Billy Beane Joins the Board of NetSuite

Here’s an interesting story. Billy Beane, the GM of the Oakland A’s, has joined the board of directors of NetSuite.
Bean was the star of Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, which detailed how he used sabermetrics to run his team almost like a quant fund:

The Beane appointment represents a public-relations coup for NetSuite, an Internet-based maker of business management software preparing for an initial public offering of stock later this year.
The Ellison Connection
The much-anticipated IPO is expected to further enrich Ellison, who dipped into the US$22 billion fortune that he amassed as co-founder of Oracle (ORCL) to bankroll San Mateo, Calif.-based NetSuite in 1998. Ellison is expected to remain NetSuite’s controlling shareholder even after the IPO.
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 software instead of distributing the complex programs on discs that must be installed on computer hard drives.
“I like to diversify myself,” Beane said during an interview Wednesday. “This is an opportunity to be with a company with an impressive pedigree and to be around people that do things differently.”

Posted by on January 5th, 2007 at 3:42 pm


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