How to Win: Consulting the Oracle

just weeks before the company's quarterly earnings were announced. There are multiple times Oracle has risen above the brink to maintain success, whether due to questionable choices or unforeseeable circumstance. But maybe the most fantastic story of how Oracle has risen above the brink is the story of its creation and how Larry Ellison overcame poverty, hardships, and naysayers to

found the second most successful software company in the world. Hi, I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Ariel Casting, and this is The Brink, a podcast that's all about the make or break moments that have defined success or failure for a company. And we're going to talk all about Oracle today, the enormous software company, the business to business enterprise and the founder Larry Ellison, who has something of a reputation for flamboyance. Let's say that's a good way to put it. Jonathan

will make care attitude. Yeah, yeah, come at me, world, I got your brot unapologetic, Yeah, a little a little rock star in the form of a software engineer. He's a he's a really interesting story. He is. And partially because as I was researching this, I found a lot of conflicting information, maybe not on the big points, but on little details. Yeah, which tells you that perhaps the story has changed with the telling. Every now and again, you know it's yes, sometimes we see this right, Well,

we'll go back and we'll start looking. And also depends upon who is it that's ronicling the story, right, So sometimes you get it from the person themselves. Sometimes that's the most reliable sour. Sometimes it can be less reliable. Larry Ellison is a guy who's been known to embellish, used maybe some extravagant word play. Perhaps we'll say, so we're gonna talk really about not just the company, but the personality attached to that company, because he really does

have a remarkable story. It's almost akin to what you would see for the origin of a superhero, like the Childhood Superhero. Yeah. For instance, he was born to a single mom. She was only nineteen at the time in New York in nineteen four and he never knew his biological dad, right, and he only met his his mother much later on. I mean he was he was still a baby when he and his mom parted ways. He didn't meet her again until he was an adult, so for a long time he didn't even realize that his

biological mother was someone other than the person who raised him. Yeah, I don't think he knew he was adopted till he was twelve years old. Yeah. The reason why she gave him up, she she actually gave him to the care of her aunt and uncle, was that he got sick. He caught pneumonia when he was just nine months old. She was nineteen, unmarried, just not not in a position to be able to care for him, and so she ended up giving him over to the care of Lilian

and Louie Ellison, her aunt and uncle. Yes, Um and Lily was a very good, very loving adoptive mother. Larry Ellison says that his adoptive father was less so Yeah, Louis essentially, according to Larry, Ellison said that, uh, Larry was was no good, that he was never going to amount to anything. Yeah, and you know, Louie Ellison was in real estate. He made a lot of money and

then during the Great Depression he lost it all. So maybe he was just a really unhappy man, could have been very bitter because of losing that fortune, and was pretty much all about undermining Larry's confidence, at least according again to Larry's tale of his childhood. And so Larry goes on. He goes to school. He's smart, but not like the kind of student who really applies himself. He knows his math and he knows his science. He's pretty good at it. But um, he also has trouble with

authority figures, and that's what school is full of. Yeah, it turns out that if you, I guess, you know, when you get a home life where you're being undermined by the person that you assume is your dad over and over again, maybe authority is something you bristle at. Yeah, yeah, you're trying to gain some control over your own fortune. But he gets through high school and then he goes on to college where obviously he just coasts through his

classes and graduates, right, That is not right. No, he went to University of Illinois and he was named Science Student of the Year. But then he dropped out. But he did so because he suffered a tragedy. Yeah. His adoptive mother us away. Uh, two years after he started college. So he leaves because the woman he identifies as his mother, the woman who raised him, has passed away. Yeah. I mean I can't personally really blame him for that. No. I mean that's a truly traumatic event, and he would

try to make another go at it. It wasn't like he just dropped out of college and that was it. He did try. He re enrolled, but in a different school. Yeah, he went to University of Chicago and then he dropped out after one semester. And I don't think it's because his adoptive mother died again. No, No, it turns out that that's a one time only thing then, unless unless she's a zombie. No. As far as I know, even in the craziest of Larry Ellison's backstories, I never heard

of zombie adopted mom. He then moved to California, which is the place he gotta be. Yeah, Apparently he started looking around for a job, and he kind of was doing pretty much any job he could he could find. In those early early days. He worked at places Fireman's Fund in Wells, Fargo, where he did technical work, and then a brief stint as a programmer at DOL. Now what's interesting is that he didn't study computer science in college.

He didn't learn to program in school so much. He had, you know, maybe some familiarity with it, but he really started looking into that once he had left school, and he did it by just sort of grabbing books on the subject, reading and studying about them, and then kind of learning from their programming for dummies. Yeah, before there

was such a thing. But essentially, yeah, this is the early days of computer programming in a lot of ways, right, Like we're talking about an era where you were starting to see computers emerge out of high tech companies and universities and finally make their way into enterprise into businesses. This is really before the era of personal computers, and they're still really big. At that time, they were still pretty big, and so he was teaching himself how to

program from various books. So it wasn't like he was flying by the seat of his pants. He knew what he was doing, but he came at it from a very obtuse angle. So then he started at a company called Ampex Corporation in nineteen seventy three, which was in the business of making generators and electric motors. Now by the seventies, by the time he started, there wasn't really

working on generators and electric motors anymore. They were working on making multi track tapes, like you know, eight track tapes, largely for data recording, not for not for putting you know, John Denver's greatest hits on him instead of that rocky Mountain high you can overlap the information, Shanna, Well, this is more about looking at you know, like computer data, like storing computer information to magnetic tape. In fact, Ampex was contracted by the c i A to create a

large terrior bit mass storage system on tapes. So that's kind of what they were doing. Yeah. So, and this is also mark the beginning of Ellison's love affair with working relationship with the c i A, which would become an important component in the formation of Oracle. So Wison would start to build databases for Ampex. Now that also is very important, So there may be listeners out there who said, I've heard the name Oracle. I don't know what they do. You know, there's a lot of people

who say that, Yeah. I mean even for a long time, I cover technology for a living and and I didn't have a whole lot of crossover with Oracle. It was the name that I was always familiar with. So when they started off, Oracle was really about making databases. And again, this isn't an era before you had spreadsheet programs or database programs that are all throughout software suites these days. This was before all that happened, and so you needed

to have essentially proprietary databases created. So these were all kind of made from scratch at the like one off, I need you to make this for me, can make it for me, right. It may be like that organization I just worked with, they needed something that was going to manage supply chains and sales and shipping. But this other one has nothing to do with sales. It's all about production. So it's a similar thing, but it's going to need a different implementation. There weren't any like one

stop shops for that stuff. You had to have it built for you. So that's kind of what he specialized in, and that's really what Oracle specialized in when it first started, was in database design and implementation. Now, after that, Oracle would expand lots of other enterprise stuff, essentially creating all the systems that allow big companies to do all the behind the scenes work. The way that you would keep track of all the different, various moving parts of a

big company. That's what Oracle does. They create that these days. Yeah, but when they started growing, they started off with this one solution they made specifically for the CIA and adjusting it instead of creating something completely new for they could adapt what they had done for other implementations. We'll talk more about that right after this quick break. While he was at Ampex and working on these database projects, he met two people who would end up being his co

founders for Oracle. In fact, depending upon the version of the story of Oracle you read, they're technically the co founders, and then Allison came on shortly thereafter. This is one of those places where you get some conflicting information. So there was Robert Bob Nimrod Minor and Ed Oates. Those were the other Ampex employees who would become co founders of Oracle, and they both graduated with degrees in mathematics. Yeah, so they did have the degree right where Larry Ellison

might have had a little more hootspah. Yeah. Now, el Ellison definitely comes across as sort of like if I were to compare him to some other iconic businessman, I would say that Ellison is in many ways similar to Steve Jobs, and in fact that two of them were very close friends. When Steve Jobs was still alive, they were very close friends. Steve Jobs, uh was the salesman

for Apple more than anything else. He was the who was able to sell this idea of personal computers, whereas Steve Wozniak, the co founder of Apple, was largely the guy who was actually building the systems. Ellison he got his hands dirty. I mean he was coding, but he was really more uh more adept at the handshaking and salesmanship side of things in many ways. Yeah. Yeah. But before Ed and Bob and Larry all created Oracle together,

Larry did take a brief stint at another company. Um. He worked at a place called Precision Elements, which basically was another data storage company, right, So he worked there. He was contracted out to work with this, or maybe Minor and Oates were, but they were all working on similar projects right again, as this database technology that was

still coming into fruition in the mid seventies. Yeah, and about that time, some accounts say that Bob and Ed decided to are their own company and they invited Larry to join. Yeah, this would be Software Development Laboratories or s d L and other accounts. Larry says that the company he was working for, Precision Elements, had more work than they could handle, and so he encouraged Bob and D to bid on some of their work. So that Bob and D formed this company as contractors for the

company that Ellison was. But whose idea it was to form this company is a little up in there. Yeah, it gets a little hard to determine based upon the multiple histories out there. But no matter what, they do end up forming this company, the SDL company, the Software Development Laboratories, and one of, if not their very first clients was the c I A. Yes, they needed a database for a secret project they were working on. Yeah, and this secret project had a code name, and that

code name was Oracle. Yeah. So it turns out the name of the company actually comes out of I kid you, not actual spy stuff, yes, which is kind of cool now and scary. We don't know what spy stuff exactly. Well, it's a database. I would imagine it's some form of way of keeping track of people what the c I A think are batties, yes, or at least people you should keep an eye on. Yes. I mean, granted, it could have easily just as been a database that the

CIA used to keep track of their assets. I mean, I had nothing to do with keeping tabs on various individuals that they thought might be somewhat suspect. Yeah. Larry is a big advocate for having a massive database of all the law enforcement databases in the United States. Yeah. Ellison has often advocated for what some people might call more of a surveillance state. Yes, and that gets a

little hairy. Whatever the case, we don't know what the Oracle project really was ultimately, apart from the fact that needed this database and Ellison thought the name was pretty cool.

Around the same time, ed Oats is reading up on some research that had been done previously, and it was about IBM and a language they had developed called sequel or s q L. Now sequel was useful, but it hadn't really been rolled out for commercial practice yet, and it was allowing for a type of database called a relational database, which was a new way of thinking about

organizing information. So you would say, you have different points of data, and then these different points have relations to one another, and a relational database would allow you to search based upon those relationships. You're no longer looking at just a cell. Now you're able to pull up a whole bunch of different information that all relates to whatever

your query happens to be. It's a pretty basic idea that is implemented widely these days, so it seems obvious on the face of it, but in the mid seventies this was a brand new concept. I'd imagine that this process would normal take a lot of time, but since these gentlemen were well versed with databases, they were given two years to make this solution for the CIA, and it only took them one. But you know, like you mentioned before, Bob Minor did a lot of the architecture.

He was kind of the Wazniac of this first project. Yes, I think one of my favorite things about the official product Oracle would come out with Now that they've done this project for the CIA, they were ready to take this database model and sell it as a product to companies. They go out to sell it to companies, but Ellison makes a suggestion that is a little weird, which is that let's call our software version two instead of version one.

The logic behind that was any company that looks out there and sees a product and they see that it's labeled version one, that company is going to think, well, this is a brand new thing. It's totally untested, it's unproven. I'm not going to invest thousands of dollars in that. I don't want to pay to beta test. Yeah, I want something that has a proven track record. So Alison said, let's just hall version one version two and fool everyone

into thinking, oh, this is the refined product. And they bring on another person to help them with development, Bruce Scott, who a lot of times is referred to as the fourth co founder of Oracle. Yeah. By the time that they get up to nineteen eighty, they started looking at many computing as in like the sort of the desktop computers. Now they're looking at desktop because that's after Apple had gotten into the game. Commodore was creating I still have

my Commodore sixty four. Oh my gosh. Wow. And then you started seeing IBM was about to launch the personal computer around this time. So this was a shot across the battle saying there's gonna be a big change in

computing coming up. That meant that companies that previously would not have been able to afford investing in computer systems because they were these huge, you know, twenty thou dollar machines per machine, they would now be to go into these smaller versions, these Apple computers or the IBM PC, and for a fraction of that cost they could buy ten machines, you know. So suddenly started seeing a lot of companies say, maybe we can finally digitize our business.

We can bring computers into this and so Oracle, Larry Ellison in particular, says, these are markets we should target. We should make sure we create products that can run on those computers, because how we're never really going to be hitting the home user. We'll be able to hit all those small to medium sized businesses that are going to want to operate the same way as these bigger companies. So this was a kind of a ce change. This was Larry Ellison saying we have to go after this group.

And more than just a C change in that sense, they also started programming in the C program language. But that's you know, that's that's me being being silly with puns. Now it's very clever, and they finally officially changed the name of their company to Oracle. By then there unn version two point three. They start building their business and it ends up being a pretty dramatic rise. They're they're doing really well in those first few years. For example,

Oracle split their stock ten times. Now here's how a stock split works, in case you aren't aware, Yes, please explain it to me, okay. In the stock split, company's board director says, all right, well, we're gonna do so. We're gonna take the number of outstanding stocks that are out there, and we're going to increase that number. So I started off with a hundred shears, are I'm gonna double that Now it's two hundred shares. So ariel, if you had two shares of stock in my company, now

you would suddenly have four shares. But the value of each of those shares will be cut in half because you can't change the value of the company this way. Otherwise, you would just be magically making a company more valuable every time you split the stock. However, by reducing the price point per share, you create more up tunities for small or midsized investors to buy shares in your in

your company, which can stimulate even more growth. Yes, so by splitting ten times, that meant Oracle was getting to a point where they were seeing their stock price grow where they felt, we need to split the stock so that we can reduce the price on a per share basis and improve liquidity. We have more to cover, but first, let's take a quick break. Now. You say, you say that you cannot just magically decide how much your company

is worth. But yeah, Oracle kind of tried that a couple of times a couple of times, and it got them into a little bit of trouble. So they misrepresented their revenues for three quarters in a row to bump up their stock prices. Right, that was the accusation. So Oracle says, all right, well, we've got a whole bunch of handshake agreements out there with companies. These companies said we're going to buy your software. The actual deal hasn't

happened yet. What was happening was that Oracle was posting these revenue figures that were not actually, you know, real, because those sales had not all happened yet. They were possibly real. They were imaginative. They were imaginative. But this isn't the only time that they kind of played a little fast and loose with numbers. Uh. In two thousand one, they actually kind of, uh another accusation, got accused of

insider trading. Yeah. The accusation is they knew that their company was not going to be worth as much once the quarterly earnings were announced, and so they went ahead and sold off a bunch of stock before it dropped. Yeah, that's not great, it is uh, yeah, that's illegal. As it turns out, that whole mess would take years to reconcile. It got real ugly, but ultimately Ellison kind of got out of that. The Ellison has been involved in a

few kind of notable strange lawsuits. So there was a case where Ellison agreed to donate a large amount of money to a nonprofit charity as part of a settlement to get out of an accusation, and then he didn't. I was about to say, that's really great to build some goodwill up with your rectifying the issue. But I guess if there's no follow through. He said in two thousand five he was going to make a one hundred fifteen million dollar donation to Harvard University had for a

special medical center, and that made headlines. I mean, that was a huge announcement. But in two thousand and six he said, you know what, never mind, I'm not going to make that hundred fifteen million dollar donation I said

I was going to make. And the reason he changed his mind is that the president of Harvard University had stepped down owned and he was friends with Harvard University's president at the time, so this was sort of I made that agreement when my buddy was running things, but now my buddy's not there, so I don't really want to do that anymore. Meanwhile, the medical center had already started kind of doing what O Oracle had done a decade earlier. They had started spending money they didn't have yet.

They started making hires and allocating where that money was going to go because they thought it was coming in, which is a valuable lesson for everybody. Don't make plans to spend money you don't have yet. This is why so many people get in trouble with credit cards. It is I mean this was just on dollar scale. And not to say that he hasn't been philanthropic. He has.

But Ellison has this reputation of being very outspoken, very opinionated, very declarative in his statements, and then not his behavior has not always followed through with that. He was notorious about taking a very close approach to holding onto Oracle and determining what the company did, like almost on micromanaging approach. Yes, he resigned from being the CEO in two thousand and fourteen,

but he is still very active in Oracle's future. Yes, he's the chairman of the company, and reportedly he still takes a very very close approach to handling Oracle's business, so he can't quite let go. Yeah, he ended up kind of handing the reins over to two people to be CEO, not co CEO, that they aren't called COCO. Oracle is two CEOs. There's Mark Hurd and there's Software Cats and not very many people had known very much about her before she became CEO. She was already executive

with the Oracle. She came out of nowhere, but she was sort of thought of as kind of like Ellison's right hand woman, who was there to really make sure the stuff that Ellison wanted to happen would happen. Now, despite the fact that she kind of wasn't super well known, she is a unfortune's most powerful winning list. That position is a very powerful one. So Oracle incredibly successful even

with the various problems legal problems that is having. Right has had a couple of big, major ones that threatened the company. I mean that scandal about the revenue, the misrepresentation of revenue. A lot of people said, oh, this might be the downfall of this company. And Ellison had famously wanted his company to overtake Microsoft as the most powerful software company in the world. If you had bought a single share of Oracle stock, it would have cost

you fifteen bucks. Then to the stock would split multiple times. By the time the stock was done with all those splits, that one share would have been multiplied into three four shares, and then Oracle I don't know what's trading at at the time we're recording this, but when we were researching, at one point it was trading at forty six dollars per share, So you moll to play that six dollars

your fifteen dollars we've turned into fifteen thousand dollars. This is why, while there have been some Shenanigans, investors overall tend to be fairly happy with how Oracle has done things Now. Oracle has, you know, gone down the list of Forbes Top companies a little bit in the past few years, but they do have really big plans to

get to rise back up in the ranks. For instance, they're delving into AI, and AI sort of autonomous database approach could end up doing things like monitoring all this stuff, detecting trends that might indicate a problem before the problem is evident. It may automatically send messages to various managers saying we've detected a problem in this section. That means we project that an X number of weeks that problem is going to impact you. It's good to a plan

for that now before it happens. I wouldn't mind having some AI to help me minimize my say, and I certainly don't have as nearly a complicated life as the various components of an enormous like global corporation. So it's a very sophisticated approach. I have some fun facts and things about Larry Els and I wanted to tell you because I want to get your honest, first time reaction on record on microphone. Well, I hope I don't disappoint. Not all of these are like super jaw dropping things.

I just kind of want to see what you think about them. So we both know that he's famous for being blunt and sometimes outrageous, but he wants skipped a keynote at his company's own conference as CEO. He skipped the keynote so that he could sail on Oracle Team USA's yacht in the America's Cup Race. You know, I cannot fully blame him. I would much rather sail an American Cup race than heavy keynote. Okay, well, how about this.

Did you come across information about trash Gate? Probably? Trash Gate was another controversy in the history of Oracle, and so this was when Oracle and Microsoft really budding heads. I mean, Bellison has always wanted Oracle to overtake Microsoft. So they hired a company to go through Microsoft's garbage and look for any evidence of Microsoft executives up to some sort of shenanigans. Particularly when it came to the antitrust lawsuits that Microsoft was the subject of around the

late nineties. And so Larry Ellison when he was confronted with this, saying, you hired a private detective agency to essentially go through a company's garbage. I mean that seems a little unethical in and of itself. He said, Yeah, it's unethical, but it's not illegal. It's not. But then to me that says a lot about a person, like somehow it being legal makes it okay. Like I tend to go for the ethical unethical as being the guide of whether something's okay or not. Uh. You know that

Larry Ellison owned one of the Hawaiian islands. I did not. Yep, he bought Lania. It's one of the small ones. Technically, he owns like nineties something per cent of it, like almost all of the island. He once sued an entire city. He sued San Jose in two thousand. Do you know why he sued San Jose in two thousand? For giggles? Nope, it was well, I don't know, I guess, I guess ultimately kind of. So Ellison is also a pilot, and he also has several private planes, including two military jets.

He owns two military jets. He likes to go where he wants to go when he wants to go there. But San Jose has a noise ordinance, and that noise ordinance says that aircraft above a certain size should not be allowed to fly in or out of San Jose after a certain time. Seems reasonable. Ellison didn't think, so he took the city to court and said that he has very large, very private plane should be allowed to take off and land at night, and that's it it

should be. And Judge Jeremy Fogel said, for you will make an exception. Really, so he didn't change the law. The law still stands, but Larry Ellison is exempt from it. Well, at least now when people get woken up by airplane noises, they could go Larry and shake their fists. That's my favorite book about Larry Ellison. My favorite is because the title is the difference between God and Larry Ellison. God

doesn't think he's Larry Ellison. I probably shouldn't say my thoughts on that one, as I was hoping the book name would be Larius Ellison picked a peck of private planes, not just private planes. You know what. Also he picked a peck of what. According to the author of that book, Ellison would date as many as three Oracle employees simultaneously. Oh, he's also in one of the Marvel Cinemac Universe movies. He yes, he and Elon Musk are both an iron Man too. They're two of the big wigs at the

the Big Meeting. And some say that Robert Downey Jr's portrayal of Tony Stark a k. A iron Man is based in part of Larry Ellison. I can see that. I can totally believe that very colorful individual. Um, he likes to wear all of the colors. He is a

remarkable person in many ways. I like, he's so complicated, Like in some ways it's incredibly inspiring to come from a background where he did not know his parents, never knew his father, and and and the people who were raising him were like, no, you're not going to make it.

You're not at least is adopted. You're not gonna do anything good, And and dropping out of college twice, and then becoming essentially a self made computer programmer and then going on to co found the second most valuable software come in the world. Ah, that's an amazing story. It's also complicated by the fact that he comes across as a tony start kind of guy, where he seems to project this feeling of being the most competent, confident, and

intelligent person in the room. Like that, at least that's his own perception of himself, according to the portrayals I've read of him. I mean, but regardless, he doesn't just talk a big game. He plays a big game. Oh brings He's very successful. So that is really inspiring. So I would have to say, like for for us, when we talk about the brink and that moment, really this one comes all the way back to Ellison just deciding to go after that software space super hard. You know.

Keep in mind Microsoft was founded in the mid seventies. They had a headstart and a different focus than a base business that Oracle is after, and Larry Ellison didn't care about that. He just kept on pushing and still does to this day. So interesting guy. I am curious to see how Oracle goes while Larry Elson maybe takes a further step away from the company. Eventually he's going to have to and what will happen to the company after that, but a fascinating company and a fascinating person

behind it. Obviously the other co founders of Oracle also very important, but both of them left in the eighties and nineties, and Ellison stuck with it the whole way, and by all accounts people said Oracle was really Ellison's company when you get down to it. So another person who has really made their stamp. I think Larry Ellison is going to be another one of those figures where twenty years in the future, people will say, whenever Oracle makes a big move, how would Larry have handled this?

And it probably would have been on a private plane with a whole lot of very expensive shampato. I think you're right. I think it's a private plane towing a yacht and and him saying I'm gonna go race boats. Yes, if you want to hear more technical details, there are some episodes about Oracle over on the show Tech Stuff that I host. There did a three part series over there, so I go more into the technical detail of the company on that side, but we really just wanted to

focus on kind of the fun stuff here. We are going to wrap this up. So I have been Jonathan Strickland and I have been aerial casting. If you would like to learn more about what we've talked about, as well as keep track of all of our episodes, make sure you visit our website at the Brink podcast dot show, or you can email us at Feedback at the Brink podcast dot show.