Cfo Thought Leader

Joining Intel Corp. in 1999 as a recent college graduate, David Freeman began his finance career as part of the tech giant’s plus-size finance team that supported various business groups. Looking back, Freeman finds that few aspects of the tech giant’s business were more influential in shaping his early career years than the company’s direct and “confrontational” culture.“They expected excellence,” he recalls. “They expected details, and they expected you to know your business.”Along the way, despite the many opportunities that Intel regularly offered him, Freeman came to realize that he wanted to open his next career door somewhere else.“I didn’t really love being at a large company, so—after 7 years there—I decided that it was time to move on,” continues Freeman, who opted to join a pioneering cloud company known as NetSuite.At fewer than 500 employees, NetSuite was aiming to be among the first SaaS companies to go public, and Freeman tells us that he ultimately had a hand in drafting the company’s S-1—a ha