You can tell who is an entrepreneur and who isn't by those who talk shit about Larry and Oracle.
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.
So anyone who believes in basic business ethics doesn't get to be an entrepreneur in your book? Like many others here, I don't have a problem with Oracle making money or even dominating its market. I have a problem with how they've done those things, and all of the potential innovation they've stifled in the process. Look at some of the lawsuits they've been involved in, or some of the promising projects they've killed by acquisition.
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.
I'm an entrepreneur and I think Larry Ellison is a turd. Am I blowing your mind?
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.
Generally I think of entrepreneurs as wanting to create a growth business with sustainable competitive advantage, which in turn creates great wealth for customers, employees, and investors.
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?
This is a "no true Scotsman" argument about the nature of entepreneurship. Entrepreneurs are people who start businesses, which is a much wider category than what you seem to have in mind.
If you don't want to obliterate the competition, then software is probably a bad place to be if you want to grow big. Winner take all seems to be the rule rather than the exception.
It's not an odd question, it follows logically from what you have written. If Ellison is a "turd" for doing what basically every big tech firm has done (gaining a monopoly in a particular market) then they must all be turds too.
I usually don't comment but this just hits the nerves so hard I couldn't resist; Larry Ellison is as not an entrepreneur, he is a public figurehead chosen to be the face of a company started by a small team of programmers with ties to the intelligence community who then mysteriously got a huge government contract with no company history to speak of despite competitive bids by established, larger companies with experience and concrete histories. Like how, oh, I don't know, another company these days is being shoved in our Face(book)s as a model of success for no other reason than its strategic value to the intell community. Or how Steve Wynn was marketed as a genius developer but it turned out he was just a front for the mob who needed stay in and compete with corporations but couldn't raise funds on wall street due to criminal records. Or how Bill Gates was a "genius" because he insisted on licensing Winblows instead of selling it even though history went on to show that he actually tried to sell it to IBM numerous times but IBM's then CEO, who was a friend of his family and lived a few blocks away in the same neighborhood actually came with the idea to the table and insisted that IBM license the software instead of buying it, which basically set Microsoft with a huge source of un-earned cash just as it was starting up and helped create the mythos of the "genius" entrepreneur.
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.
> You can tell who is an entrepreneur and who isn't by those who talk shit about Larry and Oracle.
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.
Some good points, but I wasn't trying to equate entrepreneurship with individual success or happiness. I was talking about our broader economic ecosystem, with the managed organization as the primary unit, not the individual.
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".
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.
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.
Not all entrepreneurs are trying to build super valuable companies anymore. I am trying to build a super valuable developer ecosystem to be a part of. Watsi is trying to build a super valuable nonprofit health insurance network.
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.
I dunno, Notch seemed to do alright for himself. Having made at least a billion as a result of starting his own company. I suspect that qualifies as an entrepreneur. He didn't seem the KKND type, but I could be wrong.
You're simply presenting a "No True Scotsman" fallacy. Notch created his own company, ran it, and made a billion in selling it. If that's not an entrepreneur, most of HN is going to need to change their business cards.
> 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?
Fair enough. Words get diluted because of corner cases. How about: Notch had very little to do with growing and running his company. He built an awesome game, and kept improving it until he moved on to build something else in the company. Which he abandoned and sold to Microsoft because the community started turning against him (ala Phil Fish) and it was impacting his life.
He wasnt ever interested in the business side. That makes him much more of an inventor than an entrepreneur.
What a fawning piece of tripe. Uncle Larry's monomania and "others must fail" sociopathy might have worked for Oracle in a particular market and time, but it would be a recipe for utter failure in a modern startup where adaptability and collaboration are more valued. He didn't have unique entrepreneurial DNA. He had some skills that were valuable, others that were deficient, and enough luck that the former outweighed the latter.
"He didn't have unique entrepreneurial DNA. He had some skills that were valuable, others that were deficient, and enough luck that the former outweighed the latter."
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.
I find it actually pretty ironic that Larry is so derided here. It seems to come out more due to jealousy (also see: Google, Apple, Facebook, Craigslist now that also have lots of money) than anything else.
Oracle is an expensive product that many companies happily pay for. Everyone here is just upset because they can't charge the same for their startup sass business.
Ever heard of open source? Lots of startups are using and contributing to it, using their participation to attract both users and developers. Yeah, I'd say collaboration is valued quite a bit.
Why don't you make at least a token attempt to research and prove such a strong claim? Most of their open source was acquired, not generated internally, and is demonstrably less active than it was before it became Oracle. Examples include everything from Sun or MySQL. Oracle has probably done more harm to open source than any other company including Microsoft.
Ask anyone who worked on Sun or MySQL whether they think Oracle has been a good steward, even compared to a volunteer-run foundation after the initial sponsor went bankrupt. For example, let's see what Sun's Bryan Cantrill had to say.
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.
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.
1.3% is likely more than most meaningful contributions of most of the latest web 2.0 of startups. Most startups do not contribute to open source at all, especially not any parts of their core product.
The rest of this comment is weird personal attacks.
I read a piece by a (very reasonable) VC explaining the detriments of excess LP cash in the VC industry. The premise was that if 100 companies get funded in a space (say, local delivery) where normally, 10 companies would have, then even the ones who under normal circumstances would have "out competed" the others through superior service and product will have a tough time vs the torrent of cost cutting and "competition" from the slew of competitors, thereby making the entire industry unprofitable.
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.
Makes sense. If I remember my economics correctly, with efficient markets and competition, profits should approach zero over time. But, if there's no competition....
Yea, this I don't like this whole "it's legal--I'm just a great Entrepreneur(Winner!). Make your money, but don't
step on the little guy. Oh yea, a hand shake means more than a contract in my world. I hope it's not a generational
thing? I've been no angel on my life, but I have never taken advantage of someone poor, or naive. I know a few very wealthy Winners. They have all the toys, but very few
friends, and even the third wife really doesn't give a chit
about them. Oh, once their kids realize how daddy/mommy
made all that money--the love turns to co-dependent despise
wrapped in a smile. That said, there are financial and personal heros--Wosniak comes to mind?
This is a popular misconception, they are interchangeable, being two words for the same concept of different origins. Some authors make minor distinctions, but they are not widely recognised.
Yes, whether or not you make the distinction, neither applies. I take it people on Hacker News don't dig Ellison. For all I know he is a sociopath. The above is not evidence for that.
I was told a variation of the original quote by a chess master at age < 8 (I loved chess as a kid and took some advanced classes). Thankfully, I don't recall ever acting on such advice.
That's not really true. There's a very serious collective action problem and limits on what humans (can) find genuinely attractive.
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.
We address some collective action problems, with varying degrees of success (certainly, some things we fail horribly at are collective action problems).
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.
"Larry was loathe to sell any of the company stock; he generally took a dim view of VCs and preferred to bootstrap"
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.
Kind of old-fashioned, don't you think? All that hard work and patience, building a solid product that people actually need. Much easier to win the VC/exit lottery with a Cat-Pictures-as-a-Service product.
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.
I've no idea why you've been downvoted. The numbers you point out seem to be accurate and not taking external investment does indeed leave you with more equity (as does sticking with the public company and the associated stock awards). I believe Microsoft was another company that didn't take much (if any) external investment.
It's worth pointing out that VC as an industry may not have been very mature around the time of these companies.
I'm not entirely sure I am being down-voted in this case.
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.
'he generally took a dim view of VCs and preferred to bootstrap"
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
After the first dotcom bubble just the opposite was praised arguably to the extreme. The answer is somewhere in the middle - focusing on profit from day 1 can stop you from doing things, but taking VC money from day 1 with no plan for revenue is also potentially fatal.
"Softwar" is an insightful book about Larry Ellison, written by someone who had access to Ellison. I do not want to chime in with my own opinion, but would suggest to read the book to learn a lot about the history of Oracle and Ellison.
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)
I kind of hate articles that start off by implicitly buying into the whole winners vs losers ethos. 'The DNA of a winner' - as if it was both an obvious fact that 'winners' and 'winning' are inherently superior to 'losers' and 'losing', and that it is an admirable goal to always be 'winning' all the time, in that totalizing way where you only win if others lose. And who doesn't want to be a 'winner,' right? I mean, who wants to be a pathetic loser like anyone who doesn't have 46 billion dollars? Certainly not me!
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
> The “50 people” was motivated by his dream that we could just have the very, very best developers in the world, and hardly any salespeople—it was just talk. I think he came to appreciate the sales culture later on.
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.
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.