#404 How Larry Ellison Thinks

“The book is about 25 years old and provides an intimate look at Larry Ellison through brutally frank conversations and annotations by Ellison himself.”

“Sam Walton talked about this in his autobiography. He says, for 25 years running, long before Walmart was known as the nation's largest retailer, we ranked number one in our industry for the lowest ratio of expenses to sales.”

“I used to think this book was kind of like a biography of Larry Ellison. After reading it for the second time, I think it is more just what the subtitle says. It's just an intimate portrait of him and Oracle.”

“This is one of the most important parts of the book. It took him a while to figure out what he wanted to do and how he wanted to live his life. He was 34 when he started Oracle.”

“The first version of our database was called Oracle version two. I didn't think anyone would buy version one of a database from five guys in California.”