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Watching Larry Ellison Become Larry Ellison – The DNA of a Winner

54 points by anielsen 12y ago

unclebunkers 12y ago
"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 12y ago
  Maybe sociopathy is adaptive in the modern world.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    Only if we let it be.
    - spindritf 12y ago
      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 12y ago
        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.
  - fooaway 12y ago
    The traits are definitely overrepresented in the executive suite.
  - IvyMike 12y ago
    This was the main message of American Psycho.
- turnip1979 12y ago
  I was told a variation of the original quote by a chess master at age < 8 (I loved chess as a kid and took some advanced classes). Thankfully, I don't recall ever acting on such advice.
- parasubvert 12y ago
  If you read Peter Thiel's latest book, his argument is for monopoly over competition. Which is just another way of saying, all competition must fail. So far, it's worked for Facebook. They have trampled their competition, or they just buy them.
  - hkmurakami 12y ago
    I read a piece by a (very reasonable) VC explaining the detriments of excess LP cash in the VC industry. The premise was that if 100 companies get funded in a space (say, local delivery) where normally, 10 companies would have, then even the ones who under normal circumstances would have "out competed" the others through superior service and product will have a tough time vs the torrent of cost cutting and "competition" from the slew of competitors, thereby making the entire industry unprofitable. In a way, it reminds me of the consumer electronics market, especially the laptop PC market. Fierce competition forced down profits, and now seemingly every company is focused on cost cutting rather than making something we actually want to use. Both consumers and producers have lost out (woe is me who cannot buy a quality thinkpad anymore!).
    - parasubvert 12y ago
      This. So many software markets have this problem. The only way out of it is if a clear leader breaks away eventually, or else a new market will disrupt and subsume the capabilities of the old one mired in cost competition.
  - ap22213 12y ago
    Makes sense. If I remember my economics correctly, with efficient markets and competition, profits should approach zero over time. But, if there's no competition....
- gmarx 12y ago
  No it isn't. If people keep throwing around these kind of assertions, these very serious psych diagnoses will lose all specificity and become useless.
  - hkmurakami 12y ago
    Isn't there an important distinction between a sociopath and psychopath? (or perhaps you are asserting that the generous use of xxxxx-path cheapens the gravity of the situation for those suffering from mental illnesses)
    - wavefunction 12y ago
      They are both Antisocial Personality Disorders but a sociopath and psychopath are different in their planning ability. A psychopath reacts, a sociopath manipulates.
      - hkmurakami 12y ago
        That's the most succinct explanation I've heard on the subject. Thanks!
    - jahewson 12y ago
      This is a popular misconception, they are interchangeable, being two words for the same concept of different origins. Some authors make minor distinctions, but they are not widely recognised.
    - gmarx 12y ago
      Yes, whether or not you make the distinction, neither applies. I take it people on Hacker News don't dig Ellison. For all I know he is a sociopath. The above is not evidence for that.
  - davesque 12y ago
    Whaa?
- marincounty 12y ago
  Yea, this I don't like this whole "it's legal--I'm just a great Entrepreneur(Winner!). Make your money, but don't step on the little guy. Oh yea, a hand shake means more than a contract in my world. I hope it's not a generational thing? I've been no angel on my life, but I have never taken advantage of someone poor, or naive. I know a few very wealthy Winners. They have all the toys, but very few friends, and even the third wife really doesn't give a chit about them. Oh, once their kids realize how daddy/mommy made all that money--the love turns to co-dependent despise wrapped in a smile. That said, there are financial and personal heros--Wosniak comes to mind?
adventured 12y ago
"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.
- capkutay 12y ago
  'he generally took a dim view of VCs and preferred to bootstrap" that's pretty counter-intuitive in today's bubble-blowing tech climate. we praise companies for raising the most money from the hippest VCs rather than customer retention, technology, and market position
  - josefresco 12y ago
    After the first dotcom bubble just the opposite was praised arguably to the extreme. The answer is somewhere in the middle - focusing on profit from day 1 can stop you from doing things, but taking VC money from day 1 with no plan for revenue is also potentially fatal.
- amirmc 12y ago
  I've no idea why you've been downvoted. The numbers you point out seem to be accurate and not taking external investment does indeed leave you with more equity (as does sticking with the public company and the associated stock awards). I believe Microsoft was another company that didn't take much (if any) external investment. It's worth pointing out that VC as an industry may not have been very mature around the time of these companies.
  - adventured 12y ago
    I'm not entirely sure I am being down-voted in this case. I believe my HN account got slapped with an automatic down rating adjustment quite a long time ago (that applies to anything I post here, automatically lowering my comment positioning). For example, when I posted my comment initially, it was instantly ranked below a gray-shaded 'negative value' comment from a user with a lower karma rating than myself. Anything I post on HN automatically starts at the bottom of the pile. I suspect if you could check my account it has a flag set on it.
notacoward 12y ago
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 12y ago
  Is collaboration valued in modern startups? I hadn't noticed.
  - notacoward 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      It wouldn't surprise me if Oracle were responsible for more useful open source than every "modern startup" combined.
      - notacoward 12y ago
        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 12y ago
        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.
lazyant 12y ago
and by "winner" you mean "financially successful jerk"
parasubvert 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
idlewords 12y ago
Fortunately Ellison's DNA wipes off easily with warm, soapy water.
- pwang 12y ago
  Just wanted to chime in and say that I'm loving reading your comments on this topic.
Aqueous 12y ago
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
applecore 12y ago
It's amazing how early and correct he was on what we now take for granted in databases: portable, networked, declarative, and relational.
pdevr 12y ago
"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)
hkarthik 12y ago
> 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.

54 points by anielsen 12y ago

unclebunkers 12y ago

"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 12y ago
Maybe sociopathy is adaptive in the modern world.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  Only if we let it be.
  - spindritf 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      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.
- fooaway 12y ago
  The traits are definitely overrepresented in the executive suite.
- IvyMike 12y ago
  This was the main message of American Psycho.
turnip1979 12y ago
I was told a variation of the original quote by a chess master at age < 8 (I loved chess as a kid and took some advanced classes). Thankfully, I don't recall ever acting on such advice.
parasubvert 12y ago
If you read Peter Thiel's latest book, his argument is for monopoly over competition. Which is just another way of saying, all competition must fail. So far, it's worked for Facebook. They have trampled their competition, or they just buy them.
- hkmurakami 12y ago
  I read a piece by a (very reasonable) VC explaining the detriments of excess LP cash in the VC industry. The premise was that if 100 companies get funded in a space (say, local delivery) where normally, 10 companies would have, then even the ones who under normal circumstances would have "out competed" the others through superior service and product will have a tough time vs the torrent of cost cutting and "competition" from the slew of competitors, thereby making the entire industry unprofitable. In a way, it reminds me of the consumer electronics market, especially the laptop PC market. Fierce competition forced down profits, and now seemingly every company is focused on cost cutting rather than making something we actually want to use. Both consumers and producers have lost out (woe is me who cannot buy a quality thinkpad anymore!).
  - parasubvert 12y ago
    This. So many software markets have this problem. The only way out of it is if a clear leader breaks away eventually, or else a new market will disrupt and subsume the capabilities of the old one mired in cost competition.
- ap22213 12y ago
  Makes sense. If I remember my economics correctly, with efficient markets and competition, profits should approach zero over time. But, if there's no competition....
gmarx 12y ago
No it isn't. If people keep throwing around these kind of assertions, these very serious psych diagnoses will lose all specificity and become useless.
- hkmurakami 12y ago
  Isn't there an important distinction between a sociopath and psychopath? (or perhaps you are asserting that the generous use of xxxxx-path cheapens the gravity of the situation for those suffering from mental illnesses)
  - wavefunction 12y ago
    They are both Antisocial Personality Disorders but a sociopath and psychopath are different in their planning ability. A psychopath reacts, a sociopath manipulates.
    - hkmurakami 12y ago
      That's the most succinct explanation I've heard on the subject. Thanks!
  - jahewson 12y ago
    This is a popular misconception, they are interchangeable, being two words for the same concept of different origins. Some authors make minor distinctions, but they are not widely recognised.
  - gmarx 12y ago
    Yes, whether or not you make the distinction, neither applies. I take it people on Hacker News don't dig Ellison. For all I know he is a sociopath. The above is not evidence for that.
- davesque 12y ago
  Whaa?
marincounty 12y ago
Yea, this I don't like this whole "it's legal--I'm just a great Entrepreneur(Winner!). Make your money, but don't step on the little guy. Oh yea, a hand shake means more than a contract in my world. I hope it's not a generational thing? I've been no angel on my life, but I have never taken advantage of someone poor, or naive. I know a few very wealthy Winners. They have all the toys, but very few friends, and even the third wife really doesn't give a chit about them. Oh, once their kids realize how daddy/mommy made all that money--the love turns to co-dependent despise wrapped in a smile. That said, there are financial and personal heros--Wosniak comes to mind?

adventured 12y ago

"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.

capkutay 12y ago
'he generally took a dim view of VCs and preferred to bootstrap" that's pretty counter-intuitive in today's bubble-blowing tech climate. we praise companies for raising the most money from the hippest VCs rather than customer retention, technology, and market position
- josefresco 12y ago
  After the first dotcom bubble just the opposite was praised arguably to the extreme. The answer is somewhere in the middle - focusing on profit from day 1 can stop you from doing things, but taking VC money from day 1 with no plan for revenue is also potentially fatal.
amirmc 12y ago
I've no idea why you've been downvoted. The numbers you point out seem to be accurate and not taking external investment does indeed leave you with more equity (as does sticking with the public company and the associated stock awards). I believe Microsoft was another company that didn't take much (if any) external investment. It's worth pointing out that VC as an industry may not have been very mature around the time of these companies.
- adventured 12y ago
  I'm not entirely sure I am being down-voted in this case. I believe my HN account got slapped with an automatic down rating adjustment quite a long time ago (that applies to anything I post here, automatically lowering my comment positioning). For example, when I posted my comment initially, it was instantly ranked below a gray-shaded 'negative value' comment from a user with a lower karma rating than myself. Anything I post on HN automatically starts at the bottom of the pile. I suspect if you could check my account it has a flag set on it.

notacoward 12y ago

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 12y ago
Is collaboration valued in modern startups? I hadn't noticed.
- notacoward 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    It wouldn't surprise me if Oracle were responsible for more useful open source than every "modern startup" combined.
    - notacoward 12y ago
      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 12y ago
        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.

lazyant 12y ago

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

parasubvert 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

idlewords 12y ago

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

pwang 12y ago
Just wanted to chime in and say that I'm loving reading your comments on this topic.

Aqueous 12y ago

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

applecore 12y ago

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

pdevr 12y ago

"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)

hkarthik 12y ago

> 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.