in the finance department so I didn't know about it but it turned out that when this is disclosed send in stock market value drop by thirteen billion dollars in one day Walter and the president were both actually in jail so just incredible story about corporate ethics and and compliance so 1998 I now have this line experience but double-click calls and says where the Internet is actually a business now we've got growing revenues we're looking for a public company CFO someone who's got CFO experience has got media and advertising experience will you come and join us as CFO I said I probably wouldn't have joined if it was three months earlier but they were actually about to go public goldman sachs is the underwriter I joined the day of the IPO which meant that I knew we had 30 in dollars and cash in the bank even though we were losing money and I figured with 30 million dollars in the cash in the bank we at least could last a year or two so that it just barely made my risk profile which of course would have been a terrible decision if I had come three months earlier and said no because it's too risky but doubleclick was wonderful it was three years old at the time we had 108 I was 180th employee software-as-a-service it's for those of you don't know it it's the leading technology that delivers and targets and reports on internet advertising and Google started around the same time 1998 so now I was spending more time in the Internet I was working at double-click I understood a lot about the internet night I knew about Google pretty early on even though I was living in New York so didn't have the benefit of being out here in Stanford and you can see I thought this is one of my favorites index contains 25 million pages so this is pretty early in Google's life back in 1997 in 1998 and of course I understand that Stanford was able to get some good royalties from from Google over the years from the intellectual property so this is double-click in the internet bubble we went public we went public at a 250 million dollar market cap that was the day I joined in 1998 three years later the market cap was 13 billion dollars fortunately I had I'll tell you that story tube it came down then and went back down to about 600 million and stayed around that level until it was bought in a private equity transaction bought by Helmut Friedman around 95 and then was sold to Google last year and double-click is still the leading internet advertising technology company so it turns out that the value that Google paid about four billion dollars so if you bought in the IPO and held on through the private equity phase it sold to Google you made fifteen times your money over ten years so it's a great investment but the public market shareholders didn't always get that value helmet of Friedman did a phenomenal job and Helmut Friedman got more than their fair share of that of that value but the point here is I had I had been at first Boston in 1987 when the stock market dropped 25 percent in one day and that was a very scary day so to sit on the trading floor at first Boston when we all felt the world was coming to an end gave us a little bit of experience that the capital markets were pretty risky places so when double-click stock went up substantially we all said business is great we have plenty of cash from the IPO we really don't need to raise more money I was the I actually that's another story I up until double-click I was always the youngest guy in the room overnight at double-click I was the oldest guy in the room just it was just I was what for 1998 I would have been about 40 years old and everyone else was about 25 or 28 the CEO is 30 so I'm saying you know you know even though we all think the company is going to grow 100 percent every six months which was the pace that we were on at a 8 9 10 billion dollar market cap for company with 300 400 million dollars revenue maybe we should sell some more stock and we was able to persuade the board to do that the board actually wanted to do what the CEO was a little reluctant and then on the day of the week of this offering we were raising about 700 million dollars of stock which turned out to be in March of 2000 which was exactly the peak of the Nasdaq an article comes in Businessweek about over sorry in USA Today about how DoubleClick's invading people's privacy and this privacy was sort of a low-level issue people really didn't worry much about it but somehow this USA Today article took off all the other newspapers TV stations started new articles about privacy shareholders started getting spooked our huge sell orders the roadshow was Monday started Monday morning was going to price Thursday night and the article appeared Wednesday morning Wednesday at noon I'm on the roadshow I get a call Nasdaq has stopped trading in our stock because of an imbalance of sellers so we're trying to raise all this money the stocks not trading we get together Wednesday night say what should we do some of the executives said you know what we have plenty of capital we don't really need the money let's not go ahead with the offering because we don't want to somehow reinforce to these privacy advocates that they can influence our capital raising and decisions let's just prove to them we don't need their money let's just pull up our stakes and go home and I said no even though the stock is trading at $110 a share the let whatever eleven billion dollars at the time and it's going to go down tomorrow morning it's still pretty high and we should probably raise the money so Thursday morning the stock opens at 90 down from 110 the day before and we go ahead and fortunately we were able to actually do the financing so we raised seven hundred million dollars at $90 share that Thursday night and for the next couple of months the stock stayed at that 90 million $90 share level and within six months it was down to 50 and a year later it was down to ten so I was pretty happy with the decision to continue with the capital raising and that was a pretty extraordinary week in my my career okay so the internet bubble bursts that's now mm - mm mm what happens the terrorist tax advertising is way down Internet advertising is struggling double-click is still losing money overall even though it's it's still got we have 700 million of cash in our checking account so we've got very strong balance sheet but the revenues are declining we ended up going from 2,000 employees down to about a thousand employees from the peak to the trough during this time and I say well you know what it's time for me to get back to a real company a big company with stability through this downturn it looked like there's gonna be a long recession and a friend introduced me to vnu which was a conglomerate headquartered in Holland with an operation in New York that owned Nielsen Media Research so as a research data company focused on media and just to give you a sense of going from high tech to lower tech Nielsen's technology was people meters where when you if you are a Nielsen family you you push you actually have to go and push a button to say you're in the room and then push the button to say you're leaving the room and that's how they figure out who's watching television today in fact in the United States and you can imagine how that's not 100% accurate when people do that but there were millions of people fill out these paper diaries so most of ratings back then it's still a lot of ratings today are based on literally millions of consumers once a week for a week during the course of a year filling out a diary saying what shows that I watch in pencil or paper mailing it into Florida and having a lot of retired people come in and compile the the written diaries and enter it into the database so that was the the vnu Nielsen Media Research high-tech business 2003 I had the privilege of joining the Priceline Board of Directors which was has been a terrific experience that's still on the board I've been on four public boards I'm not just on one now so I was the chairman of the Compensation Committee and I've been on the Audit Committee Priceline has made other acquisitions we are now the largest hotel internet travel agency in Europe through booking comm and we've got a terrific business in Asia called a gota and I hope you're familiar with Priceline if you're not go to priceline.com you can get great deals on hotels so so I'm at vnu it's a large conglomerate did a lot of acquisition integration and then advo came along looking for CFO and I wanted to get out of being I was a it was a much larger company with 35,000 people but I was a divisional CFO I want to get back to the corporate being a corporate CFO an ad vote called they are the largest direct mail company United States 100% off line wanted to go on line so they said you're on line backgrounds terrific we need an experienced public company CFO advo you may have you may get this in your mail but it's it's it looks it's these coupons and and and shopper kind of grocery type of circulars it comes with this card about missing children which is the public service that advo does and advo is accounts for 1% of all the postage in the United States so it's an enormous offline print distribution kind of company we never turns out we never got online never never were able to do that and we ended up selling the company for a 50% premium so and looking back I was CFO three public companies all of which got sold also mid-cap companies sort of billion to 3 billion dollar range King world was sold now part of CBS advil was sold to ballasts and double-click was sold to Google so now announced 2007 still trying to find the next double-click and a venture capitalist at Oak Investment Partners introduced me to O'Brien media which is a leading casual gain internet casual game company so now I'm back in a scalable internet high-tech business growing very quickly we had terrific customers we had great investors I thought this perhaps could be another ten to one or hundred to one type of return it wasn't and it's grow bran is doing reasonably well but it's still a small private company and still has some some business challenges and around that time my three children all our children finally grew up my youngest daughter was accepted to Stanford and my wife who'd gone to Stanford and I said if we're ever going to move back to Silicon Valley I want to be a high tech CFO high tech companies are all in Silicon Valley this is the time to come back and so I was able to come back last summer met with a number of different recruiters companies venture capital firms private equity firms and just was lucky enough that when I was looking to come back to Silicon Valley Oracle was looking for CFO and I joined Oracle in September so remember that chart about the straight line shortest distance between two points this is my career you could never predict it it would have led here but it turns out that remember Oracle was found in 1977 in 1979 they moved to 3,000 Sand Hill Circle which is a mile down the road from where I was at BCG in 1979 not knowing that Oracle even existed and I left about a billion dollars in the table if I had joined Oracle back in 1979 but I I'm delighted to be there today so so that's a little bit about the story of my career and I thought I'd be Jack felt it would be interesting to share it with you in the interest of time why don't I just stop there and and turn over to questions I have other slides about Oracle we talked about if you'd like to but thank you very much it's it's really fascinating talking that's the first question yes as an investor I didn't have any money back then now I have enough money to invest so I'm asking everyone I mean I asked the same question what's the next mobile telephone industry or in an industry and I I don't really have any great answers unfortunately but I do think that from a career point of view it's just your career will be a lot better if you happen to be a mystery that's going to grow 10x over the next 10 or 20 years because the employment is going to grow and your responsibilities going to grow and the value of equity is going to grow so it's sort of a it's a logical thing to do if you have a choice of I don't want to pick on the auto industry but if you if you go and you work for it RJ was the CEO afford it but if you go and work for Ford today compared to going to work for a company that's going to grow that has a potential to grow 10x over the next number of years the the probability weighted outcome is is going to be a lot better in that growth area so that you all probably know a lot more about what the next Internet's going to be and of course people are talking about green tech and anvil and mobile content and things like that as well but you know Oracle of course is not going to grow 10x in revenue from where we are today we're twenty two billion dollars but I think Oracle still has has the potential to have very substantial growth and if you think about when companies like Microsoft and others when they were already very large companies they there's a there's a stage where you change from a growth company to being stable and obviously shrinking at some point and that's a as an analyst if you all analyzed businesses you look at the financials you understand the markets that's a probably a pretty important question to ask is where is the industry growing and where is that company within the industry I feel I'm at Oracle not just because it's a big company and a successful company but I also absolutely believe we have enormous potential to grow the business of gain market share yes I hope it is my last job so I'm Jeff Henley was the CFO before me at Oracle he was the CFO for 13 years and he's now the chairman of the board and spends most of his time with customers and I spent about 10 percent of my time with Oracle customers it turns out customers want to talk to the Oracle CFO because they're making multi-million dollar investments in our software and the CFO is often like the user of Oracle financials for instance so I think it's pretty it may be unusual for other products but certainly in our business I think the CFO is good for the CFO to spend some time with customers so I would love to spend the next 15 years at Oracle until they kick me out of being the CFO and if I can if I'm lucky enough to just have a continuing involvement with Oracle in any way that I can be helpful oh that would be that's my dream I'm now in my dream job after twelve other jobs that weren't my dream job necessarily and and I'm I hope I get to stay here forever yes it's very different and first of all I was surprised that Oracle would hire me because I was in this box of being a mid-cap company CFO so whenever someone had a mid-cap media or technology or advertising company at CFO search I was on their list then I got a lot of calls but there was actually another technology company that I interviewed for that's much smaller than Oracle that turned me down because they thought I was a great candidate but didn't have big company experience so I feel fortunate that Oracle gave me the chance to join this big company now I had been at vnu which had 35,000 employees and Oracle has 85,000 so it's not quite as big but it's it's similar it has 100 countries it's got shared service centers similar big company infrastructure and I purposely went to be in you to check the box so that I could prove to people that I had big company experience so I think that was important in my career to prove that I at least knew what big companies operated like the big the biggest difference for me personally now that I'm here at Oracle is the amount of support staff I have so in the other jobs typically I would have between 100 and 300 people reporting to me at Oracle I have 4,500 people reporting to me and what that meant was that most of my other jobs I was a player-coach so early in your career I did everything myself I had no one to delegate to at places like double-click I was probably 30% doing things myself writing my own presentations doing my own spreadsheets and then delegating 70% of the time at Oracle I'm essentially 100% delegating and 0% doing anything myself I do I'll give a presentation but I have someone who writes the presentations for me I sit in the accounting meetings but if there's analysis I ask someone through the analysis they do the analysis and I you know I still check the math but I don't personally do spreadsheets anymore so that it was a tough transition because I wanted to do spry I'm good at spreadsheets so I wanted to to so and it turned out that there's actually someone whose job it is to do the spreadsheets who gets upset if I do them so so and he probably doesn't much better than I do now too so so that was the biggest transition is to understand that I'm essentially in a role now where my job is to hire great people make sure their goals are aligned motivate them check to make sure they're doing okay but be a leader as opposed to being an active personal contributor and that's over over the years I've done more and more that but that but now it's as I said virtually a hundred percent yes the first question is the most important thing I learned at Stanford just one well I learned a lot you know I had I think it was the background actually in finance and accounting so I had a broad range of classes at Stanford and I remember distinctly I took two courses in linear programming which were required and I was talking to RJ and Jack about this last night and linear program has anyone here taken linear programming classes okay so linear programming is what you need if you're running an oil refinery to know how to optimize the inputs and the outputs I didn't run an oil refinery so I actually have never used linear programming in the last thirty years so that was actually interesting from a solving a puzzle point of view but turns out not to have been helpful to my career but the finance courses I took and the county courses I use every day and and so that's something that was was critical I would also say the the interpersonal relations and leadership courses that I took would have been important if I really understood what I was doing back then and that's since I came right out of college to business school had never managed people I don't think I got enough out of it but today that's as you think about a career those those are absolutely critical and I wish I knew more while I was a student to know what questions to ask and what parts to learn so this is what was a second question the skills that I've learned along the way well I say you know different people have different skills that they're either born with or developed early in their lives and clearly the analysis part of something that I've had as a child all through my whole life has been sort of that my strengths and I was fortunate enough to marry a woman who's got the emotional side which I didn't have so there's this if people taking the myers-briggs test here so I've taken that a couple times and there's there's a thinking versus feeling spectrum and I'm about 99 percent thinking and one percent feeling my wife spent ninety nine percent feeling one percent thinking which makes for some interesting dinner table conversations but over the years mostly through my wife the relationship of my wife I've at least become sensitive to the feelings side of things in business and business context in addition to raising my children and so that's something which over the years I've tried to balance out I'm still heavily on the analysis side but I'd to spend more and more time at least being sensitive to to the interpersonal and feeling side question here how much you guys added to your skill set just see many different scenarios kind of call every two three years I'm not it's it's I didn't want to do it it was that there were decisions that some of them were things where I just I wanted to take the money go into Wall Street or the company was doing badly and couldn't afford to keep me in you know a double-click was was was falling so there were decisions that that were were not optimal and I also went and I joined companies at some point in my career early on probably at the King World Time which is sort of ten years into my career I would join companies who had a problem and they brought me in to solve the problem and I've talked to other friends of mine who instead went to really well-run companies and learned from the best so if you had joined Goldman Sachs or McKinsey and spent your career there you learn because you were surrounded by terrific leaders and managers and you learn by following them and most of the companies that I was at were companies that were struggling and had problems and I was one of a small group people who were going in there to fix the problems which meant that we had to learn on her own so I didn't get the chance to learn from others and watch modeling from other people so if I could do it again I probably early in my career would have tried to find a great company work for a fantastic leader and just follow him around for a couple of years and I sort of miss having done that now at Oracle I I'm just lucky that Oracle is an incredibly well managed company Larry Ellison I think is one of the best businessman in the history of business as well as Safra Catz and the other people who are leading Oracle so I'm learning I'm even now I'm learning a lot about how to run a terrific company and it's it's a pleasure to be part of it it's question back there yes is that something that you try to change your own personal risk profile if so how do you try to do that I'm not sure I was risk-averse I think I was I appreciated the option value so I wanted I wanted to protect the downside and keep some upside and that's maybe why I moved around a lot so that I moved at double click the my equity turned out to be worth quite a bit of money at Oberon the equity actually wrote a check to buy equity and that it might not be worth Natalie is my stock options not worth anything about my equity that I personally paid for might not be worth so much so I was I was willing to take some calculated risks in my career and I think that was just part of my personality that I felt I I don't think I would have been comfortable in a pure startup being one of the first three or five employees and also what you do every day if you're one of the first five employees is quite different than if you join a company with 180 employees I felt very comfortable at the double-click stage where you've got revenues you've got customers you've got a number of people who are already doing their jobs and the question is and at 180 people you basically know every individual in the company so going from one hundred eighty to two thousand people was my at the time my sweet spot and being at Oracle is a very different type of thing I'm having to learn how do you deal with people who you I see I meet them once then I won't meet them again for a year or two even if they work for me so I'm learning that that new way of dealing yes over here we've got a bit of a sense of what you love about an Oracle I was wondering if you could talk about the aspects of the CFO role whether it'll be at Oracle companies that really excite you well I've I liked finance I like math I like analysis there's I was at a presentation the other day from Glenn Hutchins a partner at Silver Lake partners and he said in God We Trust all others must bring data and so that's from from from when I was young I just I was like that part of it that you can analyze things and try to come up with a rational approach so to me if you thought about the different functions actually at the Washington Post company I thought about this I I loved the idea of being at a newspaper company and after I was there I said well how do I have a career in the newspaper industry and I looked around and I said well what are the jobs in a newspaper company there's the CFO there's the head of manufacturing of printing and he has to stay up all night because newspapers are printed at night so he's running a printing plant well I don't want to stay up all night run a printing plan there's the guy in charge of distribution and he runs a fleet of trucks to deliver the papers to people that didn't sound really sexy to me there's advertising sales which would have been okay but I'm okay at sales I'm not a great salesperson their circulation sales which is more marketing there's the editor but I'm not really an editor and then there's Don Graham's job being the publisher of The Washington Post newspaper and it occurred to me that the only job at The Washington Post newspaper that I really wanted was Don Graham's job but my name was it Graham so I couldn't quite figure out how to get from where I was to being the publisher of The Washington Post newspaper which is one reason why I ended up leaving and actually Allen spoon became the president of the Washington Post company but still wasn't part of the Graham family and he ended up going to the private equity business so as I think about those different functions what are the different jobs within a corporation finance was the one that seemed to me to be closest to what my skill set was and my capabilities and I and I've loved it so it's it from early on that felt natural to me yes a mission you can hop on these days what if someone creates yet and uh well each of these companies I could have stayed there long so if I had stayed at the Washington Post Company in spite of RJ's being on the board I would have had a very different career I probably would have enjoyed what I did the Washington Post is an extraordinarily well-run company and has terrific products but I probably would not have been able to be the CFO at Oracle as an example and as a consultant I liked consulting it was intellectually interesting but I was I felt I know whether it's just I had 13 different studies in the three years that I was there and I don't think there was a single study that I personally was involved in where the client did something material to the client based on my work they they would they they read the report they said very interesting they put in a drawer or they it was about an acquisition that they didn't do so maybe I helped them not lose money but I just felt that it was a little too theoretical and not practical enough there so I didn't want to stay a consulting I could have stayed in banking and banking was certainly I think that my friends who stayed in banking and are now senior executives at Lazard for instance are very wealthy so it probably was the right financial decision but it was mostly most of the bankers that I knew were great at sales and I felt that they were better salespeople than I was and and I just didn't want to spend my career being a mediocre salesperson so that was the decision there yes so you mentioned your how on what you like to be your last job so I think your focus now to be in selecting payments so why would you know each other servants little jet their trajectory joins our what can you ask absolutely your by direct reports yes and someone who has the same trajectory in other places what would you write you know it's very interesting because as as the CFO I have 14 direct reports who are all functional experts so there's a head of tax head of accounting a head of this financial planning analysis and there's actually conflict because on the one hand I want someone who's a generalist enough to be my successor on the other hand I want the tax got to be really good at tax and someone who spends two years a tax is not going to be as good as the guy who spent 30 years in tax and the reason they hired me was because none of those people were generalists so they were all they're all very good kind of the 14 people 13 of them I've kept one of them I've actually I've kept in his position but I've hired someone senior him investor in investor relations and I ask myself are any of these 14 people capable in five or ten years of becoming the CFO and what do I have to do in terms of their career development to get them there and the answer is some of them yes and some of them maybe not and some of them may not be able to get the kind of career experience I've had because they're not going to be able to be the CFO of another public company and stay at Oracle and there's not that many other places to go with an Oracle so I I have this the successor planning challenge and I don't know how it's I'm not worried about right now because I'm living there less than a year but at some point I would have to figure out how do I develop a successor and give them that breadth of experience and it'll probably just be my moving the same people from one department to another and trying to give them a chance at that and maybe send them to do international assignments maybe taking them out of finance and having them go into operations for a few years that come back to finance so I don't have an easy answer but it's a critical question as they think about their careers and as I think about succession planning yes well I report to Safra Catz who's the president who reports to Larry so there's a another level behind and Safra has that relationship so Safra has known Larry for 20 years she was initially his banker at DLJ and has now been the president of the company for 10 years and she is in effect the chief out her role is essentially the chief operating officer where Larry makes many of the key strategic decisions Safra makes them happen and I help Safra implement them so I don't think there's a near-term likelihood that Larry is going to look to me for advice and many things so it's and I'm fine with that I have a seat at the table I'm in the meetings I get a chance to voice my opinion but there are other people who have seats at the table who have a lot more experience at Oracle and NIT and Larry's got a pretty good track record of making decisions regardless of other people's advice so so I look forward over years actually you know Jeff Henley was someone who came into Oracle at a time when Oracle was struggling they were they had some very substantial cost problems and and Larry did look to Jeff for someone who had a different experience set had clearly had of CFOs view of the world which is different from Larry's which was an engineer's view of the world and Jeff definitely developed that relationship with with Larry it still has it Safra has that now and so certainly my goal over a number of years would be to develop that but I think I have to earn that credibility over time yes a new perspective where is big challenge well we have an ear charge challenge which is we've agreed to acquire Sun Microsystems and we've been a software company son as a software and assistance company so we're now expanding it to a new area we have a philosophy of offering our customers complete open and integrated products and we and the idea strategy behind buying son is that if we can design the systems and the software to work together the way that Apple's iPod for instance iPod and iTunes were designed by the engineers to work very closely together works great as a combined software and hardware system we'd like to do that with son hardware and Oracle software so that's probably the single greatest near-term challenge for Oracle and then longer-term it's how do we continue to innovate come up with great products and and grow our market share in the world of I T and I T is this the enormous marketplace we have very strong position we have essentially everywhere an enterprise software company so we don't do consumer we don't do small business or our customers are large enterprises governments not-for-profits so I think we're at the we're at the part of the market where they have the customers have a lot of money and have a lot of great needs and I think we have a terrific opportunity to continue to build products that help solve our customers problems and will generate revenue and profit growth for us great well I think that's so we're out of time it's 1:00 o'clock so I want to be sensitive to your schedule thank you very much I've had a wonderful time
