1997 - Academy of Achievement Interview
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/ell0int-1

1998/1999 - CNN/Fortune profile of Ellison
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cYy-b7qfCE
- there are a lot of good quotes in this video.
- at the beginning: Ellison talks about how you need to be doing things differently from everyone else
- mid-way through: Ellison says his relationship with Gates changed when Gates ran Netscape out of business; he thought that was really scummy
- mid-way through: he talks about his vision for cloud computing, with cheap computers being used to harness the computing power of servers via the internet. It's basically exactly what we have now with the iPhones / iPads / Google Glass / Chromebooks. This part really impressed b/c it was 10+ years ahead of the curve.

~2000 - Ellison on Microsoft's monopoly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssX4RL24HT4

2001.06 - Larry Ellison says Microsoft ruling could be end of AOL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEbiAcTmlQE

2011.04.08 - Canadian Business - Larry Ellison: Why it pays to be a jerk
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/busines ... be-a-jerk/

Larry Ellison responds to provocative question
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrDnuvHfBr4
- notice how he interrupts the guy asking the question multiple times

Ed Catmull and Larry Ellison on Steve Jobs at D10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7p2u_hMqK4
3:45 - Ed thinks Jobs went through phases, where he was learning from his mistakes. Steve became more kind, more empathetic, and he negotiated with a notion of fairness and partnership.
5:00 - Ed praises the fact that Steve designed the Pixar building specifically to
5:50 - "Why was he so successful?" - Ellison: "Aside from his obvious genious (which helps), he had a single-mindedness and attention to detail unlike anyone I've ever seen. He was a bit of a control freak, and he wanted to engineer every aspect of the user experience of, say, the iPhone, including what happened when you walked into the store. [This is reminding me of the book "the mythical man month" which talks about how you need a single visionary], how you paid for an apple product with your credit card in the store, what the iPhone looked like in the box, the detail of the box, what it was like to open the box, what you saw when you first opened the box, how you bought an application, how you connected to the network, every excruciating detail he was personally involved in; I don't think people understand--you know Edison had this comment that it's 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration; Steve was a god of perspiration, Steve worked incredibly hard. It wasn't just his intellectual gifts, which were enormous, but how he took that horsepower and applied it tirelessly until the entire problem was solved. I've never seen anyone like that.
8:20 - Ellison says that he met Jobs when they were neighbors because Jobs' peacock walked into Ellison's yard and woke him up. Jobs had gotten the peacock as a birthday present and didn't like it either, and used Ellison to convince his girlfriend that he needed to get rid of it.
9:30-10:50 - He gives anecdotes of Steve's perfectionism
11:40 - Ellison: There are a lot of good ideas. Translating a good idea into a great product is unbelievably hard. There are so many details; people accuse Steve of stealing the idea for the Macintosh from the Alto computer at Xerox Parc. I was at Xerox; I used the Alto a lot. Finishing the Alto and turning it into the Macintosh was enormously complicated; there were so many things that had to be done that Xerox had not done. There were a few good ideas in the Xerox machine, but Steve would translate good ideas--not always his good ideas--but he would translate good ideas into finished products unlike anyone in our industry. You know, Henry Ford didn't invent the car, but he made it cheap and he made it popular and he made it accessible to the American people. Steve would translate good ideas into finished, brilliant products.

2013 - BAC Business HOF Award 2013:Larry Ellison
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMWuWc6_obk

2014.09.25 - SteveBlank.com - Watching Larry Ellison become Larry Ellison — The DNA of a Winner
- This is a really good article. Lots of useful information.

In Oracle’s early days Kathryn Gould was the founding VP of Marketing, working there from 1982 to 1984. When I heard that Larry Ellison was stepping down as Oracle’s CEO I asked Kathryn to think about the skills she saw in a young Larry Ellison that might make today’s founders winners.
—
Though I haven’t talked to Larry face-to-face for 20 years, and haven’t worked at Oracle for 30 years, he’s the yardstick I’ve used to pick entrepreneurs all of these years since.

Larry had the DNA I’ve seen common with all the successful entrepreneurs I’ve backed in my 25 years of Venture Capital work—only he had a more exaggerated case than most. Without a doubt, Larry was the most potent entrepreneur I’ve known. It was a gift to be able to work with him and see him in action.

Here’s what was exceptional about Larry:

Potent Leadership Skill - Larry didn’t practice any kind of textbook management, but he was an intense communicator and inspiring leader. As a result, every person in the company knew what the goal was—world domination and death to all competitors. He often said, “It’s not enough to win—all others must fail.” And he meant it, but with a laugh. It wasn’t as heavy as it sounds, but everyone got the point. We were relentless competitors. Even as the company grew from a handful of people when I started to about 150 when I left (yes, still ridiculously small) I observed that, every single person knew our mission. This is not usual—startups that fail often have a lot of people milling around who don’t know what the goal is. In winning companies, everybody pulls in the same direction. A corollary to Larry’s leadership style was that, at least in my day, he did it with great humor, lots of off-the-cuff funny stuff. He loved to argue, often engaging one of our talented VPs who had been captain of his school debate team. When we weren’t arguing intensely, we were laughing. It made the long hours pass lightly.

Huge Technical Vision - Larry always had a 10-year technical vision that he could draw on the whiteboard or spin like a yarn.
It wasn’t always perfect, but it was way more right than wrong, It informed our product development to a great degree and kept us working on more or less the right stuff. Back then he advocated for:
Portability (databases had previously been shackled to the specific machines they ran on)
Being distributed/network ready (even though Ethernet was just barely coming into use in the enterprise)
The choice of the SQL a way to ask questions (queries) in an easy-to-understand language
Relational architecture (a collection of data organized as a set of formally described tables) in the first place—all new stuff, and technically compelling

The final proof of a compelling technical vision is that customers were interested—the phone was always ringing. Often it was people cold calling us, who had read something in a trade magazine and wanted to know more. What a gift! Not every startup gets to have this—but if you don’t, you’ve got a problem.

Pragmatic and Lean - Larry ascribed to the adage, “We don’t do things right, we do the right things.” I’m not sure if he ever actually said that, but it is what he lived. In a startup you can’t do a great job of everything, you have to prioritize what is critically important, and what is “nice to have.” Larry didn’t waste time on “nice to have.” I am a reformed perfectionist (reformed after those days) so often this didn’t sit well with me. I now realize it was the wisdom of a great entrepreneur. Basically if you didn’t code or sell, you were semi-worthless. (Which is why I had OEM sales as part of marketing—we had to earn our keep.) This philosophy extended to all aspects of the company. We always had nice offices, but we didn’t mind crowding in. When I started we were in a small suite at 3000 Sand Hill Road. I would come to the office in the morning and clean up the junk food from the programmer who used my work area all night. This was cool!

Oh, and I should say, even though we were at 3000 Sand Hill, VCs kind of ignored us. They thought we were a little nuts. It took a long time for our market to develop, so Oracle wasn’t exactly a growth explosion in the early days. There we were, right under their noses!

Larry was loathe to sell any of the company stock [Nathan: Just like Felix Dennis]; he generally took a dim view of VCs and preferred to bootstrap. (Sequoia Capital eventually invested just a little in us). Angel investor Don Lucas had his office above ours. I remember Larry telling me that every time we borrowed his conference room we had to pay Don $50. I’m not sure it’s true, but it’s what Larry said. [Nathan: Being aggressive with the truth.] I wonder if he took stock or cash.

Irresistible Salesmanship - Larry wasn’t always selling, didn’t even like salespeople half the time, but boy, when he decided to sell, he was unbeatable. I’ll never forget sitting in an impressive conference room at a very large computer manufacturer that was prepared to not be all that interested in what we had to say. Larry just blew them away. They had to re-evaluate their view on their database offering—and they eventually became a huge customer. He reeled out that technical vision, described the product architecture in a way that computer science people found compelling and turned on the charm. It was neat to be in the room. I saw this a lot with Larry; the performance was repeated many times.

Hired the Smartest People - The old adage “A players hire A players, and B players hire C players” applies here. Larry often philosophized that we couldn’t hire people with software experience because there were hardly any software companies, so we just had to get the smartest bastards we could, and they’d figure it out. I think he was particularly skilled at applying this to the technical team. I remember a brilliant young programmer whom Larry allowed to live anywhere he wanted in the US or Canada, didn't care about hours, where he was or any of that stuff. We just got him a network connection and that was it. This was unheard of back then, but we did it fairly often to get superstars. I remember when we hired Tom Siebel—Larry was so excited, telling me about this deadly smart guy we just hired in Chicago who was sitting in our conference room that very minute! I had to go meet him! I should say that Larry looked for smarts in men and women—women have always had the opportunity to excel at Oracle. And now there’s Safra Catz—whom I never met, but even back in the ’80s I remember Larry telling me how smart she was.

He Had Some Quirks - Larry would sometimes take time out to think. He would just disappear for a few days, often without telling marketing people (who may have scheduled him for a press interview or a customer visit!), and return re-charged with a pile of ideas—many good, some not so much. He liked to experiment with novel management ideas, like competing teams [Nathan: A greater-than-normal willingness to experiment is also a frequently-mentioned characteristic of Sam Walton and Page/Brin]. He would set up some people to develop a product or go after a customer or whatever, and have competing teams trying to do the same thing. It’s always fun to experiment, though I never saw one of these fiascos succeed. I remember one time he had his cowboy boots up on the desk, saying that we’d be bigger than Cullinet and we’d do it with 50 people, and only one salesperson. He was getting high on ideas. Only a computer historian would know Cullinet, an ancient database company that made it to $100M in sales back in the early ’80s. Yes, he was right about “bigger than Cullnet.” The “50 people” was motivated by his dream that we could just have the very, very best developers in the world, and hardly any salespeople—it was just talk. I think he came to appreciate the sales culture later on.

Larry loved to be called “ruthless.” When I asked what was his favorite book, he told me Robber Barons — worth a read even today! And he used to pore over spec sheets for fancy jets he probably thought he could never afford. Funny, I never heard him talk about sailing back then.

I’m not sure how all of this played out later because I wasn’t there. But it was clear, even back in those early days, that Larry had it all: leadership, technical vision, pragmatism, personal salesmanship, frugality, humor, desire to succeed. I have to think my success in the VC business was due in no small part to seeing Larry Ellison in action back in the day.

Lessons Learned:
Great entrepreneurial DNA is comprised of leadership; technological vision; frugality; and the desire to succeed. World-class founders:
Have a clear mission and inspire everyone to live it every day
Are the best salesman in the company
Hire the smartest people
Have a technological vision and the ability to convince others that it’s the right thing
Know it’s about winning customers and don’t spend money on things that aren’t mission-critical
Are relentless in pursuit of their goals and never take NO for an answer
Know humor is powerful — and fun!

Browser not supported