So the book I want to talk to you about today is called Soft War, an intimate portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle by Matthew Simmons.

The book is about 25 years old. The first time I read this book was about five to six years ago.

And think if you're going to read a biography or a book on Larry Ellison, this is the 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 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,

50-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 want to talk about a few of those things today. I want to 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-shakes 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 25 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 interest 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 90s. The book is written in the early 2000s. And one thing that pops up over and over again is he understood. Ellison understood the truth of the internet earlier and in a more

clear way than almost anybody else. And so everybody at the time, their main product, or of course

main product was a database. And they're like, oh, it's over. They said that the internet is going to

end the database market. And Ellison said, no, the internet is not going to end the database market.

It will drastically expand it. Ellison understood better than anyone else the potential impact

on the internet on enterprise computing in general and on Oracle in particular. While the technology

analysts in the investment banks confidently predicted the maturing of the database market,

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