#127 Larry Ellison (Oracle)

Podcast: Founders
Source: whisper-base
Language: en
Duration: 3553s
URL: https://afp-922710-injected.calisto.simplecastaudio.com/57933a1d-c5a9-4040-9aca-e766ae2ec0eb/episodes/d27c9556-7c94-4e22-9f02-f9f81519e38f/audio/128/default.mp3?aid=rss_feed&awCollectionId=57933a1d-c5a9-4040-9aca-e766ae2ec0eb&awEpisodeId=d27c9556-7c94-4e22-9f02-f9f81519e38f&feed=3hnxp7yk
Fetched: 2026-03-03 09:06:02

You want to know what I think about Charlie Cain? Well, I suppose he had some private sort of greatness, but he kept it to himself. He never gave himself away. He never gave anything away. He just left you a tip. He had a generous mind. I don't suppose anybody ever had so many opinions. But he never believed in anything except Charlie Cain. He never had a conviction except Charlie Cain in his life. That's from the very beginning of the book that I read, and I'm going to talk to you about today, which is the difference between God and Larry Ellison, and the subtitle is, God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison. And it was written by Mike Wilson. I'm going to reread that because I think, well, first of all, that's a quote from Orson Wells' 1941 film, Citizen Cain. And I'm going to reread that section to you. And instead of saying Charlie Cain, I'm going to put in the name Larry Ellison, because I think that is what the author wants us to think. So let's see how that goes. You want to know what I think about Larry Ellison? Well, I suppose he had some private sort of greatness, but he kept it to himself. He never gave himself away. He never gave anything away. He just left you a tip. He had a generous mind. I don't suppose anybody ever had so many opinions. But he never believed in anything except Larry Ellison. He never had a conviction except Larry Ellison in his life. And I think once you change it from Charlie to Larry, everything still holds true. Okay, so first we're going to talk about the noise left myself on this section. His life feels like a dream. And it says, that was the way Ellison's mind worked. He was like a search engine, gone haywire. If you ask him for information about Chicago in the 1950s, he told you about the Clinton presidency. So I want to stop there. I want to go back to what I'm going to continue that paragraph in a minute. But when he was quoting Citizen Kane, it says, you know, I suppose he had some private sort of greatness, but he kept it to himself. He had a generous mind. I don't suppose anybody had so many opinions. The reason I started with this section is the author is trying to get to pin down Larry. He says Larry is extremely hard to pin down. One of the biggest criticism of Larry is that, you know, some people call him a pathological liar. Other people say that he just exaggerates. And it's really hard to verify the authenticity of his stories. So what's taking place right now is the author is trying to get Larry to talk about his childhood. That's what he means about. Tell me about Chicago in the 1950s. Larry is not interested in talking about that. He's going to reveal only what he wants you to know about him. So he keeps things closer to the vest, you know. And so he's asked this question and then Larry goes off on the differences of like what Clinton could be doing because Clinton's president at the time they're having this interview. Well, Clinton could be doing different in healthcare and education. Okay. So he says, I tried again. I asked Ellison how he had seen his adult life when he was a kid. What he thought he was going to what he thought was going to happen to him. And so I thought this was very interesting. You mean did I anticipate becoming the fifth wealthiest person in the United States? No, he said, I mean, this is all kind of surreal. I don't even believe it now. Not only did I not believe it when I was 14, but when I look around, I say this must be something out of a dream. I think that's how probably anybody feels at that extreme level. Of course Larry, you know, how to has a what's the way to put this a very healthy self confidence. But you might have said, you know, I'm going to be successful. No one can predict like to that degree. So in this section, the author is going to tie in the story of Larry Ellison to that movie Citizen Kane. So he said, if every if Hollywood ever wants to update the legendary film Citizen Kane, it might consider Larry Ellison for the lead character. Ellison is the Charles Foster Kane of the technological age. He is bright, brash, optimistic, and immensely appealing, yet somehow incomplete. Like the movie character, he wants desperately to be loved. That's definitely true. An idolized, but loved does not come easily to him or from him. Also like Kane, Larry Ellison is oversized. He's a myth of his own making. And so at this point, the author flashes back and he says he worked in the computer industry for several years, but never had a job that suited what he saw as his superior intellectual gifts. So he's talking about the way Larry views himself, okay? In 1977, the 32 year old Ellison went into business for himself writing computer programs on a contract basis. And this is just talking about the early days of what would soon turn into Oracle. And you know, it was a side, side business, a side hustle. Larry kept his day job. He had two or three programmers that he was working with. And then once they realized they had a product, they switched from consulting to actually selling software. And then the other podcast, I'm not going to belabor this point too much. In the mid 1970s, computer databases could do, they're talking about the opportunity, the Oracle identified earlier than anybody else. In the mid 1970s, computer databases could do few things extremely well. They could, for example, keep track of thousands of customer accounts, updating them after every new order or payment. What those databases could not do, and they're really talking about what Larry and his partner is trying to fix, or cannot do fast enough, was answer unanticipated questions. The kind business people often ask before they make decisions. If a company wanted to know which of its products were selling best in Albuquerque, or which regional office did the most business in August, or how many of its female employees had more than five years of service, the database of yesterday could not produce a fast answer. Ellison's database software could. Okay, so skipping ahead a little bit, gives you insight into something that is present in all three of these books, Larry is a, he's a control freak. Like a lot of the people that we study on the podcast, he always wants control. So the stockholders who benefited most from Oracle's performance was Larry Ellison, exactly what he intended. Ellison started the company because he wanted to be his own boss, and he stayed in control throughout his tenure at Oracle, always holding on to enough stock that his power and authority could never be seriously challenged. This is one of the strategies that Larry employed from the very beginning, not only when they started the company, but as the, the company was willing to find any difficulties, let's say 15 years into the future from where we're right now, he was adamant about not selling equity. He, and he wouldn't sell his stock, I think I talk about, I think I've highlights that, they talk about this for years. He was obsessed, he did not want to raise venture capital. He always, he's like, I'm not giving up equity, we'll take on loan, we'll either make money through sales, or we'll take on loans through debt, but we're not, I'm not giving up the most valuable thing into that. I mean, it kind of gives you an insight into, you know, he's got extreme confidence in himself. I don't think at any time, there's times where, there, Oracle could have gone out of business, but even then you see like in his discussions with like his wife at the time, you know, hey, if this fails, that's fine, I'm on, I'm going to go to the next opportunity, the company might fail, but I'm not going to. Okay, so this is, we're talking about early days of Oracle here, this is on the power of the mind, early hiring practices, and Larry as a walking contradiction. How did Ellison create so much prosperity? Certainly he had a generous mind, he could converse freely about almost anything, the Holocaust, poetry, education, architecture, and the future of high technology. He was well versed in the world's religions from Judaism to Buddhism, but to him, there was no power greater than the human mind. So I just want to stop there. I always think about, I have watched a bunch of interviews with him as well as reading a lot of his own words, and that's one of the things that's so appealing about him. He's got this weird charisma, you'll see that even when he does terrible things to people which he definitely does, they have a hard time staying mad at him. He's almost like this, he's like a cult leader, he's got that kind of charisma, right? But what I think what Larry reminds me of is, I think, a truth that Benjamin Franklin hit on 250 years ago. He says his mind was much improved by all the reading he did, right? And so there was very tangible results in Benjamin Franklin's life from that where people found his conversation more enjoyable because he was a more interesting person to talk to that led to him to be more raised money for his business earlier, helped him close sales. Larry Ellison is very much the same way, so that paragraph there kind of gives you an insight into that. So it says when hiring help, Ellison valued intelligence more than experience and maturity. He often looked for unruly geniuses instead of solid, steady workers. Again, when you see who somebody admires you get the idea to like what they like most about themselves or what traits they want most of themselves. I think Larry thinks of himself as an unruly genius. He doesn't think of himself as a solid, solid, steady worker. He says, no, that's not me, I sprint, I rest, I sprint, I sprint and I rest, but I don't have like the dedication that like he talks about like the relentlessness, like of a Bill Gates. He's like, I don't have that. He liked people who argued back. He wanted employees who were sure as that as he was that they were right. Ellison's 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 then if they said yes, they'd hire them. If they said no, they say who is and they'd go hire that person instead. So an early oracle engineer is going to give us an insight into what kind of culture. This hiring practice is going to build in the company, right? So he says, I don't know if you got the smartest people that way, but you definitely got the most arrogance. Ellison swaggering combative style became a part of his company's identity. Again, you get heavily criticized for this, but you got to what Charlie Mungert tells us. Like you got to follow your own drift. That's who Ellison is and it clear from my perspective, it definitely is. Then you might as well lean into that. You're not going to change it. You're not going to what he's going to be. He's Ellison's going to be like a fall, be full of false modesty. So if that's who you are, that's and he's comfortable being that way, then you might as well build a company around your true identity. I think that's what he did. So he says, this arrogant culture had a lot to do with oracles success, but it also explained why oracles competitors despised the company and distrusted its founder. As Stuart was one of early people working at oracle, put it, if he hadn't made me rich, I'd probably hate him because he's obnoxious. He's not nice to people. And so we see this idea of the fact that there's a lot of people that, so later on in his career, Larry makes a habit of dating oracle employees. And one person he dated winds up suing him later on because she gets fired and then she hacks into the company database, and Larry winds up putting her in jail, right? And so I've omitted that. That story's been two of the books that I've read on them, but I skipped over it, but I do want to tell you how this relates something, the prosecutor who's going to prosecute this person that broke into oracles, like network and falsified evidence, essentially, which did. He says, listen, I'm coming to your house, Larry, because you're going to testify tomorrow. And Larry's like, no, I'm ready. You know, I got this. And he's like, Larry, you don't understand. You come off as a prick. That's the prosecutor's quote. He's like, you can't come off as this egotistical, arrogant billionaire when you're in front of 12 normal people in the jury, right? And so what Stuart's picking up on here and what the author goes, there's probably a hundred different examples on this book about this is, you know, he's extremely aggressive and extremely confident. And if you don't hide that, which he has no interest in hiding, I mean, you don't buy 250 million dollar yachts, right? If you were trying to hide that, you have to, you know, you're going to make enemies. And to the Larry's point, he actually uses that as a tool. He likes having enemies. All right. So it says, as a friend of Charles Foster Kane says in Citizen Kane, it's not that Charlie was ever brutal. He just did brutal things. The people around Ellison knew that he was neither all good nor all bad, just like all of us, right? He was capable of chilling selfishness and inspiring generosity. He could dazzle people with his insights and madden them with his lies. He was a fundamentally shy man who could delight audience with his colorful speeches. So he was known for his healthy ego. He often seemed deeply insecure. Over time, many people learn to accept Ellison's contradictory nature. There's a lot of things there about the shyness. He builds this giant company. He almost never comes to the office. He loves working from home, likes having complete control over his environment. And then later on in the book, they talk about, like, you know, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were, were best friends for like 25 years and they both said, they're like, you have to be my best friend because you're my only friend. You know, outside of their family, jobs case, it's not like he's, he's spending his time building deep friendships. He dedicated all his time to his work. Ellison was the same. So again, they're well known, they're charismatic, but they're, they're shy. They're introverted, which I think a lot of people would be surprised, you know, to discover that. Um, okay. So this was very interesting because again, one of Larry's, you have to give him credit. He saw, he had an insight that he built an entire company around and he was the first person. He was extremely early, early. He starts his company in the 1970s. This is, this blew my mind. This one sentence. This is the size of the software industry in 1970. Think about how large it is in present day. In 1970, sales of package computer programs amounted to only $70 million for the entire year. The entire size of the software industry was $70 million a year. And granted, um, one thing Larry did differently was that the hardware makers would give away software for free, but people actually buying individual software programs in 1970s, only $70 million a year. Okay. Uh, into this, uh, so it talks about like it's a wide open, wild, wild west, it's a beginning of an, of an industry. It's not, Larry got in, not, uh, it's not too different than, you know, this multipart series I just did on all, on the early days of the American automobile industry. These are wild times. So the book goes into detail about like, you know, this is kind of cowboy era of, uh, of software in the 1970s. And before that, and I thought the sentence was interesting into this ethical void, strode Larry Ellison, a man who misled people about his past, had precious little experience in business, and was prepared to do whatever it took to achieve success. So again, the author thinks Larry smart. He's obviously successful, but he's, he's very, um, comfortable pointing out that, you know, he's got serious personality flaws, uh, Bill Hewitt and David Packard, who grew up during the Great Depression, founded HP with certain basic values in mind. I really enjoy this section because they're going to, they're going to compare and contrast how Bill and David, uh, created their company and how Larry created his and Bill and, Bill and David, they influenced people like Bob Nois who founded Fair, Fair Trial, Semiconductor and Intel, Steve Jobs had great respect for Bill and David. Um, there's a huge like tree in the technology industry that, that started with, with Bill and David. And as they believe the company, uh, should provide opportunity and security to employees, contribute to the betterment of society, build first rate products, satisfy customers, and make money. Their way of doing business eventually became known as the HP way, there's actually a book called the HP way. I think it's, uh, written by David Packard. And I did a podcast on it. It's somewhere in those, maybe the 30s in that area, if you haven't listened to it. Uh, we thought that, uh, if we could get everybody to agree on what our objectives were and to understand that we were trying to do, what we were trying to do, then we could turn them loose and they would move in a common direction, David Packard wrote, Larry Ellison's vision was narrower. The oracle way to the extent that such thing existed was simply to win. How that goal achieved was secondary. As a former oracle board member put it, Ellison established no magnetic north, no common direction, no sense of how things would or would not be done. And so one of the biggest criticism Steve Jobs get is this idea that the reality distortion field that he would bend the truth and the reality to fit. Like instead of accepting the world as it is, he kind of just made it how he wanted. So Larry grew up, um, he created his own world or another, or put another way, he created his own life and the author gives us some insight into that here. He says Larry Ellison felt that a lot of things were missing from his life. His birth parents were God only where and God only knew who. His adoptive father was a non-entity and high school rewarded conformity and punished free thinking. Ellison's material life also left a lot to be desired. He was never very happy with the humdrum facts of his life. So he changed them. Beginning when he was a child and continuing into his days into the force 400, Ellison lived partly in a world of his own invention. Even as a teenager, he was engaging, he was an engaging storyteller in a rock and tear. When reality was not interesting enough for him, he simply made up delightful and often plausible details as he went along. His stories had all, had certain things in common. They were funny. They glorified Larry Ellison and unless you had the authority to issue subpoenas, they were damn near impossible to disprove. They were also mostly benign. Ellison was neither cynical nor mean spirited. He was always unflaggingly positive and optimistic, that's probably one of his best traits, I would say. And his fractional true stories reflected those personality traits. He wasn't going to be smothered by the dreary circumstances of his life. He was going to leap over them. He tended to see the world as he wanted it to be, rather than as it was. And so this section on how Larry had some close friends in college, how they remembered him, after they drifted apart, also gives you this insight into care, this cult leader like charisma that he has. So Ellison was generally self-centered. He was Abraham said. He was always inside of his own head, but he was also capable of showing great concern and tenderness for his friends. He wasn't a nurturing person in that he would ask how your day was or whatever. But if you told him that this was a really bad day and you needed to take a walk or talk about something, he'd be right there. Here's another one of his friends. Ellison's relationship with the two northwestern men was intense, but fleeting. After he left the Chicago area, his friends rarely heard from him again. Still Ellison did not forget them. When Abraham called Oracle in the early 1990s, he got right through to Ellison and the two had a nice talk. And in 1996, three decades, after this other guy's name was Coleman, in 1996, three decades after Coleman and Ellison had last been close, Coleman sent an email saying hello and telling Ellison that he was married and had two children. Ellison wrote back right away congratulating Coleman for getting and staying married. Ellison said he would love to get together or short of that chat on the phone. Coleman wasn't sure it would happen, but he'd hoped Larry Ellison could find the time. This next sentence is the most important part of this entire section. And it really gives you an insight into the effect Larry has on the people around him. You have to understand Coleman said, I love the guy. You always had a good time with Larry. So something also Larry's addicted to studying history reads a lot of biographies and he takes inspiration from the live stories, you know, people that were able to build remarkable lives in one of those people's churches. So Ellison often said that the 20th century figure he admired most was Winston Churchill. He also said Napoleon is the person he admired most. He had spent, he had a lot in common in Churchill, both were mediocre students, both desperately sought the approval of their fathers to no avail. And both were witty, insatiably curious, and charming when it suited them. Despite Ellison's constant public posturing, he was also like Churchill, fundamentally shy. Reading about Churchill reassured him that even these gods have moments of insecurity. So that was a direct quote from Ellison. This is a little bit about his early days in California. Ellison said that he was so poor that he subsisted on dime packages of craft macaroni and cheese. After he had earned some money, he would always reappear ready to take Quinn. This is his first wife on another adventure. The guy, this is how she remembers him too. The guy was a one man amusement park. Within a couple of months, Ellison and Quinn decided to marry. I hardly knew him. Again, this gives you an insight into his charisma. What kind of person is going to marry somebody they barely know? I hardly knew him, Quinn said. I agreed to marry him because he was the most fascinating man I've ever met in my life. I knew I would never be bored. So I think it's his third wife. She's interviewed in the book, too. And she says, you know, this is now 10 years after they got divorced. They were together for very, they had two kids divorced right away. And the author's like, why didn't you remarry? And she goes, I can't. She goes, I've tried every other man pales in comparison to him. So she's just like, it just can't do it. I found everybody else is not as good as him. So I'm just like, she's just dedicated time to taking care of her kids and raising horses and things. But again, we just, I'm bringing that up because it's over and over and over again. From college friends to ex wives, to employees, to people that want to be his enemies, say the same thing about him. And he's just got this magnetic charm that you just, you know, you believe everything he says. Ellison and Quinn lived in an unremarkable one bedroom apartment in Oakland. They hung tin foil on the windows. So Ellison could sleep after his night shifts. Remember, at this time in his life, he's only working night shifts and weekends. And they often rode the bus because the car was not dependable. The only new piece of furniture they owned was a bed. So that gives you an insight into Larry's life in his early 20s. Ellison was extremely hard on himself, Quinn said. He had, he kind of had a mental image of where he should be and what he should be. And he was not able to attain it. Okay, how many of us have felt the same way, right? Larry's going through that same thing. If Ellison had any future at all, Ada Quinn couldn't see it. During the seven years that they were married, he bounced from job to job. Sometimes taking a cut and pay when he made the change. Even so, Ellison spent money lavishly. She says his wife describes him as he had a champagne taste on a beer budget. At the time, he and Quinn were earning about $1,600 a month combined. In 1974, she decided to leave him. She could no longer stand to watch him flounder. Very interesting words there. Besides, she thought that marriage was not a good venue for him. Yes, he was energetic and exciting, but also uncompromising. And he had, you know, he was never faithful. Constantly cheating on all his wives, his third wife. So this wife is number one. His third wife, the one that actually has his kids, works at Oracle. And his, so interesting is even after Larry gets divorced, his wives like love him. They're like friends. And so his first wife is visiting the office and she's like, oh, you're dating Larry. Just wait. Like, you're not, he's going to cheat on you. And his third wife remembers a conversation. She's like, yeah, yeah, you're, you're just older than me. That's what you think. But, you know, I can satisfy him or whatever the case was. And no, just like we talked about in the podcast, the mechanic and the billionaire are the billionaire and the mechanic. He's got this, this, on, this, this whole in the middle of him that he could just never feel, you know, that drives him, he's just never going to be satisfied. Quinn believed something happened to Ellison during the visit to the therapist. So they go to, they try to like save their marriage by talking to a marriage counselor. And so that's what she's referencing. They gave him a clear vision for his life, one that seemed to come out of nowhere. He said to me, if you stay with me, I will become a millionaire and you can have anything you want. She did not know where that idea came from. He had never said anything like it before. There was never any clue, believe me, not a clue. That's what Quinn's saying. And Quinn's view Ellison made a commitment to himself that he was not going to be a failure. That was the turning point of his life, she said. Still, she did not take him seriously at the time. And so this is his first wife reflecting back on when they were married. He is extremely intense. I was married to him for seven years and by the time I left, I was worn out. And I'm a fairly multi-phasic, high-energy person with a lot of diverse interests and a type A personality. I'm goal oriented and I was worn out. He's beyond anything I've ever experienced. And I'm sure that what accounts for his enormous success now. He has incredible intelligence and he applies it with incredible intensity. And it's one of my favorite sentences in the book. He has incredible intelligence and he applies it with incredible intensity. And that intensity does not let up. People say, gee, don't you wish you were still married to him? And I say no. I'm perfectly happy with the relationship I have with him now because I'm not going to ruin my health. So again, there's more examples in the book on this crazy kind of charisma. At this point, Ellison's working at serious jobs now, but he hasn't started Oracle. And it said, Ellison, who had experienced with IBM E-frames, had signed on to teach Amadal. That's a company they're working at. Amadal's engineer is about the new machine. But mostly he just talked all day long. He was a talking doll, just so they described him, with a pull string that never reached its back. He talked to any and everyone, bosses, secretaries, telephone callers, visitors, delivery people, copy machine technicians, maintenance guys, and passurbys. But mostly he talked to Stuart, who was always within talking distance. There was Stuart said an aura about him, a powerful sense of possibility. There was also something unsettling about Ellison, something vaguely dangerous, a sense that you didn't know was going to happen. He was the kind of person you would like to follow. What Stuart was seeing was the embodiment of charisma. The characteristic that Ellison would soon exploit, so that everyone around him would do his will. The subject he liked best was himself. He was forever telling people how wonderful he was, how smart he was, and how rich he was going to be. Ellison's visit to the counselor may not have been the turning point of his life, as Quinn said, but clearly something about him had changed. If Ellison had ever had a week or uncertain moment in his life, and he definitely did, Stuart would not have known it, somehow Ellison had escaped the tight, clammy grip of everyday fear and doubt. Again, that's why it's so important to read these books. He didn't escape it. He's not sharing with you, but he just quoted Churchill, he just said these gods have these intense periods of insecurity, and that he drew, he's like, if Churchill is going through rough times and self-doubt, then of course I'm going to as well. There's a point in Larry's life where he's working for this company that's run really poorly. I think this idea, I've seen a few times where you get inspiration by seeing things done the wrong way, and then you're like, well, if these guys can run a company, I'm way smarter than them. I can do it too, and Larry's going to experience right now, this is the early 70s. I thought it was a fairly good business guy, and then I'd see these guys making decisions that I didn't understand, that I didn't think were rational, and therefore I lost confidence in them, he said. I thought it was better technically than they were, and I thought it was a better business guy than they were. See how he talks? I know it's not terribly modest to say this, but yeah, I thought I had better judgment, not only about technology, but also about markets than the people who were my bosses. They served as inspirations. If they can run companies, I'll try, I'll give this a shot. He winds up teaming up his main partner, the founding of Oracle's, this gifted programmer named Bob Miner, and Bob is a complete opposite of Larry, and some people are like, how do you even have a relationship with them? This is a little bit of why their partnership worked, and it's not saying, like, Bob doesn't paper over Larry's imperfections, but he realizes it's also a mistake to realize, hey, somebody is imperfections, therefore I can underestimate them. He's like, it's a mistake if you underestimate this guy. While Miner was amused by Ellison, he was also respected him. Some people thought Ellison was just an egomaniac, or just a performer, or just an exaggerator. Miner never made that error. Ellison could see that he was also smart and shrewd and fiercely determined. It would have been a mistake to take Ellison too seriously, but you couldn't, but you could not disregard him. Ellison was sizzle and Miner was steak, and the coming years Ellison peddled the product and Miner built it, always in that order. Ellison, the performer recruited good people into the company, and Miner, the regular guy, got them to stay. Miner could be friends with his employees. Larry Ellison was purposely aloof. He kept distance between his employees, the ones that he wasn't sleeping with, by the way. The two men commented, the two men complimented each other well. Even more than that, they needed each other. Bob Miner could never have created Oracle Corporation by himself. He couldn't have sold software the way Ellison did. He was too inward, too modest, and too honest. Nor was he willing to make the sacrifices Ellison made. For Ellison, Oracle was a holy mission. For Miner, it was always just a job. Ellison needed Miner, too. Few people liked and respected and enjoyed Larry Ellison more than Miner did, and nobody would have put up with him for as long. So I'm fast-forwarding. They've already started to Oracle, or what's soon to be Oracle, and this is fantastic, this paragraph. This is Larry's entire business philosophy in a single act. This is Larry's, right? Bruce Scott's first experience with Larry Ellison was an eye-opener. On one of his first days at STL, that's the name of before, it's Oracle, but it's just not called Oracle yet, okay? Scott was trying to connect STL's computer terminals to the instrument computer. There was a problem. A sheet rock wall stood between the STL offices and the computer room. Scott said, Larry, we need to hook up these terminals. How are we going to hook them up? I'll show you how, Ellison replied. We grabbed a hammer and smashed a hole through the wall. Bruce Scott came to believe that Ellison's entire business philosophy could be summed up in that single act. Find a way or make one. Just do it. So last week we talked about the simulators between Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison. They both started a company that wasn't based on an idea they came up with, right? And so this is really on IBM giving the relational database market to Larry. So it's the mistakes of IBM, but also the intelligence strategy and tactics that Larry used. So IBM's the one that comes up with the idea, hey, we can make a relation database, okay? So it says the system R group had its relational database up and running around 1977. So the question at the beginning of this paragraph is how slow is IBM, okay? This says, but IBM did not introduce a commercial product until February 1982. So five years later, Larry Ellison's nimble and opportunistic little company had a relational database product on the market before IBM managed to move system R from the research division to development. So he's essentially saying that oracle prioritize speed, right? What IBM moves it along, Ellison was out there gobbling up market share. Why did IBM move so slowly? As many, many commentators noted, the company was like a nation unto itself and a very cautious nation at nation at that. It had a massive, richly layered bureaucracy with committees reporting on committees reporting on committees. Nothing could get done without endless review and re-review. This is a crazy story. According to one former IBM programmer, the company wants to study on the way things were done. What they found is that it would take at least nine months to ship an empty box, he said. Indeed, Ellison could not have dreamed up a more amiable and helpful competitor than IBM. Think of the marketing of relational technology as a race with Ellison and IBM as the two main entrants. IBM, this is the greatest metaphor because this is extremely like dense part of the book. It's actually really confusing when you read it. But the author does a great job with this metaphor to explain it to us, okay? So it says, think of Ellison, IBM as two of the main entrants in this race. IBM taught Ellison to walk, bought him a pair of track shoes, trained him as a sprinter, and then gave him a big head start. How could he lose? So one thing I learned from the autobiography Sam Walton is that you should have a bias for action. And then you stayed determined, right? And that's something Jeff Bezos definitely borrowed from reading that book as well because it's talked about in Brad Stone's book, The Everything Store. Larry had the same thing. A lot of people summed up Larry Ellison's success by saying he was at the right place at the right time. One early employee of Oracle said Ellison and his partners, they didn't have a great idea. They found a great idea. That was true. But so what? Lots of people in the computer, I love that the author's response here because a lot of people just be dismissive and usually an excuse of why other people succeed and they haven't, right? I think it's a tear, like you should be studying these people and see what you can learn from them. Well, it's not a crab in the bucket mentality, you know? So the guys like, oh, they didn't have a great idea. They found a great idea. Okay. So that's the end of that quote. Here's to the author. That was true. But so what? Lots of people in the computer industry read the system or paper. But only Ellison seized on the opportunity to build an actual database product. Only Ellison took an idea and used it as a foundation for huge corporation. Yes, he was in the right place at the right time. But as he told me, I don't know if any place or any time where there aren't great possibilities. That's accurate. Yes, IBM gave him the idea. But it did not give him $6 billion. He made himself rich through ceaseless work, brilliant strategy, unrelenting optimism, and ruthless determination. Larry Ellison achieved the first success of his life by doing what no one else could or probably would do. He did it by being himself. I thought this was humorous. The north of myself. Larry would be competing with you and you wouldn't even know it. To Ellison life was never any contest. Every day a new opportunity to prove himself. He would compete with anyone. Any time over anything. Sometimes people got into contest with Ellison without knowing it. Once when the company was just getting started, Stuart joined Larry and his wife Nancy for weekend bike ride. Eventually the three came to a steep incline. When Stuart and Nancy reached the top, Larry was far behind, laboring to catch up. The next time Stuart asked Ellison to go riding with him, Larry begged off. Larry didn't ride with me, ride with me for a while, Stuart said. In the next time we rode, he left me in the dust. He was practicing. He was working. He knew there was a problem and he fixed it. This is on the idea that you need to go fast when the industry is in its infancy. The idea that somebody else might take away Oracle's business was poisoned to Ellison. He understood the importance of locking up a large share of the market early. How much does it cost Pepsi to get one half of a percent of the market from Coke once the market has been established he wants to ask rhetorically? It's very expensive. This market is being established. If we don't run as hard as we can, as fast as we can, and then do it again twice as fast, it will be cost prohibitive for us to increase market share. This is essentially disproving the idea that if you build it, they will come. Larry put marketing first and everything else second. It says there's a quote in the book, average technology and good marketing be good technology and average marketing every day. Something also about the early days of Oracle's Larry, like Michael Jordan, who uses comparison a lot in the last two Larry Elsa podcasts, he wanted to implement high standards. Very similar to Steve Jobs too, right? Ellison often erupted when someone did something he didn't like or said something he considered stupid. There was a lot of intimidation and a lot of uncomfortable intimidation. I didn't like that. This is an early employee. But she didn't believe that Ellison meant to hurt anyone. He only wanted to create an atmosphere of the very highest expectations, a place where the limits on what you can do are your own. One of Ellison's favorite quotes by Vincent Barley is that everybody in the National Football League has talent. The talent to win a championship. It's not on what talent you have. It's what you're willing to sacrifice to do that and the laboratory says I expect you to sacrifice everything. Larry had that same attitude and he also pledged his own life. This is his soon to be third wife, discovering his dedication to Oracle. She learned quickly that Ellison's work came first in his life. He was building a company and nothing could get in the way of that. Once Ellison scheduled a two week trip to Japan, he planned to go to work for a week and then have her meet him for a week's vacation. I got over there and he said sorry, business. She ended up taking tours every day and meeting him only for dinner. Ellison would make any sacrifice for the company. The third wife is the mother of his children, and this shows you how extreme he is. He's pregnant and Oracle is going through a shaky time and might fail. He says, this is his third wife, quoting him. He once turned to me, I was like five or six months pregnant and he said, if this thing doesn't work out, don't expect me to stick around. She knew what he meant. If the company collapsed, he was not going to wallow and failure. He was going to leave and start over again someplace else. I mean, just get out of here, clear out, and clearing out men leaving everything, including me. That's what I mean. You read this book and you see Ellison's warts. He's telling it to a pregnant wife that's just insane. Something also interesting about the life of the life story of Ellison is that Oracle was a surprise to him. He did not set out. Once he got going, I think his ambitions grew, right? At the very beginning, he's like, I just want, you know, I never want to have more than 15 employees. And so he says, when Ellison walked into the room and saw 50 people there, he was wide eyed. For the first time, he realized his little company was becoming big. His baby was growing up and that's exactly what he calls it. He was really shocked. He said, you know, Bob and I never figure we would ever need more than 50 people to do everything we wanted to do. Okay. So this paragraph, this might be one of the best ideas that I learned from Larry. So this is his response to being late or not showing, which he's known for doing, right? He's obviously not, it's not very thoughtful to the people around you. But why he's doing this is a, this idea that he has, it's probably very, very smart. So Ellison made no apologies for his quirks. If anything, he seemed amused at, this is a person working with him, her last name's Overstreet. At Overstreet's concerned about time management, her name's Jenny. Jenny and I approach things very differently, he said, Jenny feels that she has to be exactly on time all the time. Jenny feels if there are a hundred things you have to, you have to know that you have to know all hundred of them. If there are a thousand things you're doing, you have to do all thousand of them. My view is different. My view is that there are only a handful of things that are really important and you devote all of your time to those things and forget everything else. If you try to do all thousand things and through all thousand phone calls, you will dilute your efforts in those areas that are really essential. So again, just to summarize that section, my view is that there are only a handful of things that are really important and you should devote all your time to those and forget everything else. So this is Larry talking about how terrible manager he was at the very beginning. This is in the days when Larry Ellison was still practicing what he later regretfully called management by ridicule because I personalize a lot of Oracle and personalize a lot of the things we do. I was not terribly forgiving of mediocrity, Ellison said. I was completely intolerant of a lack of effort and it was fairly brutal in the way I expressed myself. So a lot of the strategies that Larry, I don't even know if he meant to do it, maybe it's just personality, they echo a lot of professional athletes. So I'm going to play a clip. This is one of the last interviews Kobe Bryant gave before he died and this, this is Kobe sounding a lot like Larry in the early days of Oracle. Issues of problems with other people that don't demand excellence for themselves. I won't tolerate that. Except that when the career is set and done, they're not going to be looking at you, that player and his team and saying, you didn't win a championship. You know, doing me looking here, right, so it's my responsibility to make sure everybody's holding themselves accountable. I'm holding you accountable. If we just played a back-to-back and we have practice the next day, you're asked to be there to take ready to go, right, because I'm there and I'm ready and I just got finished lifting weights for two hours, right. So I'll hold guys to a higher standard and I don't sugarcoat stuff, never have, never will. Okay, so moving ahead, the book spends a lot of time going into detail about Oracle's near-death experience. I think I covered that two podcast to give you like a good idea, two podcasts ago, so I'm going to skip over that part, but I do, there's something happening during this period of rapid growth that I think gives us insight into the kind of people that Larry kept around him at this time. And the person I want to talk to you about is the guy that's in charge of Oracle's advertising when they're experiencing rapid growth and he's going to start talking here. His name is Bennett and he's going to talk about that he learned the art of advertising from his mentor, scanning Tony. Tony and I became friends and he taught me how to kill for a living. Bennett once wrote, Bennett eventually formed a one man advertising agency that catered to Silicon Valley companies. He worked in exchange for small creative fee and a ton of stock options. Bennett who after all made his living on hyperbole once described his work this way. My ads attack like a pack of speed crazed Wolverines and have the same general effect on your competition as a full moon does on a werewolf. I'm looking for clients with killer technology and a taste for blood. Bennett came up with a catchy slogan for his ad agency because God hates cowards. Yes, this was just the man Larry Ellison needed to publicize his company. So after Oracle has been around for about 10 years, this is where we start to see the first examples of Larry saying, Hey, you know what? My goal now is I'm going to make Oracle the largest software company in the world. And we also start to see that you know, at the time people thought he was crazy and we see this, you know, reality distortion field that Larry and Steve has have Oracle may have had 131 million sales in 1987, but it was still a minor player for Oracle to suggest that it could overtake such legendary companies was almost laughable. It was as if a mom and pop burger joint said they were going to out sell McDonald's. Larry fundamentally believed even at that point that his company was going to be more important than IBM, you can't imagine how far fetched those ideas sounded. He would say he would say he was here to become the largest software company in the world. People were taken aback. So in this part, we're going to his his one of his childhood friends gives us a way to understand Larry using gambling metaphors and this is happening when Oracle's having another rough. They have to restate earnings and they're going to their stock price gets hit because they thought they were booking revenue that was not was not real revenue. And so that caused them to say, oh, you know, we're going to actually have a loss here this quarter and then they went up restating like two or three years worth of financials. But this understanding Larry's reaction, I think is really important. His childhood friend Dennis Coleman, one set of of him, Larry was always the kind of guy who would take it to the limit and then some bet the house and then bet the house again. That was just what Larry Ellison did in March 1990. Having under achieved in the third fiscal quarter, he told the financial community, we expect to make it up in the fourth quarter and get back to our annual plan. The vice president of corporate finance also used the gambling analogy to describe Ellison's behavior. It was kind of like he lost a hand in a poker game, so he doubled up on his bet for the next hand. So eventually they work, they work their way through it. They still need some kind, they need like a bridge loan to cover the gap though. And so this is where, this is an example of what I referenced earlier, Larry goes against consensus. Every single one of his advisors says, told him sell equity, sell equity, sell equity. And Larry just had a fundamental belief that there would be a mistake because the equity is going to be worth a lot more in the future. While all this was happening, Oracle was also trying to cope with its cash flow problem. Just about everyone who advised Ellison on matters of finance had been recommending for months that Oracle raised money by selling equity in the company. Ellison wouldn't do it. He preferred to borrow money instead, so they go through all, like they have all these failures and eventually find like they get to syndicate and they wind up getting the money they need. Finally, Larry and his treasure put together a syndicate of 13 American and international banks, do which they range a $250 million line of credit. That would be enough to sustain the company until the next crisis. This is Oracle's former head of sales describing Larry. There are only two kinds of people in the world to Larry. Those who are on his team and those who are his enemies. There isn't any other. There is no middle ground. Now this next section is a little longer, and I want to tell you what's happening. Larry just announced Oracle's largest loss ever. The stock is down 75%. And the remarkable thing is he is still optimistic. He's struggling, but he's still optimistic. That's why I said earlier. Thank God his relentless optimism is one of his best traits. After the announcement, the marketing man Ken Cohen went to the airport to catch a plane back to Oakland where he lived. He was sitting in the terminal reading a newspaper when he saw Larry Ellison walking by. Ellison who had changed out of his business suit and into jeans and a workshop was soon to board a flight back to San Francisco. He appeared to be in a days as if he had just awakened from a heavy sleep. Cohen was surprised to see him alone. Cohen approached him and said, rough day, huh? Ellison responded with a faint shake of his head as if he barely heard the question. Cohen saw that he had tears in his eyes. It was one of the few times he'd ever seen Ellison in an emotional pain. So Cohen said, are you headed back to the Bay Area? Yeah, I have a lot of work to take care of Ellison said. Maybe you need a day or two on the beach? No. Ellison said shaking his head. In no can, we should be able to fix this. Soon Ellison began to talk about how, the more he talked, the more animated, the more like himself he became. Ellison was a man with an inexhaustible supply of words and now he was tapping into his supply with his usual joy and abandon. Even when he was feeling his worst, Ellison remained an optimist, a man who couldn't help looking forward. He lived in the future. Another of him believed that Oracle was already fixed. But the part of him that Cohen couldn't, could see didn't look so good. Man, you look terrible, Cohen said. I don't suppose you'd believe if I told you I have a cold. I think it's time for some straight shooting on this one, Larry, Cohen said. I don't think the analysts would have believed it either. I think some of them wished you had worse. Yeah, Ellison said. But they'll see, Ellison asked Cohen how he thought the announcement had gone. Had it gone as bad as he thought it went? Were people really as angry at Ellison as they thought they were? Yes, Cohen said. It had gone terribly and people were furious. I was afraid of that Ellison side. To Cohen, Ellison seemed like a little boy who regretted that he had made his parents so angry. At one point Ellison asked him, did I say anything really wrong? Ellison did not think so, but Ellison was not comforted. He was just a crumbled mess Cohen later said, instead. Still, as Ellison made his way to the gate, Cohen did not doubt that he would build Oracle back up again. And then we see a little bit more insight into what's happening in Larry's life at this time through his, through his wife. It was unlike Ellison to brute. You never saw the guy get down about anything when employee said, but he was apparently more than a little bit reflective after the crash. Barbara said he was terrified that he would fail, confirming his father's darkest predictions about him. Black days, it was awful. The kids and I never saw him. We couldn't see him. He couldn't take the time to see us, she said. It wasn't that he didn't want to, but everybody had said that he was going to fail, and there were people waiting for him to fail, people who didn't like him. I remember talking to him and he'd be real worried and scared and wanting to turn it around. There was a note in his voice that you didn't usually hear with him, just scared, just worried. So this is another example of how like his Larry's personal enthusiasm is infectious. And it comes from a fellow board member. And then it also, it's going to give you insight into what's important to Larry. So if you're, if you're right and you want to win, you have a lot of leeway with Larry. So it says, but Ellison was just more than just a funny character. He was an electric figure and his presence on the board was mostly positive Castella said. It's that native curiosity, energy, intensity, enthusiasm. He gets enthusiastic, he's wildly enthusiastic. I mean, it's infectious. He's just like, whoa, when he's into something, man, there's energy around it and he drags people along in his wake. That's super positive. He'll get into a sport or a hobby or a woman. It doesn't matter what it is. He's wildly enthusiastic in all of the above. So Castello, Castello and the other members of the board are saying, hey, we need somebody that's actually good. We need a CFO that has experience. So they're trying to hire this guy named Henley and Larry doesn't want to. And this is the example. Like if you're right and you want to win, you'll have a lot of leeway with Larry. So I think that's a good trait of his. So as a coordinator, Castello, Larry said, he's just a goddamn finance guy. He's not that smart. He's a fucking plotting finance guy. And he just knows how to plunk numbers and all this shit. And I said, you know, this is Castello saying, yeah, right. We just need a fucking finance guy so we're not $250 million in the whole. How about that? You fucking idiot. These were the kind of conversations we had. So again, Larry is extremely hard on people. We saw this last week with the billionaire in the mechanic. But if you're dedicated to win as much as he is, so the guy running his team was this guy named Russell. And Russell would be yelling at Larry when he's making mistakes, driving the boat, just cursing out of ganging his face, calling him an idiot. And Larry would sit and take it. And he wouldn't do that with other people, but he knew that you're dedicated to win. In this case, Castello and him wind up having a falling out later. But at this point, Castello wants Oracle to succeed. They want us to win. He's like, we have to have somebody knows what they're doing in that role. And so much of the point where he could call Larry an idiot to his face and Larry went to a green. And as I was saying, OK, let's go ahead and hire this guy. And Henley does a lot. The early days of Oracle, they lacked common sense. Henley restored that. And Henley was the guy that Larry didn't want to hire. And Larry reflects on it. He's like, yeah, I was wrong. That was the right guy for the job. So I'm going to read this section to you about the changes Henley makes. Just to realize, like, again, every company has held together with duct tape. They all have weird things that they're doing poorly inside that we just can't see. And this is remarkable. Most of the changes Henley made were common sense ones. They only seemed revolutionary because Oracle had been lacking in common sense. No longer would the company sell a maintenance contract and recognize all the revenue up front. Instead, it would book the revenue a month at a time as the payments came in. No longer would Oracle have a tiny, bad debt reserve, meaning they had no buffer. From now on, it would always keep enough cash to cover any deals that fell through. And no longer would customers be given a year to pay for their software. What the hell is that? That's crazy, right? I said, I don't care if the accounting rules, this is Henley talking. I don't care if the accounting rules say you can recognize the revenue or not. We're not going to do that, Henley said. So let's start doing 30-day terms. And if people aren't willing to buy it, it means they don't really need the products anyway. And that's the big issue is there's a lot of salesmen, our salespeople at Oracle that were getting paid commissions by making fake deals. Okay, don't worry. I'll give you 85% off and you'll have to pay for a year. And then they get the commission right then, because the company books the revenue right then, even though they didn't get any money. And then a year goes by and that company goes boss or they disappear. So they want to, this is why they had to restate a lot of their finances. Like I said, I think it was like three years or something like that in total. Okay. This is a section on charisma, best friends, and competition. And I would say Larry's extremely selfish. He reminds me a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright, and he's completely like, just, hey, this is what's best for me. And this is what I'm going to do now, whether my kids be damned or, you know, my wives to be damned in Frank Lloyd Wright's case. I think Larry's probably a better father. He definitely is a better father. He has a better relationship with his two kids than Frank had with his. But one person that Larry genuinely I think cared about was Steve Jobs. And I really do think he admired and respected Steve. And maybe he calls Steve the Edison of our time. And I think my guess is Larry would have loved to have Steve Jobs career. Because yeah, he makes way more money than Steve. But Oracle's products are mainly hidden from view. That's very different than the adulation Steve Jobs get because, you know, we're all walking around with the product that he created. And we're working on computers. The computers he made and the phones and everything else is supposed to like even if you do use Oracle to stream something, you know, you don't even know you're using an Oracle product. So anyways, this is about he's competitive with everybody else, but Steve Jobs. The people who work for Jobs who were caught in his gravitational pull quickly found out he cared much more about his own standards than he did about their feelings. When I wasn't sure what the word charisma meant, I met Steve Jobs and then I knew this is Apple. That's a quote from Apple's chief scientist, Kenyam Larry Tesla. He wanted you to be great and he wanted to create something that was great. And he was going to make you do that. So there's kind of the similarities between Steve and Larry. So it says, we both joke around. I say, Steve's my best friend and Steve says, I'm his best friend, Ellison said, and he says, well, you're my only friend. So you have to be my best friend. That was Steve's joke and I could make the same joke. Remember, Steve's still alive at the time of his writing. Ellison tended to describe the things in his life in grandiose terms. This is hilarious. It's definitely true. He owned the fastest boat in the world. The best surgeon in North America had operated on his elbow and so on. He talked about his relationship with Steve Jobs the same way. This wasn't just a friendship. It was a pairing for the ages, a meeting of the minds, the greatest love of all. But he's, he talks about a story where Pixar just released Toy Story and he's at the premiere. Right? So he says, I'm very competitive and sometimes when somebody does something really great, I get upset because I feel like that isn't me, Ellison said. And my reaction towards Steve wasn't competitive at all. I felt what he had done was so wonderful and I was so proud of him and I love and I love him so much. It was almost as if I had done it. I didn't feel the least bit competitive. I was very, very happy for him, which is a bit of a revelation for me. The wonderful thing about loving somebody else is that I can, it can expand your ego in the best sense. If they do something great, you feel terrific about it. And so here we were at this premiere and I'm giving Steve a big hug and telling him all of this. He's verbalizing what he just said to us to Steve. It was a pretty emotional moment for both of us. It was a great intimate moment. Just two more things. This is Ellison on love and work. Ellison then went on one of his rhetorical adventures. Life is the enlightened pursuit of happiness, not the unenlightened pursuit of as much money as you can accumulate. And the only things that are as important in our lives are love and work, not necessarily in that order. We work because work is an act of creation. We identify with it. I look at the company, I think, this is me. But that's not my whole life. People I care about, people I love are essential for my sanity to make it through every day. So both of those things work and love conspire to deliver some kind of happiness. And if we can get reasonably good at both of them, we're in really great shape and I love that piece of advice, get really good at work and love. And you're going to be 90% of the way there. And finally he's talking about his son, but I really think this is advice for all of us. He's got the same problem all the rest of us have. He has to engage in an enlightened pursuit of happiness, to figure out what makes him happy. That's all about how you feel about yourself, how you relate to other people, what your work is, what you create, and what you make. Your builders, human beings are builders. He's going to have to find something he really wants to build. He's going to have to have some idea and create something out of that idea. So much more in this book, just like every other book I cover. So if you're interested, definitely pick it up. Goes into great detail about the first 20 years of Oracle. That is 127 books down, 1000 to go. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show note, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. And I'll talk to you again soon.