Larry Ellison: Billionaire Samurai Warrior of Silicon Valley

He is the

samurai

warrior

of Silicon Valley. Larry's attitude is: if you want to compete against me, then prepare to be crushed. Larry Ellison started Oracle software more than 30 years ago and has made him the highest-paid executive of the last decade with total compensation. of one point eight four billion dollars, there was no one better than Larry to make a customer believe that he can change that person's business life with his product that he sees around the corner long before many of us reach the end of the street he will do. Whatever it takes to win in the office as soon as possible, the German software company had to pay Oracle $1.3 billion or in the ocean, there is absolutely no doubt that you hate losing the technology your company has become The backbone of the world's information systems, from government to online commerce, the brash

billionaire

is an ambitious provocateur with a singular management style.

I have a theory that Larry's succession plan for Oracle is that he's trying to find a way that when he's six feet under in a grave he can still run Oracle loud and clear. Okay, if you know anything about Oracle's Larry Ellison, it's probably something like this. I have a Bugatti, the fastest car in this house, it cost 200 million dollars, the fastest sailboat, that's all. I am addicted to winning, the more you win, the more you learn. He is a high-flying adrenaline junkie and an unapologetic collector of expensive toys and real estate. It spent four hundred million dollars to bring the 2010 Copa América, the oldest active sports trophy, back to the United States for the first time in 15 years, but its success comes from something much less flashy - some of the world's most essential software tools. that you use every day but you probably don't realize it's their company that makes them work almost everyone in the world uses Oracle they just don't know it if you do any kind of government transaction with almost any government in the world any transaction business with almost any Internet business in the world or any traditional business if you have a credit card if you have a cell phone if you have any of the modern things in life if you live today I think you probably use Oracle.

Larry Ellison arguably created the most important computer software you've never heard of. He was a man behind the curtain for a tremendous change in the way we all live. Ellison remained behind that curtain when we tried to contact him to participate in this program born in the Bronx in 1944 Ellison grew up in Chicago when he was 12 his father bluntly gave him some surprising news my father just said right before dinner oh , by the way, you were adopted and we're having meatloaf tonight, it was so shocking. I just put it aside and thought about it for years without really, you know, facing it all and realizing all the implications.

He dropped out of college twice. Ellison was a mediocre student and did not like formal education. Mike Wilson is editor of the St. Petersburg Times and interviewed Ellison extensively for his biography. Larry wasn't interested in following school rules in the family or anywhere else. Larry needed to get out of Lewis Ellison's shadow and prove to his father that he could make something of himself. His talent for the fast lane was obvious from the start. Larry went out and bought a turquoise blue Thunderbird. He was a classy guy. He wanted to impress people. He got in that car and drove it to California.

Larry Ellison was a young man with a tremendous amount of talent. potential his trip to California was instrumental in us becoming Ellison he settled in Berkeley and set out to make a living writing code in 1973 he worked at the computer electronics manufacturer am Dom there he met Stuart Fagan and they have remained friends for more than 35 years I walked into my cubicle the first day I worked there and across the hall there were a couple of guys who never seemed to do any work, they just talked all the time and one of them kept talking about himself and how smart he was.

It was, how stupid everyone else was. was and how he should really be handling everything and that was Larry Ellison Ellison was a talented but impatient programmer desperate to find something of his own to control to say he had the attention span of a tumbleweed is overestimating him, I would say more the attention span of a lightning bolt , but his attention was focused when he got a job at a company called Ampex Ampex was struggling with a project funded by of all places the information-driven CIA the project was codenamed Oracle the CIA needed a system to store and retrieve Large amounts of foreign intelligence concerned with its various operations and sensitive missions for Ellison was his life's work and would plant the seeds of his future in the 1970s.

Information storage meant putting data on reel-to-reel tapes, which It was too slow. and inconsistent for the CIA and too slow for Ellison, he left Ampex and then founded his own company with his friend and programming genius Bob, the miner Bob and Larry were a perfect odd couple for Silicon Valley. Bob had all the engineering intelligence, the technical ability of Larry. on the other hand, he had the sales ability, the visionary ability, the ability to go to a customer and explain how they can change their business with this original handwritten sign and $1,200 started software development labs or SDL Ellison recruited friends at Oats and Stewart Fagan to help. program, he wanted me to join him and he's going to start some kind of company and I thought it was the stupidest idea I'd ever heard in my life because Larry wasn't famous for finishing things.

I used to say that he is completely inconsiderate and he will never do it. It didn't matter at all and she was right, Alison's new company needed a product and after reading an obscure IBM research paper she thought it had a method of classifying information that was far superior to anything that had existed before it was called database. of relational data according to Gary Blum, who worked with Ellison for 14 years, it was a complex name but a simple relational idea, Davis, would you know what did what is? It is a collection of data and information that is very simply placed in a format that makes it very easy to search and finding that information is nothing more complicated than IBM not seeing the potential of what they had.

Ellison did. I said: Oh my God, we can beat IBM in the markets because IBM doesn't believe in its own idea. Ellison believed and asked programmer Bruce Scott. Getting into writing code to me is just cool technology and kind of fun, but to Larry, you know he saw a company, he saw a market, we weren't sure Larry was right, but B needed the jobs and it was a fight all the time. Larry was under a lot of pressure to get some money somehow. In 1977, at age 34, software startup Larry Ellison was busy creating an intelligent database that they thought would revolutionize the way businesses retrieve, manage, and They analyze data in three rooms. and in a small area of ​​the lobby there were four of us writing programs.

Larry was mainly involved in finding clients and that was a strange idea because we didn't have software, although all the things you read in books about someone being a leader, he was. But he was tenacious and would never give up on anything. Ellison pursued and cajoled customers, becoming the company's chief evangelist. There was no one better than Larry at making a business person believe a customer could change that person's business life with his product while knowing they still needed a smarter solution to the monumental task of managing the world's intelligence Ellison sold his database to the CIA their first customer called the new Oracle software version 2 there was no version 1 because everyone thought well no one buys version 1 it has bugs so we started with version 2 our version 2 has at least as many bugs as anyone's version 1 and I described those early versions as the motel of databases, the data ran out but didn't come out in 1982 Ellison also took the Oracle name for his company.

He addressed government agencies and large corporations in his own unique way. I remember Bruce once told me very clearly that we cannot be successful if we lie to customers for some reason. Larry told Bank of America. I think he told us there were 15 of us when there were actually five of us. I'm not sure why Bank of America would think differently of you if you're 5 or 15, but Larry had given them a number that was a little higher than reality. Allison was also honing a sales philosophy that has its roots in a trip she had taken to Japan in the early 1970s.

I was in Japan and I was talking to a Japanese business executive and he said, you know, the problem with the United States is that we simply do not have the stomach for competition. Japan we believe that our competitors are stealing the rice from the mouths of the art that you know from our children in Japan we believe that any market share less than one hundred percent is not enough. His take-no-prisoners approach became known as the Oracle Method, the Oracle Method. In the early and mid-80s it was simply winning by almost any means necessary. Larry's attitude was like if you want to compete against me, then you better be prepared to get crushed or not compete against me.

His product, the Oracle database, took off like a jet. wrestler in one of his ads and in 1986 Oracle went public his 39 percent stake in the company was worth a staggering $93 million. The IPO was huge, but it was eclipsed the next day by Microsoft's public offering. which made Bill Gates' steak worth a In 1989, Ellison moved a whopping three hundred and fifty million dollars to this gigantic campus in Redwood Shores, California, which became known as the Emerald City, a reference to the Wizard of Oz or as one newspaper described it. Larry Land and everyone knew who the magician was when I ordered a Ferrari 348 and was going to get the first 348 in California.

Larry ordered one somewhere on the east coast and it shipped before he got mine. He didn't want to be second, he wanted me to be first. its obsession with being first took its toll Oracle hit a wall, these aggressive sales practices began to cause serious problems Oracle's aggressive sales practices in the 1980s turned the company into a nightmare for accountants the sales force was so aggressive, so willing to close a deal and there were so few commercial controls on the composition of those deals, so we started to have the problem that we certainly signed some bad contracts.

They also sold products that had not yet been created. Oracle was selling a lot of futures, so you're taking a lot of money and a lot of revenue for future deliverables, so the question comes when you finally get those liberals now, who do you sell them to? You already sold it to everyone, you sold it to him three years before you had it. It doesn't help the company's prospects that its last product was a flop. Oracle version six was plagued with bugs. Customers became frustrated and sales plummeted. It's sometimes characterized as Oracle's near-death experience in the early '90s and it was that we weren't cutting fat.

We are cutting muscle and you could even say we are in a couple of cases where Oracle's stock price and its free fall were as well. By November 1, 1990, it had lost $790 million. His company was almost a billion dollar operation and it was failing. Larry was trying to achieve this greatness that he was building for all the time and now he was in this feeling of being a laughingstock, it was devastating for him, we are all a group of kids who grew up with the business. and we were no longer children and the business was no longer a small business, it was a big business and we had to replace practically all the senior managers and it was a very painful process.

He convinced well-known sales and management consultant Ray Layne to join. the company and what he brought to the table was what I characterize as operational discipline and maturity around this, that's how a big company works, it was chaotic, it was painful, no one wanted to go through that again, so the culture was restarted, but the true Savior of the company. came in the form of a new product Zack Nelson was Oracle's youngest marketing executive Oracle 7 was a spectacular product, the future was incredibly bright and I think everyone inside Oracle at the time certainly knew that their orders were not only incrementally better . a magnitude better Ellison's company had dodged its near-death experience in 1994.

Oracle's revenues surpassed the $2 billion mark and, as a result, its stock was worth nearly $3 billion to Ellison, making which wasn't enough to become the only software heavyweight Ellison knew he had. to fight withthe current champion, Bill Gates, seemed to be personally disappointed because he wasn't richer than Bill Gates, it's the scorecard and if you weren't number one, if you weren't the richest, you weren't at the top. It wasn't the best, it was the scorecard and I was losing. I think Larry thought he was in tremendous competition with Bill Gates and maybe Gates didn't think so much.

Larry wanted to be recognized as the world's most innovative sales evangelist. of the software and he had a tough battle against the guy who would put his software on virtually every personal computer in the world. Ellison was obsessed with Gates and would later publicly admit that he had hired private detectives to dig him up. Gates' new product. Windows 95 made the entire technological world vibrate, including Ellison himself in this appearance on the Charlie Rose show. This Windows 95 is enormously complicated software and the idea that people can install it in their homes and manage these things in their home to me.

It's funny and it's time for something that's easier to think about. This is clearly part of our strategy to get rid of Microsoft, but how you determine Microsoft is not something where you throw darts at Bill Gates and hate and envy Bill Gates, you have to think about. about products and create products that are better than the products that Microsoft sells and that Ellison made a move into the consumer device market called it the network computer or NC launched the network computer with great fanfare the computers we make today, personal computers They are quite expensive, very, very complex, that is why we have introduced this new kind of computer for normal humans. beings that are very, very low, cost a lot of weight, now every person can use a computer because it is low cost and very easy to use, you can surf the web, you can send emails and he said, and it could cost a kind of $500.

An internet device, so to speak, is no different than your toaster. I remember talking to him and I said, "You know the Internet makes it possible to imagine a world without the Microsoft operating system on every desktop" and that's how you really know, it was the birth of MC Ellison. in a campaign to promote the power of his new baby on the web while making fun of the popular PC. I hate PC with a passion. Put things online. Its bits. Don't put pieces on cardboard. Cardboard on trucks. Trucks to meat stores. If I. go to the store, you know, pick out this stuff, it's crazy.

I love the internet, but falling PC prices meant NC was doomed to fail. I don't think there was anything wrong with the idea, I actually just think it was premature, five years later I would have won. world and the only difference is all the PC manufacturers Dell HP all the other gateway what did they do? They created a $500 PC that surfs the web very well and responds very well to email and that closed Ellison's foray into the consumer market. His North Carolina was too. way ahead of his time, but his view of the Internet was still spot on.

The Oracle database became the basis for all these Internet services that we take for granted today. Expedia Amazon eBay. Check out the list of apps that store all that information. that information delivering that information making those transactions through the Oracle database what people thought Larry was crazy is now a genius and solved the biggest IT problem in history by mm Larry Ellison's company, Oracle, was among the world's elite technology companies, but infighting would continue soon ousting the company's president and chief operating officer, Ray Lane, who had been promoted to second-in-command and heir apparent, described that the culture at the company that left wasn't good enough for a salesperson to meet their quota, they had to earn 200 percent of their quota was, you know, the top 10 percent are rewarded.

Millions and everyone else you know falls into the networks. They are weak soldiers. Shoot him. Lane said he didn't fit into Oracle's system and that he was the only person making decisions. in Oracle it's Larry, a lot of people who got them out of Oracle got confused about who was in charge and that's pretty volatile, it's like a galactic collision, yeah, where two stars collide and it's a pretty violent explosion. Oracle, the company was on a roll but was falling behind. behind in one key area, we are still struggling to be relevant in the application world, where we are the second largest application provider in the world and we are number two in ERP behind sa P boy, this number two is getting old, the number two in us.

As for number two, we are number two in CRM behind Siebel, but we are growing faster than sa P and we are growing faster than Siebel and we were determined to become number one in applications, like we were number one in the database to reach number one Ellison needed to do something his company had long avoided buying new technology through acquisitions when he came to that conclusion, opened his wallet and bet much more than anyone else and, in fact, he did much faster than anyone wanted. to combine new application software with Oracle's successful product line in 2003, targeted the company PeopleSoft and in a hostile takeover attempt, the Department of Justice sued Oracle on antitrust grounds, alleging that the acquisition would allow the company illegally increase fees and harm innovation after a year or half a year. battle the court sided with Oracle Ellison eventually acquired PeopleSoft for ten point three billion dollars it's very rare that someone gets sued by the government and actually wins, you know, it's just another testament to the tenacity of this guy that the Most guys might have given up that instead, Ellison stepped up in the next five years and would spend about thirty-four billion dollars acquiring fifty-two companies.

Heather Bellini is a senior managing director in the technology research team at International Strategy and Investment Group. It has been covered by Oracle since 2003. Look and see how the landscape was changing and how the massacre that was done to some of its competitors was going to give it the opportunity to make some acquisitions and buy some technology that it was behind and it really was he who started it. The whole trend within the technology industry Ellison's appetite for acquisitions accelerated in 2009 with his seven point four billion dollar trophy purchase of prominent hardware company Sun Microsystems, but in 2010 his eyes were on another trophy , a four-hundred-million-dollar, decade-long obsession, BMW.

Oracle Racing was launched in 2004 Ellison's America's Cup career It may be the oldest active award in international sport, but what Ellison created was completely new. The boat is a trimaran. He often appears to be almost flying with only one of his three holes in reality. contact with water the oceans have never seen anything like it there is absolutely no doubt that he hates losing there is no doubt that Grant Dalton has competed against Ellison on the America's Cup circuit, as I remember, and running against time and we will run against him in the future this is a man who is very determined to work on Valentine's Day 2010 Ellison brought the America's Cup back to the United States for the first time in 15 years he celebrated with his now ex-wife, the romance novelist Melanie Craft, was his fourth The old

samurai

warrior

's marriage resurfaced when his friend Mark heard he resigned as CEO of Hewlett-Packard amid allegations of sexual harassment and expense account irregularities.

Ellison was outraged and attacked HP's board of directors. He said quote that HP's board just made the worst personnel decision since An idiot on Apple's board fired Steve Jobs many years ago, exactly one month later, Allison shocked the business world when she turned around and hired the ousted executive. The Silicon Valley soap opera continued when HP named Leo Apotheker as its CEO. His former company's AP is Oracle's biggest rival in enterprise software and Oracle had been embroiled in a nasty copyright infringement case that lasted three years and ended in November 2010. When the software company was ordered German company to pay Oracle $1.3 billion, it was the largest settlement ever reached for software piracy.

The Larry Ellison fight had brought new blood to the information technology battlefield and, as always, he is more determined than ever to win. Larry Ellison is quite similar to the New York Yankees, they are the team you love to hate and as a competitor of Larry Ellison, I am sure he is the person people love to hate, given the success he has had. Those visionaries that you think just talk without saying anything and say, "Oh, this is how the world can be." You know, Larry sees what the world can be like. and then he tries to make it so that he started with a $1,200 stake in a small company and, by sheer force of will and persuasion, turned it into one of the giant software companies in the world.