Billy Beane Likes Larry
Ellison Connection
Billy
Beane, renowned for building one of baseball’s most
successful teams on a shoestring budget, will now test his
business acumen by joining the board of NetSuite, a rising
Silicon Valley company backed by software mogul and Oracle
co-founder Larry Ellison.
Beane
will remain the Oakland A’s general manager, a job that has
attracted more attention since his book, Moneyball: The
Art of Winning an Unfair Game.
His
appointment represents a public relations coup for NetSuite,
an internet-based maker of business management software that
is preparing for an initial public stock offering this year.
Undoubtedly Beane will be rewarded handsomely by
“getting-in” prior to the public offering, since holding
pre-IPO stock could well enable him to hit a grand-slam!
Beane
said he was drawn to NetSuite because of the Ellison
connection, as well as the company’s unorthodox approach of
selling online subscriptions to complex software programs,
instead of distributing them on discs that must be installed
on computer hard drives.
Not only has Ellison scored exceptionally well in other IPO
situations like this, but the returns generated by one of
NetSuite’s biggest rivals, Salesforce.com, have been
significant. And that will certainly be a favorable factor
in the coming initial public stock offering.
