Larry Ellison Success Story

Larry Ellison

Lawrence Joseph Ellison is an American businessman and investor. He is also co-founder, executive chairman, chief technology officer (CTO), and former chief executive officer (CEO) of Oracle Corporation. He is also the owner of the 41st largest island in the United States, Lanai in the Hawaiian Islands with a population of just over 3000. In October 2021 he was listed by Bloomberg Billionaires Index as the 7th wealthiest person in the United States and 8th wealthiest person in the world.
Larry Ellison was born on 17 august 1944 in New York. His mother was unwed. When he was nine mother was years old he contracted pneumonia and his mother give him to his aunt and uncle for adoption. Larry then didn’t meet his biological parents until he was 48. Larry Ellison was raised in a two-bedroom apartment and he didn’t know about his adoption until he was 12.
His adoptive mother was also loving and caring and his adoptive dad lose his real estate business in the great depression. Larry Ellison's relationship with their adoptive father was not so good. When he was young he had a great interest in math and science. He was also called the science of the year. During the final exam of his second year, his adoptive mother died.
He then dropped out of school he again enrolled at the University of Chicago but dropped out again after one semester. As his relationship with his dad was not good his dad thinks that Larry Ellison was an aimless young boy. In 1966 he moved to California. He was 22 years old at that time.
In the early 1970s, he worked for Ampex Corporation. He does many jobs. He also worked as working as a technician for Fireman’s Fund and Wells Fargo Bank. He had the opportunity to work on a project for the CIA which included creating databases for systems. Larry Ellison was inspired by the paper ‘A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks’ written by Edgar F.Codd on relational database systems.
In 1977, with Bob Miner and Ed Oates (Larry's co-workers), he started his 1st business Software Development Laboratories (SDL). They start with their business with the 2000 dollars.

“When you live your life in different ways, it makes people around you become uncomfortable. So deal with it. They don’t know what you are going to do.”

“If you do everything that everyone else does in business, you’re going to lose. The only way to really be ahead is to ‘be different.”

“See things in the present, even if they are in the future.”

“I am so disturbed by kids who spend all day playing video games.”

“Think of it as you want it, not as it is!”

“When I do something, it is all about self-discovery. I want to learn and discover my own limits.”

In 1979 they rename their company rational system. Ellison had heard about the IBM System R database, also based on Codd's theories, and wanted Oracle to achieve compatibility with it, but IBM made this impossible by refusing to share System R's code. Initially, Oracle Database release called Oracle version 2 in 1979. There was no Oracle version 1. In 1980, Ellison’s company had eight employees, and the revenues of that company were less than $1 million.
In 1982 they named their company Oracle System Corporation. Ellison's dream was to create a database that will be compatible with IBM but IBM refused to share R’s code with Larry Ellison. In 1983 the company officially became the Oracle system corporation. In 1986 company hit almost 55 million dollars.
In 1990 Oracle laid off 10% of its workforce. This crisis, which almost resulted in the company's bankruptcy. This problem was due to Oracle's "up-front" marketing strategy, in this strategy sales, people urged potential customers to buy the largest possible amount of software all at once.
In Larry Ellison's business, he also faces losses but he wants his company to become number 1 in the world. He later admitted that he made a big mistake due to that company went bankrupt. Ellison would later say that Oracle had made "an incredible business mistake".
When IBM delay its entry into the relational database market Ellison saw this and find the opportunity to dominate the market in the mid-range systems and microcomputers category. Later he focuses on aggressive sales strategies he does work and after some time his hard work brings him a reward.
In 1991 Oracle Company had a great percentage of market of shares and this company became growing at faster rates. Now Oracle became the world's number 1 company so there is little and almost no competition.
In 1994 the company Informix became the biggest competitor of Oracle Company. But in 1997, Informix announced a revenue shortfall and thus made Oracle the dominant force in the market. Due to Ellison's hard work, he became the director of apple in 1997. In 2007, Ellison earned almost 61,180,524 dollars. In the year 2009, Larry Ellison made around $57 million.
In 2009 Ellison decided to buy Sun Microsystems that giving Oracle control of the popular MySQL open-source database which Sun had purchased in 2008. Ellison was reported by The Wall Street Journal to be the best-paid CEO in the last decade. The most important thing is to not lose hope because time will bring reward to those who will do hard work.
The thing that makes Larry Ellison different from others is that he didn’t lose hope when he had losses in business his company also went bankrupt.
Today he is still CEO of his company and has been its backbone who has ensured that it still continues the dominance that it established in the previous years. Larry Ellison married four times first he married Adda Quinn from 1967 to 1974. Then he married Nancy Wheeler Jenkins from 1977 to 1978. Then he married Barbara Boothe from 1983 to 1986. Later he married Melanie Craft from 2003 to 2010.

“Because software is all about scale. The larger you are, the more profitable you are. If we sell twice as much as software, it doesn’t cost us twice as much to build that software. So the more customers you have, the more scale you have. The larger you are, the more profitable you are.”

“When you are the first person whose beliefs are different from what everyone else believes, you are basically saying, ‘I’m right and everyone else is wrong.’ That’s a very unpleasant position to be in. It’s at once exhilaration and the same time an invitation to be attacked.”

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Larry Ellison Success Story

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