At its core, Steve Miranda pegs his company’s decision to bring thousands of jobs to Nashville to two factors: winning the “tremendous battle for talent,” and because people want to live here.
And he hopes it doesn’t do one thing to dilute Nashville’s culture.
Miranda, a veteran executive at Oracle Corp. (NYSE: ORCL), appeared in Nashville on Thursday to address the annual meeting of the Greater Nashville Technology Council. Miranda’s one-on-one chat with council CEO Brian Moyer is the first public appearance by an Oracle official since early May, when Metro Council unanimously approved an incentives deal tied to Oracle’s $1.2 billion riverfront tech campus.
Oracle plans to have 2,500 employees by 2027 and 8,500 employees by the end of 2031 at its 1.2 million-square-foot development on the East Bank of the Cumberland River. It’s a record-setting economic development deal that will speed the transformation of Nashville’s small but rapidly growing tech sector.
Miranda, who is the company’s executive vice president of Oracle Applications product development and a direct report to co-founder Larry Ellison, touched on the angst or anxiety many residents now feel about the never-ending influx of new residents and giant tech companies such as Amazon, Oracle and others moving in. He was responding to this audience question: “How does Nashville stay Nashville and stay true to its roots, while still competing at this larger scale?”
“Frankly it’s in our best interest … that [Nashville’s culture] stays where it is, because that’s why people want to move here,” Miranda said. “That’s what we’re hearing from our employees and what we hear from university students who are either here or want to live here. Why are we coming here? We’re coming because people like Nashville, so we don’t want to do anything to disrupt that.”
He added: “Obviously, we’re putting up our buildings and our campus. But we want it to stay Nashville because that’s what people like. And if we in any way contributed to minimizing that, it would only hurt the cause. There’s no hidden agenda or something: We’re here because people like Nashville.”
Miranda said Oracle’s hiring strategy reflects that desire. He said Oracle won’t be importing large numbers of its own employees by assigning them to move to Nashville.
“We’ve kind of taken the policy — and it’s worked — of just having to be organic when we move places. We’re not relocating people,” he said. “Hopefully that either contributes to the community or doesn’t have that disruption. The result is you have people who are moving because they like it and want to become involved. They want to become part of the community, not disrupt the community. Hopefully [our] approach fits in with that area and makes things better for everybody.”
Miranda said the overriding reason Oracle chose Nashville was talent, particularly the kinds of people who are relocating to the region and the graduates that the region’s many college and universities produce each year.
Oracle, he noted, is competing against Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Salesforce and many other big companies for skilled workers. Many such workers are relocating to new cities. Oracle is following that talent, and Miranda added that as a result of the pandemic, Oracle has realized that “now we can do things outside of a traditional headquarters, particularly engineering, which is our sweet spot.”
“We’re in a battle for top high-tech talent. It is a continuous talent battle. In today’s world — and it’s only accelerated through Covid — you’ve got a tremendous battle for talent,” Miranda said. “The battle for talent and a great place to be: That’s why we’re here.”
