LOCATION: Hampshire, UK
LANGUAGE SPOKEN: English
CURRENT ROLE: Chairman of the Family Office of Technology investments
PREVIOUS LEADERSHIP ROLES:
Member of the Executive team and Chairman, EMEA Salesforce
Member of the Executive Team and Head of EMEA, Siebel Systems Member EMEA Executive Team, Oracle Corporation
BOARDWAVE ROLES: Patron, Mentor, Angel Investor
Dr Steve Garnett has had one of the most distinguished careers of any European executive in the software industry. The Salesforce chairman, whose tenure ran from 2003 to 2017, has a memento of his industrious career hanging above his desk in his Hampshire home. It is a framed note from his old boss, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, given to him on his retirement.
Also in the frame is a pair of Buddha-shaped cufflinks, worth $10,000, which need a little more explaining. Benioff bought them during a work trip to London. When he got back to the US, he discovered that the cufflinks were faulty so he asked London- based Garnett to take them back to the shop in Sloane Street to be repaired. Unfortunately, the expensive cufflinks were posted back to the UK in a brown envelope with another work- related item – “a boring Gartner report” as Garnett describesit. The envelope went straight in the bin and it was only days later, when he asked the US team what had happened to the cufflinks they were sending, that he realised his mistake. “I was in London, so I called my wife and said, ‘Can you get into the bin?’ She took everything out of the recycling bin and luckily she found these cufflinks at the bottom.” Even if he had lostthe cufflinks, Benioff may well have forgiven him – although his retirement gift may have been less generous. “He would accept some mistakes,” he says.
Garnett entered the software industry when it was in its infancy in the late 1980s, and helped grow some of the tech world’s biggest names: Oracle Corporation, Siebel Systems and Salesforce. And Garnett has plenty of anecdotes from his decades in the game. But, interestingly, one of his biggest regrets is that he didn’t keep a diary or detailed notes of what he describes as a “crazy” journey. He does remember that the founder of Siebel Systems, Tom Siebel, was a formidable boss. He was also “the most consistently unreasonable person” he has ever worked for. “If you could do something in an hour, he’d want it in 10 minutes. He drove everybody along at a hard, harsh pace. If you missed the target, you’d have the crosshairs on you, if you missed it twice, you’d be fired,” Garnett says. “Would I work for Tom Siebel again? Never. Did I respect him? Yes.”
Garnett also worked closely with Oracle founder Larry Ellison, one of Silicon Valley’s original tech billionaires. Garnett tries to think of an appropriate anecdote for Ellison and, after a moment to think, he says, with a wry smile: “I’m not sure I can tell that one”. He does, however, recall a dinner in the early 1990s. “Larry came in and there’s about 10 of us and Larry starts espousing the future of where Oracle was going. We were quite a sizeable company at the time,” he says. “He didn’t get on with Bill Gates, as he saw him as his main rival by then. Larry sat at the end of the table and said, ‘Guys tell me who is the most important company in the world?’” he says. “Well, it was one of those times when you decide to keep quiet. Because I thought, I’m not saying Microsoft and I’m not sure
who else to say. I couldn’t say Oracle because that would be creepy.”
Someone else put their head abovet he parapet and suggested GE, acompany that had a diverse portfolio but was best known as a lighting firm.The answer did not go down well withEllison. “‘LIGHTBULBS?’ he shouted,”says Garnett. “‘No, no, no. It’s obviously Microsoft’.”
The anecdote reveals the fear of failure that seems to haunt many tech bosses, and Garnett admits that it is something that drives him too. “I never wanted to go to my family or friends and say I had failed an exam, missed a promotion at work or had a failed investment. That feeling of failure was a stronger driver than the desire to make money or be seen as successful.”
Lighting the way from Liverpool
Hanging out with the tech billionaires was a far cry from Garnett’s humble beginnings on a council estate in Liverpool. One of his earliest memories is of his dad, a docker, dying from cancer when he was seven years old. “After that, Mum had to go out and put food on the table. She cleaned school floors to make a living, so life was pretty tough,” he says.“I qualified for free school meals. I made all the free lists,”he says. Despite the lack of money, it was a happy childhood spent with his mum and three sisters. “I never felt unloved, cold or hungry. What you don’t have, you don’t miss, so I never felt at a disadvantage.”
The family’s annual holiday was one week in Rhyll in North Wales, and it was the Welsh capital he headed to, aged 18, to do a degree in maths. University hadn’t figured in his life plan up to that point. “If you got to 16 and you’d stayed out of trouble with the police and got a job, that was a success. The expectation was very low.”
Garnett’s only reference for higher education was the BBC’s high-brow quiz show University Challenge, chaired by ex-public school boy Bamber Gascoigne. “I thought people who went to university were terribly bright and terribly posh,” says Garnett. But it was an inspirational teacher who changed his mind. “I was lucky that my maths teacher opened the doors and kindled the flames of interest in the subject.”
Much of Garnett’s heart remains in education to this day. He sees it as a crucial way to bring about more diversity in the tech industry and he is determined to help a new generationof youngsters who may see further education as unaffordable. “Lack of opportunity and poverty are like a punishment for a crime you never committed. So many lives are not reaching anywhere near their true potential because of poverty, lack of opportunity and lack of confidence. If I can help change that in my own small way, then I’ll be thrilled.” He adds that he “strongly believes that higher education is the nearest thing we have to a silver bullet to improve social mobility.”
For that reason, Garnett has been involved in two initiatives aimed at making the STEM world more diverse. He is in the process of setting up a foundation to help give children from poorer backgrounds in Liverpool the opportunities that he found by luck. “If someone’s got the talent but is fearful of taking on the debt, I can help. I’m focused on maths, physics and computing. It’s come full circle.”
Education was Garnett’s route out of the council estate: a maths undergraduate was followed by a master’s and then – thanksto an advert in New Scientist magazine – a PhD in nuclear engineering. “I thought the nuclear industry could be the industry of the future and suddenly I wanted to participate.” And it was while doing his PhD that he began to use computers for the first time. “In those days, it was mainframe computers. So you’d apply a deck of cards and put them into a card reader. It would run on the mainframe, and then you’d get your output back – if you were lucky – the day after.”
He began writing Fortran code but, when he finished his PhD, he decided he’d had enough of academia and wasn’t keenon the nuclear industry either. Instead, he took a job at British software firm Logica. He worked there for about a year, until one of his colleagues announced that he was leaving to work for a start-up called Oracle. Garnett had never heard of the firm and his colleague admitted the move was a risk, but when another job came up three months later, he suggested Garnett apply. He found himself chatting to Geoff Squire, who headed up the UK team, in a pub in Richmond. He took the job as the head of technical support.
“There were 25 people at Oracle UK, probably about 100 worldwide. Today there are about 160,000, so we saw abit of growth,” he says, with only a hint of irony. What was it like working for Oracle back in the early days? “It was a phenomenal experience to be part of a high-growth company. There was a lot of buzz around the office because we were constantly winning contracts. We were revolutionising the industry. We were a massive disruptor to the status quo.”
The revolution came because Larry Ellison spotted that businesses wanted “platform neutral software”, rather than being tied to IBM software that only worked on IBM machines, or HP software that was tied to HP devices. It meant an explosion of growth for Oracle.
Scaling up and giving back
Growing companies seems to be one of Garnett’s passions. “When there are tens or hundreds of people, you can move the needle on the dial. When it gets to tens of thousands of people, it’s very hard to see that movement,” he says. “I like to join start- ups. But when there are more people in HR than in sales, it’s probably time to move on.” His next job was at Siebel Systems, where he saw the new firm expand to 8,000 people in four years.
But it’s his career at Salesforce that Garnett is most proud of. And not just because of the work. “One of Marc Benioff’s key ideas is integrated philanthropy,” he says. “That is the idea that you can do well as a business and simultaneously do good, by helping people less fortunate.” It is called the 1/1/1 model, which has since been adopted by other firms such as Google. It will likely, says Garnett, “be remembered long after the software is forgotten”. Under the model, the firm puts 1% of the stock, 1% of its profits, and 1% of employees’ time into charitable causes. Garnett devoted his charitable time to helping build Teach First, a charity that puts good teachers into poorer inner-city schools.
Since leaving Salesforce in 2017, Garnett hasn’t really relaxed, other than spending time in his house in Thailand indulging in his love of cooking Asian food. He reveals that he is working on a cookbook. He has found time to become the main seed investor in software companies Fairsail and Kimble. He was also an early investor in cybersecurity firm 1E, which was sold to Carlyle Group for around $300 million, and recruitment firm SourceBreaker, which was sold for around $100 million.
His many years spent at some of the tech industry’s biggest companies – and among legendary leaders – have taught Garnett some valuable lessons. He has no doubt that surrounding yourself with “exceptional people” is one of the keys to success. But so is letting leaders get on with achieving without over-managing them. He views his role as a “door-opener”, to help leaders in their careers, which is perhaps a nod back to his old maths teacher. “Those experiences taught me what could be achieved when you combine disruptive software technology and talented people with an insatiable appetite for business growth.”
What is the best advice you’ve been given?
It was Marc Benioff’s advice (and something that he often says): “You can do well and you can do good together!” Meaning you can build a rewarding career but you can also help others who are less fortunate along the way.
Can you tell us something surprisingabout yourself?I’m a cosmology nerd. I have all of Einstein’s papers in my house. If I wasn’t a CEO, I’d probably be a professor of cosmology. I also speak Thai, albeit rather poorly.
Is there a piece of tech, other than your phone, that you could not live without?I’m a massive Apple iPad fan. I don’t need PCs anymore, but I could not do without my iPad.
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