Video Summary: Larry Ellison: Bloomberg Game Changers Series

Oracle’s technology has always been a part of the backbone of the internet. There are a lot of people who are unaware that all the e-commerce websites, government site credit cards and even the mobile phones as well rely on the database of Oracle to run.

In an interview, Larry said that one day his father surprised him by telling him that he was an adopted child. He said that he was just 12 when he was told this.

He was a medical student, but he hated this formal education system. Therefore, he decided to drop out of college twice.

After some time, he moved to California where he started working at a company called Ampex as a programmer to make his living. This was the company where he met Stuart Fegin and became his friend for the next 35 years.

When Larry joined the company, it was working on a project for the CIA. The name of the project was Oracle. While he was working on it, he realized that the old information storage is dependent on tapes and that is very slow and not that reliable.

After working for some time, Larry left Ampex and found his own company. He named his company SDL and had a budget of $1200 in the beginning.

Larry had fantastic luck as he came across a vital paper by IBM, which stated how information could be stored in relational databases. It was a better and superior method that was being used currently. Larry thought of using that idea which IBM never used.

Larry developed new software by using the new storage model. He went to the CIA directly and sold them his database. Larry called it as version 2 because he assumed that no one prefers buying version 1 of anything. After this success, he sold his database to a lot of other institutions.

His product became really popular and successful. In 1986 it went public, and he was valued at 93 million dollars. (See Millionaire Mindset: How Millionaires Think Differently?)

Because of the aggressive sales policy, the company started selling the products that did not exist only. When the company launched version 6 of Oracle, it turned out to be very buggy because of which the shares of the company started falling.

Oracle was a big company, and Larry made sure that he managed this fall. They launched Oracle version 7; it was great software. In the year 1994, its revenue raised and exceeded 2 billion dollars. You would be surprised to know that Larry’s shares were worth more than 3 billion dollars.

Larry had an ambition of being first in everything that he did. He truly tried hard to be the wealthiest person in the world like Bill Gates but couldn’t; he was really disappointed because of this. Yet, he was amongst the top 5 richest men in the world. (See How to build the entrepreneurial mindset?)

Later, Larry planned of expanding oracle software offering. For this, he also bought a software company called “Peoplesoft” for 10 million dollars. He spent around 34 billion dollars on acquiring over 52 companies.

It was in the year 2010 that Ellison brought back America’s cup. This was the first time in 15 years that someone did so.