
Watching Larry Ellison Become Larry Ellison – The DNA of a Winner - anielsen
http://steveblank.com/2014/09/25/watching-larry-ellison-become-larry-ellison-the-dna-of-a-winner/
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parasubvert
You can tell who is an entrepreneur and who isn't by those who talk shit about
Larry and Oracle.

Some here seem to think Entrepreneurship has changed into a kumbaya group hug
where we just attend conferences together , check code into GitHub, might make
a bit of money if we ask nicely, or sell "ads", and hope for an early exit
because of our sheer brilliance, leaving the dirty work to our future parent.

The most valuable companies on the other hand look for sustainable competitive
advantage, or as Peter Thiel would say, monopoly. That definitionally implies
"all others must fail" at competing with you. That doesn't mean you don't have
partners, it means in the area you excel at (hopefully a big area), you are
the only game in town.

With Oracle it never was quite the only game in town, but it never lost being
the clear revenue leader in RDBMS (and middleware after BEA).

If you are in an area where you can't do that or it's hard to do that, you're
not going to build a super valuable company - maybe a super valuable online
community or open source project. But not a really valuable company generating
tremendous wealth beyond asset speculators.

Perhaps that's what's changed about entrepreneurship, and why you see Larry
derided by some here. It isn't just about building companies anymore, it's
about funding communities that might become companies with enough tinkering
and luck.

~~~
idlewords
I'm an entrepreneur and I think Larry Ellison is a turd. Am I blowing your
mind?

People start and run companies for a variety of motives. Obliterating the
competition is one of them, but it seems to correlate with being a pretty
awful person to be around, so not everyone chooses to play by those rules.

Ultimately you get to choose-and are responsible for-the rules you play by. If
there's one big lesson of entrepreneurship, it's "take responsibility", and
that includes figuring out what kind of person you want to become.

~~~
jiggy2011
If you don't want to obliterate the competition, then software is probably a
bad place to be if you want to grow big. Winner take all seems to be the rule
rather than the exception.

~~~
idlewords
"If you want to grow big". There's plenty of room at the bottom.

~~~
jiggy2011
Do you think that anyone who runs a large software company is a turd?

~~~
idlewords
What an odd question. I imagine some of them are very nice people, but I would
have no way to know.

~~~
jiggy2011
It's not an odd question, it follows logically from what you have written. If
Ellison is a "turd" for doing what basically every big tech firm has done
(gaining a monopoly in a particular market) then they must all be turds too.

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notacoward
What a fawning piece of tripe. Uncle Larry's monomania and "others must fail"
sociopathy might have worked for Oracle in a particular market and time, but
it would be a recipe for utter failure in a modern startup where adaptability
and collaboration are more valued. He didn't have unique entrepreneurial DNA.
He had some skills that were valuable, others that were deficient, and enough
luck that the former outweighed the latter.

~~~
jiggy2011
Is collaboration valued in modern startups? I hadn't noticed.

~~~
notacoward
Ever heard of open source? Lots of startups are using and contributing to it,
using their participation to attract both users and developers. Yeah, I'd say
collaboration is valued quite a bit.

~~~
jiggy2011
It wouldn't surprise me if Oracle were responsible for more useful open source
than every "modern startup" combined.

~~~
notacoward
Why don't you make at least a token attempt to research and prove such a
strong claim? Most of their open source was acquired, not generated
internally, and is demonstrably less active than it was before it became
Oracle. Examples include everything from Sun or MySQL. Oracle has probably
done more _harm_ to open source than any other company including Microsoft.

~~~
jiggy2011
Oracle is a better steward of these projects than a bankrupt Sun would have
been. Besides , Oracle has been an active contributor to Linux for years.

~~~
notacoward
Ask anyone who worked on Sun or MySQL whether they think Oracle has been a
good steward, even compared to a volunteer-run foundation after the initial
sponsor went bankrupt. For example, let's see what Sun's Bryan Cantrill had to
say.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc)

No, Oracle isn't a steward. At best they're just using those projects at cash
cows. At worst they _intended_ to destroy their erstwhile competitors instead
of trying to outdo them. What they are most definitely not doing is devoting
the resources necessary to improve or even maintain the health of those
projects or their communities.

As for contributions to Linux, here are some figures.

[http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2013/09/google...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2013/09/google-and-samsung-soar-into-list-of-top-10-linux-
contributors/)

Oracle doesn't even crack the top ten (none/unknown/consultant don't count).
For a company that makes so much revenue selling open-source-based products,
such as repackaging Red Hat's work and selling against them, 1.3% is a pretty
paltry figure. What's really sad is that they contribute even less to anything
else, from the Apache or OpenStack foundations down to the zillions of smaller
independent projects. Just about the only comparable company with less open-
source visibility is Amazon.

Lastly, don't think I or others can't see how your claims keep getting changed
or reduced as you're proven wrong again and again. First it was about startups
not valuing collaboration, then about Oracle producing more useful open
source, then about being a good steward of the open source they've acquired .
. . and even that isn't true. What's next? Saying we should still worship
Larry because (as far as we know) he hasn't actually killed any babies for
three whole months? Stop fawning and _learn about the topic_.

~~~
jiggy2011
1.3% is likely more than most meaningful contributions of most of the latest
web 2.0 of startups. Most startups do not contribute to open source at all,
especially not any parts of their core product.

The rest of this comment is weird personal attacks.

------
unclebunkers
"It's not enough to win, all others must fail"

This isn't the DNA of a winner, this is the DNA of a sociopath.

~~~
spindritf
Maybe sociopathy is adaptive in the modern world.

~~~
dllthomas
Only if we let it be.

~~~
spindritf
That's not really true. There's a very serious collective action problem and
limits on what humans (can) find genuinely attractive.

Which is why I added "in the modern world." In a tight-knit community
sociopathic traits are probably much less beneficial than in an atomized,
largely anonymous society.

~~~
dllthomas
We address some collective action problems, with varying degrees of success
(certainly, some things we fail horribly at are collective action problems).

My statement wasn't meant to say, "Oh, it's simple, we just X!" Just that it's
not necessarily outside the realm of things we could address. In particular,
"adaptive" \- when it comes to humans - is only relevant at time scales of
many generations. Much changes over those time scales.

------
adventured
"Larry was loathe to sell any of the company stock; he generally took a dim
view of VCs and preferred to bootstrap"

Which is why 37 years after its founding, and after 28 years as a public
company, he still owns 25% of the company (per Bloomberg). All the more
remarkable considering Oracle is worth $173 billion.

~~~
mikestew
Kind of old-fashioned, don't you think? All that hard work and patience,
building a solid product that people actually need. Much easier to win the
VC/exit lottery with a Cat-Pictures-as-a-Service product.

On a side note, boy, I'm at a loss to come up with a reason for someone to
down vote you. Factual statement, complete with a reference to where you got
your information, and some little shit who doesn't like facts comes along and
clicks the down button. That, or someone on a mobile device who tried to click
one of two buttons that are separated by about four pixels, and hit the wrong
one. The good news is that one of those can be fixed.

~~~
LandoCalrissian
"Cat-Pictures-as-a-Service"

Brb, working my billion dollar exit now.

------
pdevr
"Softwar" is an insightful book about Larry Ellison, written by someone who
had access to Ellison. I do not want to chime in with my own opinion, but
would suggest to read the book to learn a lot about the history of Oracle and
Ellison.

You will learn a lot of things, including:

* How being adopted affected his personality

* How he wandered around for a long time without any clear objectives

* How someone filed a false case of rape against him, and how he survived

* Death of one of his co-founders due to cancer

* How Oracle competed with other database companies, including the technical details (this is the part which I found most interesting)

------
Aqueous
I kind of hate articles that start off by implicitly buying into the whole
winners vs losers ethos. 'The DNA of a winner' \- as if it was both an obvious
fact that 'winners' and 'winning' are inherently superior to 'losers' and
'losing', and that it is an admirable goal to always be 'winning' all the
time, in that totalizing way where you only win if others lose. And who
doesn't want to be a 'winner,' right? I mean, who wants to be a _pathetic
loser_ like anyone who doesn't have 46 billion dollars? Certainly not me!

How about _' successful'_ or _' exceptional'_? Certainly says the same thing
without the implied value judgment against those who don't share the same
value system

------
idlewords
Fortunately Ellison's DNA wipes off easily with warm, soapy water.

~~~
pwang
Just wanted to chime in and say that I'm loving reading your comments on this
topic.

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applecore
It's amazing how early and _correct_ he was on what we now take for granted in
databases: portable, networked, declarative, and relational.

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hkarthik
> 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.

I found this statement interesting as many entrepreneurs still think this way.
Seems like it's a right of passage to hate sales people and then later grow to
love them as you watch them bring revenue into your company.

------
lazyant
and by "winner" you mean "financially successful jerk"

