Larry Ellison - Success mantras

Recently read some of the success secrets from Oracle Corp founder and CEO Larry Ellison. He had first seen opportunity in relational databases, when others missed it, and co-founded Oracle in 1977 putting $2000 of his money. Starting with Oracle 2 as the first release(there was no Oracle 1), Oracle over the years has become leader in database technologies and enterprise applications in the world. Here are some bits from him...

• I have had all of the disadvantages required for success.

• I love sailing. I like it more when I'm winning.

• There is really nothing riskier than not taking risks.

• There's a wonderful saying that's dead wrong. 'Why did you climb the mountain?' 'I climbed the mountain because it was there.' That's utter nonsense... You climbed the mountain because you were there, and you were curious if you could do it. You wondered what it would be like.

• In some ways, getting away from headquarters and having a little time to reflect allows you to find errors in your strategy. You get to rethink things. Often, that helps me correct a mistake that I made or someone else is about to make. I'd rather be wrong than do something wrong.

• Five years from now I don't know how I'll think.

• 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.

• We used to have a rule at Oracle to never hire anybody you wouldn't enjoy having lunch with three times a week.

• People tend to like what they're good at and not like very much what they're not good at.

• Whenever you can find flaws in conventional wisdom is when you get real competitive advantages. Whenever you're just doing the same thing everyone else is doing, the best you can hope for is parity, you know, or small advantages, to do it 10 percent better or 20 percent better or even 30 percent better, but not a thousand times better.

• You don't need too many things that are radical to get ahead;You need about one of those every five years. You have to take these big risks on a regular, though not too frequent, basis.

• I often say that when you think you have this really great idea and everyone else thinks you're nuts, there's one or two possibilities. You have a really great idea; the other possibility is you're nuts.