Watching Larry Ellison Become Larry Ellison – The DNA of a Winner
steveblank.com
steveblank.com
Some here seem to think Entrepreneurship has changed into a kumbaya group hug where we just attend conferences together , check code into GitHub, might make a bit of money if we ask nicely, or sell "ads", and hope for an early exit because of our sheer brilliance, leaving the dirty work to our future parent.
The most valuable companies on the other hand look for sustainable competitive advantage, or as Peter Thiel would say, monopoly. That definitionally implies "all others must fail" at competing with you. That doesn't mean you don't have partners, it means in the area you excel at (hopefully a big area), you are the only game in town.
With Oracle it never was quite the only game in town, but it never lost being the clear revenue leader in RDBMS (and middleware after BEA).
If you are in an area where you can't do that or it's hard to do that, you're not going to build a super valuable company - maybe a super valuable online community or open source project. But not a really valuable company generating tremendous wealth beyond asset speculators.
Perhaps that's what's changed about entrepreneurship, and why you see Larry derided by some here. It isn't just about building companies anymore, it's about funding communities that might become companies with enough tinkering and luck.
People start and run companies for a variety of motives. Obliterating the competition is one of them, but it seems to correlate with being a pretty awful person to be around, so not everyone chooses to play by those rules.
Ultimately you get to choose-and are responsible for-the rules you play by. If there's one big lesson of entrepreneurship, it's "take responsibility", and that includes figuring out what kind of person you want to become.
The only thing this is proof of is inexperience, gullibility and lack of insight into the real workings of the world.
You want to see a good example of an entrepreneur? Look at Jack Ma. No social background, no spoon in mouth, just a lot of optimism hard work and a sense that success can be mutual and open-looped. Started in China, a country notorious for government/business/family-relation corruption but chose not to seek help from the obvious places and instead earned business the hard way - going door to door and manufacturers and asking them to sign up, one boring conversation at a time.
You couldn't make a hollywood movie out of that because its so boring. But it's reality. Any startup story that can have a hollywood movie around it is usually just a public business sockpuppet around a group of allied interests with money to throw around at the next "genius" they want to prop up to create a magical story/script for the next IPO.
I think it's a stretch to assert that Ellison started in business solely to "obliterate" his competitors.
The alternative is starting a lifestyle business. This is fine, but not a source of great wealth beyond your family. It's more aptly described by "small business owner" or "self-employed".
Either angle can shape the person you become, but I'm not sure it's so easy to correlate "awful" with "growth company founder". Certainly Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are in this category, and they've been brutal to their competition. Are they turds too?
There is room for a variety of entrepreneurial styles. In economics as in a natural ecosystem, there is room for an astounding variety of survival strategies.
The Disney movie "The Lion King" just isn't referenced enough on HN. Your comment is roughly equivalent to saying "You can tell who is a successful species on the savannah by those who talk shit about Mufasa." The truth is that apex predators like lions are very cool, but, by biomass and evolutionary longevity not nearly the most successful animals in any ecosystem.
And, uniquely to humans, there is a meta-game, wherein what we say about the world influences the world. This effect is so strong that we can indeed redefine what success means with our words. Success in nature is, unambiguously, survival. Live long enough to reproduce, die happy. But we humans can and often do alter this definition. And we do it in economics as well. The traditional definition of capitalist success is (to paraphrase) "die a billionaire". That's a valid definition, and I wouldn't take it away from anyone, but realize there are other valid choices who's existence doesn't affect the validity of Larry's credo.
I would argue that the problem with that definition is the fact that success has to be personally attributable value. Money is, in the end, just a kind of primordial "like". Larry has amassed billions of "likes". But how much more value could he have created had he not worried so much about localizing the rewards?
I'm glad you want to be an apex predator, but I don't think you'll get very far by insisting that the world only needs (or would only benefit from having) apex predators.
My version of being an entrepreneur includes having enough time to be with my family and raise awesome children who will have the ability to be entrepreneurs as well.
I'm not sure it's relevant to your central thesis here, but this conflates the experience of the individual with the workings of evolution. Living long enough to reproduce (more precisely, having a high inclusive fitness, which typically includes reproducing but strictly doesn't have to) is roughly equivalent to nature saying "more like that" which can be counted as "a win" - but the dying animals are still probably dying in pain.
The question was, what approaches are required for the individual (an entrepreneur) that creates such a managed organization to build a sustainably, very high wealth producing capability?
In this, I do not think your analogy of apex predators follows. Most companies live and die quickly, those that become pillars of wealth and last 50 years+ have tended to carve out monopoly (by their apex predator?) status in certain areas such that they can diversify into new ones.
This is not to say that all organizations need to be pillars of wealth and last two generations. There's plenty of room for survival and happiness with lifestyle organizations. But I wouldn't necessarily call people that start such companies entrepreneurs, I'd call them "small business owners" or "self employed".
There's also reason to believe that being central in such a structure, one you do not own or control, is actually a good strategy for building a super valuable company.
And using different strategic framework can be a competetive advantage. It's harder for a competitor to destroy you completely if they don't understand your support system as well as you do. Doubly so if the framework you are using turns out to be ascendant regionally or globally.
He's the success story of a brilliant founder that hands off his work to a parent (Microsoft) to do the dirty work.
All Minecraft versions combined have sold over 50 million copies, and the product is on the decline (since people only buy it once). So what "dirty work" did he hand it off for Microsoft to do?
He wasnt ever interested in the business side. That makes him much more of an inventor than an entrepreneur.
I have personally seen Oracle try to steal my employer's ideas (while I was at Dolphin) and code (while I was at Clam). I was in one of their machine rooms when I caught them making an illegal copy of our source tree, and I most definitely did not get the impression that it was a rogue developer acting on their own initiative. In another life, I've seen how they treat partners, contributing almost nothing to a "joint effort" on a port (impeding it by only providing machine-obfuscated source) even though they were clearly going to benefit most from its completion.
That kind of crap has nothing to do with being hungry, or competitive, or even aggressive. It has to do with being immoral. That's why even real entrepreneurs "talk shit" about Larry and Oracle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc
No, Oracle isn't a steward. At best they're just using those projects at cash cows. At worst they intended to destroy their erstwhile competitors instead of trying to outdo them. What they are most definitely not doing is devoting the resources necessary to improve or even maintain the health of those projects or their communities.
As for contributions to Linux, here are some figures.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/google...
Oracle doesn't even crack the top ten (none/unknown/consultant don't count). For a company that makes so much revenue selling open-source-based products, such as repackaging Red Hat's work and selling against them, 1.3% is a pretty paltry figure. What's really sad is that they contribute even less to anything else, from the Apache or OpenStack foundations down to the zillions of smaller independent projects. Just about the only comparable company with less open-source visibility is Amazon.
Lastly, don't think I or others can't see how your claims keep getting changed or reduced as you're proven wrong again and again. First it was about startups not valuing collaboration, then about Oracle producing more useful open source, then about being a good steward of the open source they've acquired . . . and even that isn't true. What's next? Saying we should still worship Larry because (as far as we know) he hasn't actually killed any babies for three whole months? Stop fawning and learn about the topic.
The rest of this comment is weird personal attacks.
Luck plays a part in every success story. However, I find it dubious at best to consider that luck is the main factor in Ellison's and Oracle's success.
This isn't the DNA of a winner, this is the DNA of a sociopath.
Which is why I added "in the modern world." In a tight-knit community sociopathic traits are probably much less beneficial than in an atomized, largely anonymous society.
My statement wasn't meant to say, "Oh, it's simple, we just X!" Just that it's not necessarily outside the realm of things we could address. In particular, "adaptive" - when it comes to humans - is only relevant at time scales of many generations. Much changes over those time scales.
Which is just another way of saying, all competition must fail.
So far, it's worked for Facebook. They have trampled their competition, or they just buy them.
In a way, it reminds me of the consumer electronics market, especially the laptop PC market. Fierce competition forced down profits, and now seemingly every company is focused on cost cutting rather than making something we actually want to use. Both consumers and producers have lost out (woe is me who cannot buy a quality thinkpad anymore!).
The only way out of it is if a clear leader breaks away eventually, or else a new market will disrupt and subsume the capabilities of the old one mired in cost competition.
(or perhaps you are asserting that the generous use of xxxxx-path cheapens the gravity of the situation for those suffering from mental illnesses)
A psychopath reacts, a sociopath manipulates.
Which is why 37 years after its founding, and after 28 years as a public company, he still owns 25% of the company (per Bloomberg). All the more remarkable considering Oracle is worth $173 billion.
that's pretty counter-intuitive in today's bubble-blowing tech climate. we praise companies for raising the most money from the hippest VCs rather than customer retention, technology, and market position
It's worth pointing out that VC as an industry may not have been very mature around the time of these companies.
I believe my HN account got slapped with an automatic down rating adjustment quite a long time ago (that applies to anything I post here, automatically lowering my comment positioning).
For example, when I posted my comment initially, it was instantly ranked below a gray-shaded 'negative value' comment from a user with a lower karma rating than myself.
Anything I post on HN automatically starts at the bottom of the pile. I suspect if you could check my account it has a flag set on it.
If you think there's an issue with your account, you could email the HN admins to see if it can be fixed (hn@ycombinator.com).
On a side note, boy, I'm at a loss to come up with a reason for someone to down vote you. Factual statement, complete with a reference to where you got your information, and some little shit who doesn't like facts comes along and clicks the down button. That, or someone on a mobile device who tried to click one of two buttons that are separated by about four pixels, and hit the wrong one. The good news is that one of those can be fixed.
Brb, working my billion dollar exit now.
Wait till le derpina hears about this one!
You will learn a lot of things, including:
* How being adopted affected his personality
* How he wandered around for a long time without any clear objectives
* How someone filed a false case of rape against him, and how he survived
* Death of one of his co-founders due to cancer
* How Oracle competed with other database companies, including the technical details (this is the part which I found most interesting)
How about 'successful' or 'exceptional'? Certainly says the same thing without the implied value judgment against those who don't share the same value system
I found this statement interesting as many entrepreneurs still think this way. Seems like it's a right of passage to hate sales people and then later grow to love them as you watch them bring revenue into your company.