#404 How Larry Ellison Thinks

The book I wanna talk to you about today is called Sophomore, an intimate portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle by Matthew Simmons. The book is about twenty five years old. The first time I read this book was about five to six years ago. And think if you're gonna read a biography or a book on Larry Ellison, this is the fur very first one you should read because the author had access to Larry Ellison and traveled extensively with him for two years. And they have these unbelievably just brutally frank conversations in the book. And so I wanted to read the book and look at it through the lens of, like, can I get inside of the mind of Larry Ellison? Ellison has had a very unique set of life circumstances. He founded Oracle all the way back in 1976. He's one of the wealthy. Fast forward, you know, fifty something years later. He's still one of the wealthiest people in the world. And so I wanted to understand how he thought. Now the interesting thing about this book is Ellison annotated this book. So he made an agreement. He could not change anything that the author wrote, but he was able to add his own footnotes in his own words. And so in addition to these brutally frank conversations, by reading the footnotes, you start to understand his point of view in the way his mind works. So that's what I just wanna talk to you about a few of those things today. I wanna start with the very first thing. Ellison is his own harshest and most unrelenting critic. A huge chunk of this book is Ellison being embarrassed by his performance as CEO of his own company for the first decade and a half of its existence. Another thing that Ellison has in common with a lot of history space entrepreneurs and really great entrepreneurs, he has extraordinarily little interest in the recent past combined with an obsession to read voraciously about history. Ellison refuses to, and I think is incapable of resting on his laurels. He was best friends with Steve Jobs for twenty five years, and I think Steve just absolutely nailed it with why it makes no sense to rest on your laurels. And instead, you should do this. This is what Steve said. If you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should just go do something else wonderful and not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next. What interests Ellison is not the last five years. It's the next five years and what he's going to do in that period. Another thing, Ellison is naturally contrarian. Larry and the author get to know each other in the late nineties. The book is written in the early two thousands. And one thing that pops up over and over again is he understood. Ellison understood the truth of the internet earlier and in a …