#124 Larry Ellison and Oracle

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one-time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets. They're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high. So I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show. So we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today. And I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th. And what of Larry Ellison the man? Although much of my time with him coincided with the period of adversity for Oracle, I never once saw Ellison downcast. His unquenchable optimism and almost messianic self-belief never faltered.
It is this aspect of Ellison that many people who either don't know him or know him only a little find most objectionable.
For them, he is at best a bombastic showman and at worst a prophet and even a self-serving liar. Yet I am more convinced than I was at the beginning of my journey with him that Ellison is an extraordinary person, quite different from and infinitely more interesting than the caricature beloved of the media.
He's funny and entertaining, but also highly serious, always interested in ideas and eager for new ones.
Above all, Ellison is intense.
There's a restlessness about him.
Much about Ellison is paradoxical, even contradictory. He's enormously vain, intellectually dominating, and irrepressibly extroverted. But he's also shy, has relatively few close friends, and is in constant need of the emotional reassurance that much of his life had been lacking.
He is determinedly youthful, but he is never far from thoughts of mortality.
He detests vulgarity and yearns for simplicity and naturalness, but he also derives straightforward pleasure from owning hugely expensive material status symbols.
He desperately wants his wealth to do some good in the world, but he recoils at the very idea of altruism.
He is ultra-confrontational in business, but he goes to almost any lengths to avoid confrontation on a personal level. He either delegates to the point of detachment, or is obsessively controlling down to the last detail.
He prides himself on never losing his temper, but he is manifestly driven by overwhelming passions.
Ellison is nothing if not complicated. Aren't we all? All right, so that is an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Softwar, An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle, and it was written by Matthew Symonds. So the idea to study Larry Ellison actually came from a misfit. And I found him so interesting, I'm going to do a two part series on him. Now I am still in the middle of this multiple part series on the early automobile pioneers, but I'm waiting on two books to arrive. So in the meantime, I figured, hey, let's learn from, let's see what Larry Ellison has to teach us. So let me tell you right up front, this is not like a typical biography. It's like Larry annotated this book. And so this is what the author has to say. He says, An innovative twist was that Ellison would have the right of reply or commentary within the book, which he could either use to express a counterpoint to any of my conclusions that he disagreed with, or to amplify things that he thought were important. Neither of us would be able to alter the words of the other.
So at the end of every chapter, there's a series of footnotes written directly by Larry Ellison. So I think you're going to enjoy this podcast because the bulk of the highlights come from Larry talking directly to us, which I think is an interesting and unique idea. So I'm going to start with his early life. This is Larry telling us the difference between him and his much older adopted father. Some background for you to know, his father probably didn't want to adopt him. So his name is Lou Ellison. Lou's second wife was Larry's biological mother's aunt. I know it's a little confusing. And we're going to see the contrast between him and his adopted father. And right from the very beginning, we see that Larry is a misfit for real. So it says, part of the problem was that Larry and Lou had very different attitudes towards authority. Ellison says, he believed that our country's officials and authority figures in general were always right and should be obeyed without question. The governor, the mayor, the police, they're in their jobs for a reason, he'd say. They know things you don't.