Yet Another Value Podcast - Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle $ORCL (Fintwit Book Club July 2025)

Episode Date: July 29, 2025

In this episode of Yet Another Value Podcast Book Club, host Andrew Walker is joined by Byrne Hobart of The Diff to explore Softwar, the 2003 biography of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. Together, they dissect the contradictions of Ellison's public and private personas, Oracle's aggressive sales culture, and the book's surprisingly prescient predictions about tech's future. They reflect on ERP nightmares, Oracle's early brushes with collapse, and its surprisingly fertile alumni network. The conversation probes the blurred line between visionary leadership and red flags, while tracing Ellison’s uncanny resemblance to figures like Elon Musk. From petty footnotes to PR plays, it's a sharp look into one of tech’s most enduring empires._______________________________________________________________[00:00:00] Introduction to the podcast and book.[00:01:48] Byrne joins the episode.[00:01:49] Quick disclaimer on investment advice.[00:02:37] Skipping the boating sections in book.[00:03:30] Initial thoughts on Oracle in 2003.[00:04:00] Larry Ellison's personality contradictions.[00:05:45] Oracle's sales tactics and benchmark claims.[00:07:00] Predictions on mobile and distributed systems.[00:08:44] ERP transition challenges explained.[00:10:03] Reasons to bet against Oracle.[00:12:04] Oracle’s management style and red flags.[00:14:23] Intelligence connections and conspiracies.[00:15:54] Government ID advocacy post-9/11.[00:17:24] Comparing Larry Ellison to Elon Musk.[00:19:45] Book’s structure and humorous footnotes.[00:22:55] Seibel rivalry and Oracle acquisitions.[00:25:11] PR's role in Oracle’s strategy.[00:26:40] Market perceptions and quarterly focus.[00:30:03] Importance of sell-side analysts back then.[00:31:29] Anecdotes about market cap drops.[00:33:48] Oracle’s executive alumni shaping tech.[00:36:23] Differences in tech executive pipelines.[00:38:51] GE's internal business training system.[00:41:09] Ellison’s hiring practices and red flags.[00:44:05] PeopleSoft DOJ case and hypocrisy.[00:46:43] Safra Katz’s rise at Oracle.[00:49:19] Oracle’s leadership transition dynamics.[00:51:54] Book's narrative style and structure.[00:52:56] Author’s omission of Ellison’s childhood.[00:55:13] Ellison’s charisma and software predictions.[00:58:33] Ellison’s lasting influence and vision.[00:59:45] Tease for next month’s book selection.Links:Yet Another Value Blog: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com See our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimer

You're about to listen to the yet another value podcast with your host, me, Andrew Walker. Today's episode is my monthly book club with my friend, Byrne Hobart from the Diff. We read Soft War. It is the Larry Ellison, an intimate portrait of Larry Ellison from Oracle fame, as the book calls it. It was published in 2003, and I think we both really enjoyed, you know, I'll be honest, I'll probably with you. I don't know if I would recommend the book, but I think we both really found it thought-provoking, just seen inside how tech migrable.

go, seeing inside the company thinking, like using the benefit of what we know from the past 20 years on how Larry Ellison, Oracle, tech, and everything evolved. I think we both found it really interesting. If you do read it, again, I think you will learn and find a lot thought-provoking. Skip all the sections on the boats. That's the only thing I would advise you and you'll have a much better time reading it. But it's a really fun podcast. I think you're really going to join. We'll get there in one second. But first, a word from our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by FinTool. Fintoul is the AI junior analyst tailored specifically for individual investors.

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Go to fintool.com to transform your research process. That's fintool.com. All right. Hello and welcome to the yet another value podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Walker. It's our monthly book club with me today. I'm happy to have my co-host book club partner, Byrne, Hobart from the diff. Burn, how's it going? It's going great. Quick disclaimer. Nothing on this podcast is investing advice. You can hear the full disclaimer at the end of the podcast. Burn. Today we, this month, we both Red Software. It's Larry Ellison. Biography, I guess, it calls itself an intimate portrayal.

It was released in 2003, which I think makes it a really interesting retrospect on like, you know, you've got Oracle and the bulk of the book focus on Oracle, like right during the dot-com crisis and right at the end of the dot-com crisis. I want to talk about all sorts of stuff here because it was really interesting reading this with kind of 20-plus years of hindsight bias and knowing Larry Ellison and knowing where the future of the tech world and everything is going but let me start with this. You and I both read this book. It's 700 pages, 250 pages of it is probably devoted to Larry Ellison telling boating stories

and 550 is awesome. I will confess I did not read the boating parts very attentively. I'm glad he enjoys his boats. It seems like they go fast, not quite fast enough sometimes, but yeah, that was not my favorite. For those who probably haven't read it, the middle 150 pages is Larry Ellison just describing boat races he's been in for 150 pages. you i read the first time i was like i'm out i'm skipping it uh but i want to ask you if you had read this book in 2003 let's start with here you read it in 2003 you're a stock analyst

what would your opinion of oracle have been like you know if you could fast for 20 years and kind of see what would you have thought about oracle so what would i have thought about or in 2003 like if you read this or with that if you read oh like having read it yeah you read this book and you just have somebody puts guns to your head and says by longer short what are you yeah um it that is such a tough one because i i had such mixed feelings about oracle and about ellison and um i don't it seemed like they there's this weird thing where i noticed that he likes to complain about other people's flaws and he he has people he likes and people he hates and he'll tell you why. And everyone he doesn't like is actually more like him than the reference category that he

likes. He talks about how Oracle is this. It's an engineers company. We care about technology. And there's a reason that all the successful tech companies are run by programmers. But you don't have any scenes in the book where Larry says, okay, I'm going to look at the man page and debug this shell script that I wrote. You only have scenes where he's selling. And he talks about how he doesn't understand the salespeople. But then the next scene will be him, pitching a bunch of CEOs and having this incredibly effective deflection when they say we've spent tens of millions of dollars in your products and we've gotten no return from it. He talks about how he can't stand that everyone in the industry is dishonest and they're

all making up these fake benchmarks and things. And I just, I feel like Oracle would have a much higher market cap if every benchmark that I've ever seen in an Oracle ad were in fact true. They show some pretty incredible numbers that I assume are true for some context, but not for everything. So I feel like looking at that, I would have said Oracle is as technical as they need to be. Like, they clearly do have to actually have really good software engineers. I think if I'd looked at the time, maybe I would have refused to go long for actually completely incorrect reasons. Like I could have said, it is absurd that he has this thesis that we're going to run everything on

distributed systems with commodity hardware and we're going to let these crazy amateurs who wrote their own version of Unix because they have too much free time. They're weird nerds. Like, would you actually put anything serious on a platform like that? Of course not. You want to buy something from Sun instead. And then when Larry is going on and on and on about how the future of computing is a $500, small-ish, mobile-ish device, like he still, he thinks it's a laptop, but he's basically

describing what the smartphone evolved into. Pretty simple device, pretty cheap. Everyone has them. Everyone uses them all the time. They are basically a browser. And you can, like, when you use mobile apps, what you are basically doing, unless you're playing a game, is every app is just, here is a topic-specific browser

that is formatted for the specific thing you're trying to do. Like, LinkedIn on app is LinkedIn, is very much linked in the browser app. Interactive Brokers app is, you know, it's the same kind of interface, but it's the same information and the same capabilities of the site, et cetera. So, like, he got a lot of stuff surprisingly right. And I think by the end of the book, I was just kind of confused. I really could not tell if Oracle was a good company selling products in a hard category to do well in,

or if Oracle is just really good at selling and the technology is okay, but they will always overpromise. And so you will always be somewhat disappointed. I think you can read it and you can feel like this is just a catastrophe in the making, that the company nearly went under one time and that that will probably happen again. And that obviously would have been completely wrong. But there was also this striking thing as I was reading, which I think is past your question, but sort of part of it. It's like a lot of, so a lot of the details, they just, they were worth reading in part because there are things that I took as a given that somebody actually had to articulate and had to ship. So stuff like, yeah, everything happens on a server or you're interacting with it through a browser. That was something that people like Alison had to say was going to be the way that things were.

Yeah. And then other parts of it just seemed completely timeless. Like, people have these big, splashy projects. They do ERP transitions, and it doesn't really work well, and their incompatibilities and mistakes. And, like, just last year, Lamb Weston had this big earnings blow up because of an ERP thing, which I thought was particularly funny because so many Lamb Weston, so many of the hedge funds that hold Lam Weston or software companies were software-focused funds that just happened to own a potato stock. That's why I first heard about it was looking at 13Fs and wondering why. so many growth funds were buying potatoes.

And then those software-focused investors did manage to, if they didn't sell it right time, they lost money on potatoes because of software. So, like, that part felt kind of timeless. And then you look at the cover and you look at Larry Ellison today. And you're like, okay, he basically looks the same. And he does talk a lot about like aging and longevity research at the end, which was interesting. No, look, you hit on so many things I wanted to touch on.

Just to quickly touch on the land west thing. That was one of the things that I really took away from this book was, you know, it is a common trope among investors. Oh, company implementing an ERP transition short the stock, right? Like just, and when you read this book, I've never been inside a big company undergoing a tech transfer. Like maybe they were when I was at a big company, but I've certainly never led one. When you read the book, you really start to understand why you would want to short a stock. Like you and me, I'm sure it just seems, oh, you know, you upgrade some servers. It is much harder than that.

and you kind of get that in the book. But, yeah, it looks like kind of like a partial brain transplant where like we're going to keep everything running, but we're actually like snipping out a little bit of the brain stem. We're going to pop in a new faster brain stem. And we're pretty sure this will work fine and you won't have a seizure and die. Like, they've got two really interesting stories in there. One with Oracle upgrades to their own product. And they say like for 10 days, the company's basically shut down and they're like, thank God,

we decided to do this over the Christmas holidays because we can't do anything. You're like, that's a tech company that basically should. just stuff. And there's another where G power, I think it's in Hungary. I want to say when G power is upgrading and they try to do like their own systems bolted onto Oracle and they try and they're like, oh my God, everyone, if we were doing this for real, like everyone in this plant would have just died or something. So they're like, oh, it's so difficult. We have to like use the software and adapt our procedures to the software. So I thought those were really interesting and it explained to me like why there's a trope of ERP shorts. Like it is really hard. Just to stick with, I want to

talk about all the things in the future. Like, you hit that. And it's so interesting when you read this. But let's just stick with, would you have gone longer short the stock if you had just read this book? And look, and people say short. I think you mean short on a relative value basis, right? So would you probably would have bought the QQQ and shorted Oracle or a long.

Yeah, because I'm not talking unabashed alpha. Go ahead. Right. Yeah, I do feel like I would have bet on underperformance. I would have two. And the reasons I would have given you were one. a lot of the stuff in the early 90s. So they almost die in the early 90s.

And I do want to talk about that later. But there's like from the early 90s until the end of the book, Larry's always complaining and everyone's complaining. Oh, Oracle, all of our sales, it's hard to manage this business because all of our sales happened in like the last day of the quarter. And they basically, they're constantly having issue with channel stuff being. And you're like, okay, well, that's one.

B, the CEO, you know, he gets this book published. And literally, like, the thing. thing he's most passionate about. And the thing that the book spends the most time talking about is probably his race is boat racing. Oracle sponsors the boat racing. He's taking all of the analysts are worried like, Larry, how much time you're going to take off next year to go race boats and stuff? He almost dies racing boats. She's like, you have a CEO who's distracted. And then there's lots of related party transactions starting from Alison Fowleson's Oracle when he's working from, I think it's Omex. And Omex, he's working for them and he puts out a bid and has his own company,

Oracle that he found, take the bid. And even though, Larry isn't like doing any of the actual programming work. He takes the majority of the shares. So it starts with that. And then throughout the book, they'll be, oh, yeah, Larry's got $100 million in this company. And they're making a product and Oracle's partnering with them or Oracle thinks they should buy them. So you've got related party dealings, channel stuffing, almost died, distracted CEO. Like, that's a tri-fax.

That's a wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. Like, it felt like the kind of company where you just, you don't know when it will blow up. but it's just inevitable that's going to blow up. And then it talks about Larry's habit of finding someone who seems really great, promoting them, deciding he promoted them too fast. And now he's mad at them because he's overpaying them.

And he also blames them for like whatever. It seems like I forget the guy's name, but there's one guy where Ellison basically gives him the mandate of, okay, just grow revenue. You're a sales guy. You're a deal guy. This is the Mormon, I think. There's a Mormon who they're like,

he's the greatest salesperson and just sell, sell, sell. And then when you sell, sell, sell, sells, they get mad at him for sell, sell, selling too much. Yeah, and for margins. And I feel like, yeah, it was, that also felt kind of petty. Like, do you really want to fixate on margins when your company is growing really fast and it's growing into some theme and, you know, may or may not be the standard? And Ellison's constantly talking about how you need standards, you need interoperability. It feels like there are five different cases where he uses the analogy of you have a phone system and that's like your software. software is set up. But then if you have one person who speaks French and one person who speaks

Japanese and they try to have a conversation, you realize they're mutually unintelligible, so you need this common language. And it's the Oracle database that is under the hood for everything. He's talking all the time about this kind of standardization effort, which is, which basically implies that you get every incremental point of market share is worth more than the previous one. And so you would think that that would be a time when, yeah, if salespeople are upgrading themselves to business class seats when they go on flights to visit customers. Like, that's probably not the biggest problem for the company to focus on. You said petty.

And there was one of the, like, the thing the book has the most of that I was surprised by was how much book racing is. When it comes to management, the thing the thing has the most of is Larry, uh, kind of getting sick of his right hand man at the time and, you know, having to falling out. And then Larry firing him right before his stock options best. I mean, I think it happens with five different executives. And look, I'm not on the inside of multi-billion-dollar tech companies, so maybe this company, but I was shocked by how often you'd have a CEO, you'd have, not a seat, you'd have a high-up person who gets fired by Larry right before the option best. And Larry will basically say, hey, if I fired my secretary, she would get two weeks pay or something, right? So why should a highly paid professional when you fire them be entitled to multi-million dollar severance packages, which on the one hand I get, but on the other hand, like, it's just so common throughout the book. He's firing people right before they, their options vest. And again, if I was throwing in red flags, it'd be like, hey, always buying

your right hand, always having falling out with your right hand man and firing them right before their options vest. Like, this is some really strange behavior. Like, there's a fifth and six red flag. Anything there you want to add on it? No, I thought that that was, it was all pretty aggressive stuff. And on the red flags thing, one of the funnier bits to me was when he's talking about the early stuff. And he just, he casually mentions that, yeah, it's named, Oracle's named after a CIA project and that then they land one spy agency. It's like the Defense Intelligence Agency or something as a customer and something that opens doors for every other intelligence agency.

And like it did feel like, you know, you could definitely spin some interesting conspiracy theories. It's sort of like if you've ever seen, like people used to obsess about this with Facebook years ago about how it was funded by Incutel and it's probably this big intelligence project. And Oracle, early Oracle, you know, it kind of has that vibe where you can definitely tell a story of this guy works at the CIA, and then he creates an independent company, and all of its revenue is from different spy agencies. And what does it do? Well, it stores everyone's information about everything. Now, I think that the problem with that is, you know, as a conspiracy theory, is that it is a very post-tel-code build-up conspiracy, where if you have a backdoor into some software,

you can actually access it and exfiltrate information, whereas in practical terms, even if you know, you know, even if there's a secret password to the database or something, like, you have to physically get to the machine or, you know, get access to the machine. It's not as easy as it is now. So I thought that was fun. I thought it was fun that I'd never heard conspiracy theories about Oracle as an intelligence front or as a former intelligence front. But it's just one more thing that makes it look a little bit weird and, you know, as you say it, so at the end of the book, September 11th happens towards the end of the book. And Larry Ellison goes on this big kick where he's saying, hey, we should have, I believe it's government ID cards, like a government database.

Everyone should have government IDs for security purposes. But, you know, what would a government plant say? Now, this would have hugely benefited Oracle's business and stuff. But what would a government plant say? Right. I powered CEO going off and saying, hey, everybody needs like your government mandated ID card. Sounds very, very close to the government line. Let me go to looking for it.

Look, you and I are talking in late 2025. It's hard to read this book without bringing our. knowledge of everything that comes to it. And I think you've already hit on some. Ellison, a lot of what he's talking about. And now you don't know how much is us like planting on to what would like, you know, you read a sci-fi writer in the 60s, they get some stuff right, they get some stuff wrong. And a lot of people celebrate the stuff they get right. I don't know how much of what Ellison's talking about is we give him credit for the stuff that comes or how obviously whatever. But the things that I was really striking out was, let's start on the personal side.

Larry Ellison becomes really close with Steve Jobs at the end of the book and he's always very close. And then later, he becomes very close with Elon Musk. And it's hard for me to read this book, particularly without all the shades of Elon Musk coming here. And that goes from the relationships with women. It goes from the sales promotion. It goes from all sorts of things. But I'd love to just start by talking about, you know, were you reading this book kind of like I was with a little bit of the changes of the Elon Musk to come? You know, I hadn't really thought about the Elon parallel. It's definitely there now that you mention it because it is, you know, Elon, his vibe is partly that he is very technical.

And for what I understand, he is actually really technical and really smart. But also his public persona is very much a sales persona. And I think Elon and Larry both like fast cars and, you know, expensive real estate sometimes, although it feels like Larry enjoys his more than, more than Elon enjoys his. You know, so they, they do have some commonalities, but there's also, I think Ellison just deeply identifies with Oracle, and you can read him saying that he's going to quit at any time and focus on molecular biology and that that's what his real passion is. But I feel like even if, and I read the book around when it came out, but I remembered almost nothing from it except, except the footnote, we should talk about the style, but the pink. The hot pink tank top footnote was like my one firm. What's the hot pink tank top footnote?

Oh, so, okay, we could do a sidebar on this. So like the structure of the book is Ellison. So the book, again, Ellison is technical, describes himself as technical, but you constantly see him doing deals and you never see him writing code or, or, you know, proving theorems or something. So he, the book opens discussing the negotiation with Ellison over what this book will be. Because you can do, you know, I'm going to. to ghost write your autobiography. I'm going to do a totally unauthorized biography. And I'm going to

talk to everyone and dig up all the dirt. And we could collaborate a little bit about how we're going to collaborate. And the author's agent comes up with this idea of, why don't we have the author write the manuscript. And we give Larry just unlimited flexibility to put in whatever footnotes he wants about whatever point he wants to make. And a lot of them are in the chapters where it talks about a falling out with some former executive. It's basically like every time there's a quote from that executive talking about what it was like to work with Larry

or how he felt about getting fired by Larry Allison Larry says this guy's full shit, this guy sucks. Yeah, it's every, it's very petty. It's used the petty word again. But there's, so let me see if I can find it because it was a great little detail.

So it's talking about some meeting took place on a boat, on Ellison's boat, and he let's okay here we go I remember going over to Larry's house in Atherton this is my first experience of Larry he shows up in shorts and a pink tank top

holding a glass of carrot juice and I'm thinking this is my kind of guy and there's a footnote LE writes I met Mark out of my deck just as I arrived back home from the gym I was wearing a black cotton tank top with a cyanara logo on it I have never owned nor would I ever wear

a pink tank top that is very important I might have skipped that footnote because I don't remember that one but the footnotes throughout are quite funny just because he gets accused of so much and every time he basically says I know you are but what am I?

Like that is the... Yeah, it was like turning the shaggy song wasn't me into a full book. Just every time Larry is accused of doing something bad wasn't me. And then he confers himself to Galileo at one point. He says it's like Galileo and the Pope. Telling Galileo to stop researching or something.

Yes, I remember this. Let me, so Tom Siebel, at one point, he, I like this term. He says, you fall in, he, I think he accuses the author, but he might just accuse the press of falling into the lies of Larry, right? And he says, look, Larry lies and distorts everything. And the author even says, the press has come to believe that. They know he exaggerates everything, all this sort of stuff. And again, this.

comes to, I think, I think Larry's a little more humble with it when it comes to the boating stuff. But, you know, basically the author and Larry are both saying, like, Larry might not be the best boat captain in the world or whatever it is when you do that. But he's, you know, they're basically saying he's professional tier. And I was kind of just struck by the lies of Larry again, if I bring it back to Elon Musk, you know, there's been the recent scandal with Elon Musk and his Diablo stats or, you know, he basically, I'm the best gamer in the entire world in like two or three really five-year games. And the really five-year gamers like, absolutely not. But it just struck me the lies of Larry, like it runs through the book,

the salesman. And I'd love to talk about that as it relates to Larry and Elon. And then as it relates to Larry and his subordinates, like it's really interesting how so many of Larry's subordinates get fired. He hates them. And then they go on to run big successful companies. Tom Siebel would probably be the big example. And then if we can bring the benefit of the future to it, you know, PeopleSoft, the book closes with Oracle making the hustle bit for PeopleSoft, which I want to talk about that. Tom Siebel, who Larry, I think Tom Sebel is the one who Larry says, if it was between, if I had one bullet and you and your dog were there, it wouldn't be your dog I was worried about

because Sebo accuses Larry of, like, being willing to kill people's dogs to sell products. And then Sebel shows up him and his dog at an event with Bulletproof Arm around, which I think is great. Three years after this book is published, Oracle buys Sebel for like $6 billion. So it's hard to push it. Anyway, I threw so much at you. I'll just toss it over to you and we can talk about any piece of it. Yeah, there's a lot to go through. Like, the rivalries were really interesting.

It actually, one of the things that I thought about periodically reading this book was that he and Beniof seemed to not hate each other as much as any former protege. And I can't tell you. I forgot Beniof was a former protege as well, yeah. Yeah, and it may be that Beniof actually probably. noticed this pattern and just decided at some point, you know, as the next vesting date was coming up, that either they're going to be enemies forever or he's going to leave Oracle and they'll stay friends and chose what turned to be the right call. So, yeah, the drama around how much they competed,

you know, how aggressively Oracle competed and then that they sort of bury the hedge, but I do feel like the CEPL acquisition was probably more of just a victory lap of Oracle, kind of solidifying how dominant it was. Yeah, like maybe it does come down to the fact that with a lot of these transactions, it is fundamentally this PR, like PR plays a very large role in what software you use because you, if you are buying database software, it's probably because your company does not specialize in something like database software. So you were partly doing something where you want to make sure this decision looks. good. It is a large enough expenditure that it is some, you know, it's a line item of the board of directors would be aware of in many cases and they're going to ask you questions about it. And so if you can work with the company that is a credible provider of this service, then that's good. And that actually means that all these companies have this huge incentive to eject one

another from being in the circle of credible companies that are reasonably intelligent CEO could choose to work with. So that probably explains a lot of the viciousness and back. backbiting and, you know, all the weird benchmarking things and all the debates over, you know, is this benchmark accurate, which incidentally is also something that happens all the time with AI. Like every time we do LLN comes out, there is, you know, it's doing well on some leaderboard and then people are immediately accusing them of training on the data that they're going to be tested on or gaming the leaderboard in some other way.

So, yeah, we will just, we will never not have that kind of thing. Let me pause you on the PR point. And this is the other, I, this comes back to the red flags we were talking about with Oracle. I've read a lot of business books. I'm sure you've read a lot of business books. I've never read one that had so many mentions, aside from one, which I will say in a second, I've never read one that had so many mentions of quarterly earnings, stock price and response to earnings, and the company really carrying about quarterly earnings.

The only other one that I can remember is Enron. This is the only one that I can remember. And again, I look, this is 20 years old, and Oracle is clearly not a, not a fraud. I can feel comfortable saying that. But, you know, when I saw the channel something in the 90s and then I saw in the 2000, I mean, the dot-com bubble, they are every quarterly report. I believe there's one at the beginning of the book where Oracle stock goes down because they miss earnings by a couple shares, cents or something.

And they take out ads in the financial time to describe why their business is doing well and why Wall Street was wrong and stuff. And I was just, I wasn't sure, is that a sign of the culture? Was that a sign of the top times? Because, again, we're right on the heels of the dot-com bubble and Oracle for a while, like holds in there. Or was that actually business strategy where they were saying, look, these companies are comparing Oracle, which is still kind of a startup until maybe the late 90s versus

buying IBM. It's important that they know, you know, hey, this is mission critical stuff. It's important they know strong business. We've got momentum. You know, people are still switching over to us even if the stock price has gone. Like, we're still dating chair. You want to be with the new player. So how did you kind of read that?

Yeah, like I think maybe that is also, like I do think that that social proof thing is really important that if you, if you are an enterprise software customer and you've heard of this company, you've seen them on CNBC and the stock chart is going up, you feel a little bit comfortable that this is working. And then if you are hearing about them in a negative context where they're missing earnings and the stock is in the dumps, maybe you do feel like they are a has been and the market is kind of telling you that there's something new to do. Do you think that was an early 2000 thing because people were still kind of getting used to the IT budget? Or do you think that's still the case kind of today? Like, yes, if your supplier is in absolute distress, you're going to be scared. But today, everybody understands and you might be willing to take a small startup or something. Do you think it's changed or do you think that was early? I think the bigger the contract and the bigger the company, the more that kind of social proof matters.

And that this is actually one of the ways that VCs in that space can, one, add actual alpha and to deliver some kind of value other than just the cash that they provide is that if their logo, if the VC's logo is on the company's page, that at least tells you, you know, Sequoia does not think this company is going to vanish anytime soon. So you can be a little bit more willing to work with them. So I think that that part probably does also hold, but maybe the fact that Oracle was fixated on its stock price is also partly evidence that they did actually care about their software engineers because the salespeople are getting paid commission. So it's still variable, but it's kind of realized right away. And

the salespeople all understand this. Whereas with the engineers, they, they obviously, like, certainly the people who joined early and got options and did well from that, they recognize that equity comp is just a really powerful way to earn a lot of money from working at companies that do well. And so once that's the case, you know, if people, if the narrative around the office goes from I got, I joined Oracle five years ago and I just bought a house for cash and I'm still, you know, I still have a million dollars of liquid assets. So I'm doing great because it's the late 90s that that's very meaningful at that time. The narrative goes from that to, you know, I joined Oracle and I'm actually poorer now because I held all of my stock and bought more

and the pay has, you know, the base has not made up for that. That is pretty bad for morale. and if you're a salesperson and you're just complaining that my commissions are down from last year, well, your sales bros will just razz you and tell you that this is a personal failing, but if it's the stock price, it's something a little different. So I think there's probably, there's probably a bunch of different forces there. And also, the retail investors were not necessarily a bigger force than they are now, But I think a more of a more of a normal force, like there were retail investors who would actually buy things like AT&T and collect dividend checks, and that was their thing.

And so you just had, like the stock had a lot more salience and running ads like that was probably, you know, I don't think that they should have run ads to pump their stock in major financial publications. But it was, I think it made a little more sense in that context than it would today. Because today, like if you are, if you are marketing your company. as an investment to just the median retail investor, then it's because you're trying to become a meme stock. No, you know, the other thing that was interesting was the sign of the times, obviously, but how much sell side analysts get a lot of press in here. And I think if you read

something in the, you know, starting in the early 2010s today, I don't think self-siding analysts would ever get any press in a tech book or anything unless it was just, I can't even imagine in what context they would get press. Well, yeah, I think so the way, like, if I were writing a book about Oracle today, what I would do is use sell side, like quotes from sell side reports as just a snapshot of what the consensus was at that time. I think like that is part of the social function of cell side research, but when markets were less efficient, it actually made some amount of sense to pay an analyst to actually research a company and figure out if it was a buy or not.

I did think it was interesting, because this is still true, that the Gartner analysts were so important. I was wondering that too. I was like, I don't think they carry the same weight anymore. Gardner, Forrester, all this, like, Alison hates them. And when they make suggestions, people are like really pulling budgets based on it. Yeah, he has, I think in one of his footnotes, he's comparing to Alice. I forget who was at Forrester and who was at Gardner.

But he says that with one of them, it's that he will cite sources for everything. You can always double check his work. And, you know, you can make sure everything adds up. And if he's wrong, he'll correct himself. And the other one has this amazing technique where she just makes up everything. And then you can't check any of it. Let me switch. You know, one thing you and I, I think we bonded over this two or three years ago, the company

that lost the most market cap value in a day club. And, you know, Facebook did it at one time, a couple other companies. And I think the thing that was interesting was if you had just bought the companies that lost the most value in a day, I think you actually did pretty well as a portfolio. And there was one line in here that Oracle at one point, I think it was during the early 90s during one of their big drops, they had the biggest market cap drop in one day. And it's like, boom, it's another example. Just buy the companies that have the biggest market cap drop in a day.

Yeah, I guess at that point, well, I think if you do that, this is the annoying quantity. Well, actually, you are probably buying large cap growth, right? And owning large cap growth has been a pretty good thing to do over, well, not in the late 90s, but over much of financial history since then. So to some extent, there is a little bit of free writing there on that factor exposure. On the other hand, it does make some logical sense. Like, if you're big enough to lose a lot of market cap, it means you're a big company. If you're actually in a position where you can lose a lot of market cap, it's either you had

some kind of huge accounting scandal or a huge but non-fatal accounting scandal, or it is that your business is actually uncertain enough that even at that massive scale, there's just there are a lot of open questions about where it can go and how they can get. So that at least gives you, like if nothing else, if you wrote a business history of the U.S. where you just take each of those big drawdowns and look at what led up to them and what the consequences were afterwards, you probably get a nice summary of what were the highest impact companies, because those are the companies where they can be very big and you can still have a huge range of estimates for what they're actually worth. Like, if you look at Google today, like what number

you put on Waymo? Is Waymo, you know, an interesting cash sync that is good for the brand and may eventually turn into a real business? Is Waymo actually a lot of the value of the company because they have kind of cracked the code and they can scale? I think you can still debate a lot of that stuff about big tech companies today. And it is a signal that there are just a lot of different interesting futures. Let me switch. Speaking of Google, Oracle, I mean, when you read this book, a lot of the Oracle leaders who leave, and often on, as we discuss, contentious terms with Larry, but some, like Mark Beniof on nice terms, they become literally the future of tech, right? Beniof runs Salesforce. Siebel run Siebel, several other, like, kind of, let's call them

Oracle spins, even though they're not necessarily Oracle spins. The execs are getting recruited left and right to go run big tech-focused companies. Yeah, Korean has a, of Google Cloud, has a cameo at the beginning and then at the end. And I like, like, like, Tom, Tom's Currian of Google Cloud. Okay. Yeah. So I like cases where a book will just randomly mention someone offhand who ends up being famous later.

Like there's there was some history. I think there was a book that was a history of Lazard. And it mentions a random Lazard associate. And it's Mark Pinkis. Yeah. I had a year or two there. So I like those little cameos. But yeah, a lot of them do end up being kind of in technical, but customer-facing sales.

kinds of roles. My question is, there are some companies that the pipeline is full of CEOs. You know, famously GE would be the example of CEOs of other companies. Famously GE would be the other. Oracle is a great one. You know, you can probably list 10 Fortune 500 executives that come out of Oracle. Google, obviously lots of execs come out of Google. Facebook, a lot of execs come out of Google. Though interestingly, it tends to be Facebook execs who take their billions, found their own company, and then kind of like found their way into a billion dollar company versus other companies hiring Facebook texts. But there are some where you don't get a lot.

And I would point to Apple. I can't think of a single ex-Apple employee who's at the top of a really large company. I'm probably missing some, but I'm probably like, but Apple famously, Tesla and all the Elon Musk companies, I mean, for the most part, I can't think of a single like high-level executive who's kind of spun out of the Tesla website. And I just wanted, and again, Tesla, Elon Musk, Oracle, Ellison. It's interesting because you've got these two guys who are connected and who I see a lot, I think you do as well, see a lot of similarities and their styles, their preferences.

One company is just spinning off execs left and right. Another company, to my knowledge, is not spinning off any. So what do you think is, what is it about one company that creates them into kind of a management CEO spin-off factory and another company that, you know, I don't want to say the talent spare because I've heard great things about Tesla employees, but they're not just like producing high-level talent that's going elsewhere. Yeah, so I think there are a couple of phenomena. I wrote a piece a long time ago about business mafias and how there are different companies

where you hear about PayPal famously. Yeah. And one of the things that I noticed as a commonality is that if you take the core part of that company and just look at how many people it is, it's usually, so like for PayPal, you know, the software and then the kind of dealmaking side. So like excluding the customer service piece, which was in a separate office. You have around 200, 250 employees, something like that. Tiger Management was actually in a similar range for their full team.

And I forget who else I included in this list. But basically, one of the common patterns is to get a really good business mafia, what you need is a company where they actually have this premature exit. Like in the case of Tiger Management, it was just they made some bad macro bets at a time when they're at peak AUM. and it just kind of fed on itself and they own wound. But you have a bunch of people at that company who they still have a lot to prove. They have enough money that they can try something else.

Like they don't have to immediately get a job or they can't pay rent. And they all know each other. And part of the theory that I had on this is that if you have this small set of people and they're all working insanely hard, their entire social circle is just saturated with other connections within that firm. Like they all know all of each other. And so they are kind of part of this narrow. cohort.

So I think that's one piece. I think for GE, it is just a different dynamic where if you run a company that is fairly decentralized, that has all these different divisions that are doing different things, you can have a lot of people who are doing mini CEO jobs. And this is one reason Palantir has produced so many founders, despite being a lot younger than these other companies, is that a forward-deployed software engineer is basically running a sort of temporary company within another company and, you know, making a lot of CEO. E.O-ish decisions, like they're balancing technical constraints against business constraints.

They're working within their organization, within other organizations. They're trying to figure out what things do you just basically, where do you just pay the OPEX, where do you use CAPEX to eliminate some cost? And so they're making a lot of that kind of executive decision. And when you read about GE, which incidentally, I thought that was going to be the company you would mention as 90s company where books about them, it's like every chapter could be, here's how they hit their number that quarter. You know, I read the Welsh book a while ago.

Maybe I wasn't focused on it. But I mean, I do remember that was one of his things. But I don't remember them like taking out advertisements to rebut. But yeah, go ahead. So they would do stuff. I think there was some anecdote about ML. It was either, I think it was ML actually doing intra-company deals on the last day of the quarter where like he ran plastics or something.

And so on the last. day of June, he's asking some GE, other GE subsidiary, can you please put in a purchase order for $5 million worth of our plastics? And we'll buy something from you next quarter. It'll make it up for you. It'll make it up to you somehow. So, yeah, if they have that culture where it is fairly decentralized, like you have your own P&L, then you'll have a lot of people who could run a company. And also, presumably a lot of those people join GE because they want to get to the top. And if you have this sort of GE management culture where everyone understands that they have these shared experiences and everyone feels like it is this pyramid and there's a lot of attrition at every

level. And at the top, you know, before it was Jack Welch and soon it's going to be me, then you probably have a lot of people who feel really salty every time there's, you know, there are five people who all expect a promotion. One of them gets it. And so the other four have to go, you know, run Allied signal or something. Look, that happens. I mean, gee, that's what happened, right, MLL gets promoted behind Weld, it's Welsh than Imelt, and the other two top guys who are in contention for that, they leave and one goes and comes the CEO of Home Depot. Let me ask you a question on the PayPal Mafia thing, right? So your contention was, hey, one of the reasons you get one of these like Mafia-style things

where you've got a company where a bunch of is an early exit. So PayPal, it's an early exit, and what basically happens is, hey, you had, you know, it's a company, it's crushing its category, super successful, super ambitious people. And you probably had a bunch of late 20, early 30s people who they would have stayed at the company and kind of promoted within the company and stayed there and, you know, vests and all that. And instead they get taken out. So they probably have a lot of money. They're 20s, 30s. They're all connected to each other, super ambitious.

And now they've got a lot of money. So they're kind of seating and starting each other's funds or VC Next Adventures and all that sort of stuff. Is that kind of what you're thinking behind that? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Okay. And they also did have a practice of hiring through their networks. They would always ask people to name your five smartest friends and see if they want to work for PayPal, too.

So you had some preexisting connections that then got a lot stronger. And, yeah, Oracle, it is kind of a mystery that, well, I guess to take a step back, you know, you can look at those mafias and they are a really interesting phenomenon. But if you look at companies that don't have as much of one of those, like it took Google a long time to have that. And it just doesn't have the same kind of network density because people just, gradually leave and start other things. But the people, like, more, I don't know if this is still true. Last time I looked at this, like more market cap was created by just Google, not having a Google Mafia, but having Google, then.

That's why I think the PayPal example was interesting because it's the early exit, right? Like the contention here would be, hey, Amazon probably would have had a lot more, except that people, they stayed at Amazon or, you know, Amazon just kept going and successful. And instead of exiting at the early 30s and being like, I've got, nothing to do. They stayed for the next seven years. They were 100 millionaires at Amazon. They retired or they stayed at Amazon, whatever. And now they've got a family and all their connections are kind of still at Amazon still so they don't have that network density. That's why I was so interested. And that's why I do think Oracle is kind of an interesting example, because

they do still have that kind of mafia, despite not having the early exit. Maybe that's because Larry Ellison's exiting everyone early and their options and stuff. You want to know what another thing. So Oracle is always, Ellison's always trying to hire. the most talented people. I did think it, are you surprised that Ellison hasn't been canceled? Because he says, hey, I didn't get why we would hire like the most, the brightest up-and-coming young salesmen. And, you know, it's 80s, 90s, mainly men at the time. I didn't get why we do that. And then for our EAs, we'd hire like kind of, you know, people without college degrees. So he starts hiring, they're hiring Stanford grads for all of their spots, basically. And they're

also hiring super cute Stanford grads. And Ellison's just like dating every one of them. I'm a little, he gets a play more reputation. I'm a little surprised it hasn't come back to bite him. Yeah, I think, I think it's for the same reason that there aren't good Oracle conspiracy theories. It's that you don't, people don't realize how much Oracle software they're using because they're using it so indirectly. Whereas something that's customer facing, it is a big deal if the CEO is, is, yeah, chasing the assistance and things like that. So I think, I think that's actually a big part of it, that there's actually just a lot more tolerance for misbehavior because you don't even know what to boycott if you're boycotting Oracle. Like, you just have either you don't, you know, either you say, okay, well, I am not going to buy an ERP system, you know, to manage my home or whatever.

So take that Larry Ellison. Or it's like, okay, I am not going to work with any Fortune 500 company because they are all tainted by the Oracle Association or their suppliers are. No, I hear you. And obviously, I'm not accusing anyone. But, you know, it strikes me that the astronomer CEO having that viral moment, very well could have been Larry Ellison and that was two very high up people in Astronomer very well could have been Larry Ellison and a EA

because one of the stories that comes out I mean there's this crazy story with one of his former girlfriends who's an EA suing him and all this sort of stuff in criminal charge it's crazy but one of his defenses is he has another EA in a different country who he's dating like come to his defense in the stories like the man was dating two EAs

and two different companies inside the same firm like let's get a girl let me switch the end of the book I found the end of the book to be really, so the afterward is PeopleSoft, which I don't think we have time to talk about. That becomes a landmark DOJ case, which I think is kind of interesting because throughout the book, he's hitting on Microsoft in their DOJ case, and then he gets involved in one. Yes.

But do you want to say anything on that? No, just like, it's another instance of Larry saying, you know, I can't stand these smarmy salespeople and then being a smarmy salesman or saying we have to be more, you know, we're really, yeah, We're really engineering focus company. We would never lie about stuff. And then, yeah, lying about stuff. Yeah, so it was another instance of that where he definitely hates people who remind him of his own worst traits. But the reason I mentioned the end of the book is I found it was really interesting.

So the CEO of Oracle today, so this is a benefit of hindsight, is Safra Katz. And Safra Katz makes a big splash in the back half of the book. He hires her in the late 90s. She basically becomes, I think it's officially as cheap as staff, but she becomes his right-hand woman. a lot of the people who were his number two get kind of pushed out by him. But the end of the book is the author is speculating on who will take over Oracle

when Larry leaps, right? And Larry, it's the early 2000s, so Larry's in his early 60s at this point. So it's not crazy to think, hey, who's going to be next? And the author basically dismisses Katz, says she's super loyal to his boss, but she doesn't have what it takes to be the CEO. And then Larry, right on the heels of that,

comes and says, hey, here's exactly what I want, and the CEO takes over to me, and it is completely not Katz's description. And then he lists two internal candidates who have none of, no similarities with Katz's skill set or anything. So I just found, like, with the benefit of hindsight, that was so interesting and look, I'm sure people get over it. Scatz gets promoted to be the CEO of like, you know, Fortune 5 company, so I'm sure she gets over it. But I just thought it was really interesting to see, like, she's getting dismissed as the CEO and benefit of hindsight. We know she kind of like, wins the totem pole. So I want to just end on that because I found it hilarious and really

interesting with the benefit of hindsight. Yeah, I think it's just, it's really hard to tell how people will evolve and how companies will evolve. And I think you could look at Apple's succession as a really interesting example of this, where I think if you'd ask who can fill Steve Jobs's shoes, you'd only be thinking about people who are on the design side or technologists. And you would not be thinking, well, when you think Steve Jobs, you think continuous improvement in COGS and reduction in working capital needs by effectively outsourcing to East Asia. On the other hand, that was more of what Apple needed at that time. And I think sometimes you want companies where you are not trying to have every CEO fit the same mold

because the problems, you know, if the previous CEO is really good at solving whatever problems the company faces, the problems that the company cannot solve will be the things that that CEO is bad at. And so kind of by, you know, that selection effect means that you probably always want to have successive differently good CEOs. There may be some fun internal politics story. Like, it would be very interesting to read, you know,

a memoir by Safra Katz's own chief of staff or someone who's been able to follow her calendar and know how she operates. Because there are, and this is a big, Again, like, if you write a book like this, you're interviewing a bunch of people. The people who have the time to talk to you for hours are often the people who got fired. And so, of course, they have an opinion on what they did well and on how unethical the people who are still the company are.

But there was this bit about how every, for a while, but basically all communication was going through cats, right? Yes. And so she kind of knows where the bodies are buried and does have just some internal leverage. Like if there's someone, you know, if the head of Emia Sales is constantly telling her, things are not really working this quarter, it looks really bad. If she doesn't tell Larry and then Larry finds out that, hey, sales in Europe were actually way below expectations that may make that person look bad rather than her. I have no idea. Like, she actually seems just like a really effective manager, just a completely different kind of manager than what I would have expected.

but she's also in a position to win a lot of those internal political fights. So, yeah, very, very ambiguous. Like, my baseline belief is that she's just a very organized operator and that at Oracle scale today, you just don't need that many big, bold dreamers. You probably need someone who can just balance between frequent buybacks and growth investments. No, look, you hit the nail on the head with, her and the internal struggles because there's even Larry's number two at the time says, hey, I think he's getting ready to leave Oracle and he basically says, hey, I started telling

Larry, I need one-on-one time with you and Larry was just like throwing everything through cats. I do think it's interesting in your, hey, the weakness of the person, Larry very much sticks around. He's still the chairman of Oracle. He's still the CTO of Oracle. So it is interesting, like he's still looming large and maybe that helps work with her. And then the other interesting thing is, if I remember correctly, she's named co-president, I think, with Mark Hurd, and I think co-CEO at the time, and then Mark Hurd passed away

in 2019, and Katz becomes the solo CEO. But Mark Hurd, it's just interesting. He was, so she's kind of sharing the role. There is someone else in there. And Mark Hurd, if I remember correctly, he was at HP, and he's fired from HP for sexual harassment claims dating a, dating inferior. And it's like,

hey, that doesn't fly at HP, but maybe over at Oracle, you know, back to what I was saying, maybe over at Oracle. It kind of does fun. Any last thoughts on the book? I mean, look, I don't, if listeners were like, hey, would Andrew, I don't want to speak for you, listeners like, hey, would Andrew recommend reading this book? I'd be like, I don't know, man, you got to skip the boating parts.

But it was, like, really interesting. There were a lot of things that, as just somebody, you know, putting around, drooling out of his mouth all the time, I would never have thought about internal, that I understand a lot more about like an internal big IT. Yeah. Any last thoughts? No, that's exactly how I would read it. And like, the book, it has this kind of.

weird almost novelistic presentation where the actual plot of the book is basically it's like six or so quarters in the immediate aftermath of the dot-com bust yes and then it's as as many novels do you tell this tightly constrained story here's where all the action happens and then periodically there will be a flashback here someone tells a story over here we get some context over here and so you kind of weave into this full story because I was kind of expecting you know Larry Ellison, like first, first sentence of first paragraph is Larry Ellison was born here and he grew up in this city and he went to grade school and his friends remember him being rambunctious or whatever. And no, it's like I think the very beginning other than Larry negotiating with the author over what the book will be, which also has this weird postmodern, you know, it's kind of like a gonzo journalism thing because this guy's always, is often in the room and he's talking about being on the plane with Larry, being in the car with Larry, et cetera. you just you open with Larry gets in a car and is driving off to talk to another set of customers

opens with Health South right yeah yeah no you know I can't remember if it was last month or two months ago we did Snowball and I was interested in the difference of Snowball where Snowball it starts with Buffett's current career but like the first chapter but then it quickly goes like what you said Buffett's born but it was interesting where Snowball it really hits on Buffett's relationship with his mother and father terrible relationship with his mother father who Buffett idolizes, right? With this book, it doesn't mention Larry's beginnings at all until really the middle. And it's kind of crazy because Larry has, he's adopted and his adopted father is basically like, not that he doesn't want a relationship with him, but kind of clearly

doesn't care for Larry. And in the hands of another author, I think you can tell you've got an economist author writing this. And the hand is another author. You start with that and you have Larry as the guy with the chip on his shoulder throughout the entire book. Right. The boating is more important than that. I thought it was an interesting choice and also puts a little bit more of it in perspective, I'd say. I could imagine Larry having talked to the author about this and having basically said,

you know, my childhood wasn't great. So as soon as I could, I moved to California and built the life I wanted to have. And, you know, so at that point, the childhood is just like this background context that he's not really thinking about. I think that that does make sense as a reason that we wouldn't have seen a ton of this detail. I always go back and forth on whether, like, I'm always impressed when a business biography is able to track down someone who went to middle school with this person and is able to talk to them. It makes me hope I'd never get a biography written of me, but I think I'm safe. But then I also ask myself, you know, I'm sure there were, I'm sure there were a lot of people who were similarly talented or

driven and just they got unlucky. And, you know, maybe the year that they would have started their amazing database company, a family member got sick and they had to spend years caring for this person. And that's why there's not a book about them, even though they're, you know, every bit as cool and interesting. On the other hand, it's like, it's, it's interesting to get the context because part of what you get from this is this person was unusual from very early on, but in a mortal, understandable way. It wasn't like they were a complete alien who was just beamed down to this planet. Like, they're on the same spectrum as the rest of us in all the respects.

When I read this book, like Larry Ellison, he comes off well in this book. And I do think there is, you've mentioned Godza journalism. Like, I understand Larry didn't get to reject anything in the book, but I think the journalist has a real soft spot for Larry. But when you read, when I read the Buffett biography, right, I think one of the quotes I said to you was, dude, he was 12 and people were calling him up and were like, I have a warehouse full of goods by you. I need you to move this stuff and like trusting Buffett.

I was just like this there was something clearly unique like un-mortal about there is nothing about Larry Ellison like he's very charismatic but a lot of it is like kind of right place right time and it's again it's funny he says Microsoft they're willing to break the rules from the founding of Oracle where you're working at a company and you direct a contract to yourself like he's very slippery with rules I would say so there was just nothing in here that I would say this man is a a god among men where I'd be surprised if anyone would read the Buffett book and like not think hey, there was something really unique about this guy from a very early age. Yeah, yeah.

Like Buffett definitely has some of those really outlier traits where it is just like reading about early Mozart where, you know, he sits down and plays and you're like, how long have you been playing the piano? He's like, oh, that's what this thing is called. You know, it's something like that. And yeah, you do have a different vibe with Allison. And yeah, he's like I said, really charismatic. Clearly, this is something I had underestimated about him before rereading the book.

He actually has this definite vision of the future. Whereas I always thought of Oracle's vision, like the future that Oracle envisions is the quarter they're guiding for and that they don't actually have some broad technological vision. And yet you read it and he he basically correctly predicts how we will use computers today. And he has to shove this narrative down people's throats. And he also, and maybe this is like too much of a tangent for this late. But he has this line early on where he tells everyone you don't need to. You should not customize your software for your business process. You should actually customize your business processes around my software,

which is an incredibly arrogant thing to do, except we clearly do that. Like the existence of the like button has just rewired everybody's brains, and we're used to thinking in terms of status updates. And there are so many companies where their name has become a verb, and it just changes the scope of what you can do. It changes how you think and behave. So he actually got that part right, too, that, yeah, the software is actually going to tell you what to do and it's going to tell you how to think.

Like, you're still thinking, but you, you are writing on tracks that are written in code. So that, I thought that was, that was one surprise from the book. And in terms of just like, is it useful who should read it? I think anyone, anyone who's dealing with large IT projects or just wonders about where does this money go, like you read quotes about how many people in IT are employed at large banks and you ask yourself, you know, what do they do all day? like there are only so many ways for Chase to check whether or not my balance, you know, make sure that my balance updated correctly if I bought something at Starbucks.

And it's clear that just these are incredibly complicated systems, not just complicated technological systems, but complicated human systems. And maybe if there is something extraordinary about Ellis and some, some factor in which he's just a massive, massive outlier compared to the rest of us, it might be just his fluency in translating between those layers. And, you know, sometimes that is just like, a technological limitation of the relational database model means that your company has to do something different and this person needs to get fired. And if you can actually make that translation and then

you have the sort of will to power to actually implement it, then you can do pretty extraordinary stuff, especially if you happen to be born at a time where you are young enough to found a company when Moore's Law is really kicking into high gear. And then your company is well positioned for a world of network computers where there are centralized computers, but it's centralized. Data Center is not centralized one really big hunk of iron from Sun Microsystems or IBM. He did, I think some of this was probably luck where I don't think he started Oracle. I don't think when he was starting Oracle, he was thinking, well, when every computer is networked, databases will be more important. But he certainly seems to have seen that happening sooner than other people did and made the right calls

based on that. So pretty impressive. But it's just crazy to be still kicking. It's So great. Well, look, I think it's like chapter 19. All these focus on is longevity. So it makes us. But we're going to have to end it there because I think you've got three kids all on your own. I don't know how you're doing it.

But I've got to run as well. We need to, but this has been great. I was worried when I was like, oh, man, IT. And then we talked for an hour and I have like five different notes that you were just saying that I wanted to follow up on. But we're going to have to put it all there. Next month, I will tell you, if we have recorded this podcast one week ago, so we're recording on July 25th, if we had to record a July 18,

things were getting topy enough that I was going to be like, burn, it's time. We have to do a bubble book. We have to bring out boom by By Byrne Hobart and the sick us about how manic things are getting. I think things have kind of cooled off just to touch since then. But I'm telling you, man, we're on the verge of we're close to Pure Maniaf, and it tips just a little further. We're busting up boom for next week. But to all our listeners, if you have ideas for next month's World Club, we'd love to hear Burn Hobart from the diff and Capulgains.

This has been great. And looking forward to chat next month. Absolutely. This is great. A quick disclaimer. Nothing on this podcast should be considered an investment advice. Guests or the hosts may have positions in any of the stocks mentioned during this podcast. Please do your own work and consult a financial advisor. Thanks.