Larry Ellison

“Larry Ellison did the exact same thing when Oracle was going through rough times. He'd read biographies of great figures as a way to motivate himself and convince himself that things will get better.”

“When they were recruiting from universities, they'd ask people, are you the smartest person you know? And if they said yes, they would hire them. If they said no, they would say who is, and they would go hire that guy instead.”

“Ellison insisted that his recruiters hire only the finest and cockiest new college graduates. When they were recruiting from universities, they'd ask people, are you the smartest person you know? And if they said yes, they would hire them. If they said no, the…”

“Ellison insisted that his recruiters hire only the finest and cockiest new college graduates. When they were recruiting from universities, they'd ask people, are you the smartest person you know? And if they said yes, they would hire them. If they said no, …”

“You do not want turnover on your core team. That knowledge compounds and don't interrupt that compounding.”

“Someone once said Bill wants people to think that he is Thomas Edison when he is really Rockefeller. If he was Edison, he would be less dangerous. He is utterly relentless. He is indefatigable. He is absolutely focused, and he wants it all.”

“There are a lot of people in the world smarter than Bill Gates. There are very few people in the world that have his focus and endurance.”

“Once a customer and Larry understood this right away, once a customer committed to a database vendor, he was pretty well locked in for the next 10 years or so.”

“I want to get the creativity out of the sales process. If you want to be creative, go write a novel. I want to engineer the sales process. I don't want the people in the field spending all their time wheeling and dealing on price. The primary function of our s…”

“She makes up for one of my biggest areas of weakness. She's disciplined and thorough, and I'm not. I'm pretty good at separating the good ideas from the bad ideas, and I'm pretty good at drilling into detail and solving problems. But once a problem is understo…”

“U S salespeople tried to sell the largest possible transaction to any given customer and then move on to the next customer in the next deal. It took me until 1991 to figure out that the U S hunting strategy was both short-sighted and unsustainable. It took ano…”

“Network computing architecture got absolutely no traction in the marketplace. So we announced a successor called internet computing architecture and sales took off. The big difference between the two, the name.”

“One of Larry Ellison's favorite maxims is the brain's primary purpose is deception. And the primary person to be deceived is the owner.”

“Ellison, by his own admission, had never really wanted to be a CEO and never really wanted to run a company.”

“He had borrowed heavily against his shares, That had now slumped to a point where he faced the equivalent of a margin call from his creditors.”

“There's a lot of parallels, in my opinion, between what Ellison is seeing in the late nineties, early two thousands, and what is going on in AI today.”

“Microsoft software is rarely first rate. They never ever innovate, but they're good copiers.”

“Most people hate to admit they're wrong, but it didn't bother Bill one bit. All he cared about was what was right, not who was right. That is what makes Bill very, very dangerous. If Bill has to choose, he'd rather win the war than win the argument.”

“Ellison says that the cardinal sin of the computing industry is the creation of complexity. And he's constantly trying to get Oracle to actually do the work for the customer and then limit the amount of decisions that the customer has to make.”

“Oracle had 70 separate HR systems, each with its own database. To find out how many people worked at Oracle, you had to look into 70 separate databases.”

“My original goal was to build a company doing about 10, ten million dollars a year in revenue and employing about 50 people.”

“We had about 200 people around the world involved in analyzing and reanalyzing, setting and resetting prices. It costs us a fortune in duplication of effort. We were competing against ourselves. It was embarrassing. Now we have less than 10 people working on p…”

“I wanted to knock out Sybase while they were technically behind and vulnerable, even if it meant sacrificing profits in the near term. If we were successful, the profits would be greater in the long run.”

“Even though he wouldn't, Larry wouldn't sell him equity, he actually helps arrange a loan for Larry Ellison and the company.”

“He says, if Detroit ran like Silicon Valley, nobody would sell cars. They would just sell parts. Customers would have to figure out which were the best parts. Maybe you'd grab a Honda engine, a Ford transmission, a BMW chassis, a GM electrical system, and buy …”

“Financial independence means you no longer need to trade time for money, but once you've been liberated, the freedom that comes afterwards can be difficult to manage. The good news is that suddenly you have all these choices. The bad news is that suddenly you …”

“One of the oldest and worst habits of the Oracle sales organization was the use of aggressive discounting to get existing customers to buy software before they actually needed it.”

“I believe that every process within an organization, marketing, sales, service, everything should be carefully engineered. I'm still an engineer at heart, but now I apply engineering discipline to our entire business, not just product development.”

“I think if you're going to read a biography or a book on Larry Ellison, this is the very first one you should read, because the author had access to Larry Ellison and traveled extensively with him for two years, and they have these unbelievably, just brutally …”

“I've always been more motivated by fear of failure than greed. I hate to lose. Silicon Valley is a killing field. Very few technology companies survive, and we did.”

“A prime example was something called the energy center of excellence. This was intended as a place to showcase Oracle software for the energy industry. Ellison uncovered plans to spend millions of dollars to run the center. So I asked how much energy software …”

“If you're a fighter, the only way up is through the top fighters in your division. So we picked fights with Microsoft and IBM because they're the ones we had to beat to reach the top. By constantly measuring ourselves against the two top heavyweights, we const…”

“Profits and prices are cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces on the marketplace. Costs, however, could be strictly controlled and any savings achieved were permanent.”

“Once I'm finally certain of the right direction, I pick a fight. It helps me make my point and it makes it impossible to do an about face and go back. Once a course has been plotted, I sail a long way off and I burn the boats. It is win or die.”

“Ellison's decision to the horror of many colleagues and customers to abandon all further development of client server based applications and concentrate Oracle's entire engineering effort on building for the new computing architecture of the internet.”

“The sales force convinced their boss that the best way to fix this was to pay more money to the sales force if the deal went through a partner than if the deal came directly to Oracle. For example, if you sold a million dollar deal directly, Oracle would get a…”

“The first version of our database was called Oracle version two.”

“He thought for a very long time that his true motivator, if you could choose between being feared or loved, he used to say that he'd choose fear. And what he realized is like, that is always a lie. And he says, it took me a long time to understand that we all …”

“People, teacher, coaches, bosses, they want you to conform to some standard of behavior they deem correct. They measure and reward you on how well you conform, how you arrive on time, dress appropriately, exhibit a properly differential attitude, as opposed to…”

“You can never really be certain of anyone's motives, including your own. You are better measuring off people on what they do rather than the unknowable why.”

“And if customers don't believe you're going to survive, you won't.”

“The bigger the apparent risk, the fewer people will try to go there. We would surely lose if we had to face serious competition. But if we were all alone in pursuit of our goal of building the first commercial relational database system, we had a chance to win…”

“Self-absorption will crush a marriage, and I was completely absorbed by my own ambition.”

“Instead of surrendering equity in Oracle to pay off the banks, Ellison has secured a deal that gave him an eighty million dollar loan on highly favorable terms. He does this by going to Japan, which their economy was doing great at the time. So in exchange for…”

“This intentional fight that he picks against Bill Gates and Microsoft and how beneficial the positioning was. That he chose and how this message spread through the media and actually enhanced greatly enhanced not only his individual stature, but the stature of…”