LARRY PAGE

Lawrence Edward Page, more popularly known as Larry Page, is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and the co-founder of Google, the largest internet company in the world. Page was born in March 1973 in Michigan to computer scientists Carl and Gloria Page. Carl Page earned his Ph.D. in computer science in 1965 when computer technology was still in its infancy, whereas Gloria Page taught at Michigan State University. Page was raised without any specific religious beliefs. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering with honors from the University of Michigan, and his Master of Science in computer science from Stanford University.

Because Page’s parents were one of the earliest computer scientists, he was exposed to computer gadgetry and information from a very early age. This also piqued his interest in the subject very early on. He would often take machines and gadgets apart to see how they operated. After earning both his Bachelors and Masters in computer science, Page decided to enroll in the Ph.D. program at Stanford University. Here, he thrived under the mentorship of his supervisor Terry Winograd. He also met his future business partner, Sergey Brin. They originally met during orientation, where Brin (who had already been in the program for two years) had offered to show new students around, one of whom was Page.

For his dissertation, Page wanted to explore the World Wide Web, still a new phenomenon at that time. More specifically, he wanted to understand its mathematical properties and find out which and how many web pages link to a specific page. A combined research project by Page and Brin titled “Backrub” led to the development of an algorithm called “PageRank”. The duo realized that using this algorithm they could develop a search engine much more powerful than any that were present at the time. The original version of their search engine is still available on the Stanford University website.

Page and Brin registered the domain name Google.com in 1997. After applying to family and friends for loans, the duo managed to raise $1 million and officially incorporated their business as “Google, Inc” in 1998. The name Google is based on the term “googol” which is a very large number written as 1 followed by a hundred zeros. The company grew from a small start up in a friend’s apartment in Menlo Park, to a multi storey complex in Mountain View, California known as “Googleplex”. Google has time and again been named one of the best companies to work for. When it went public in 2004, Page and Brin became billionaires overnight. They initially ran Google as co-presidents, until 2001 when Eric Schmidt took over as CEO. In 2011, however, Page went back to being the CEO, while Schmidt assumed an executive management position. The founders still own a chunk of shares but their compensation is officially $1 per year, which ties their compensation directly to the company’s performance.

Page is passionate about environmental causes, as evidenced by the launch of “google.org” – the charitable arm of Google. The company invests in renewable energy and development of hybrid cars. Page has won numerous awards and honors including an honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan, being elected as a fellow of the Marconi Foundation at Columbia University and being listed as one of the top 100 innovators in the world by the MIT Technology Review TR100. Page is married to a research scientist Lucinda Southworth, and the couple have two children. His current net worth is estimated to be US $48.8 billion.

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SERGEY BRIN

American  computer scientist and entrepreneur Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin is the co-founder of Google, the largest internet company in the world. Brin was born in Russia in 1973 and his family suffered from financial trouble before arriving in America. They moved to the US when he was six years old to avoid the unfair persecution of Jews in Russia. Brin’s father wanted to be an astronomer but ended up as professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland (Sergey Brin’s alma mater) and his mother is a researcher at a NASA Space Center.

After graduating from University of Maryland with honors in 1993, Brin began his graduate studies at Stanford in the field of computer science on a graduate fellowship he received from the National Science Foundation. Brin met Larry Page, the co-founder of their future company, during the orientation at Stanford. After a while they became close friends, especially since they were able to intellectually challenge each other.

Brin’s area of interest was data mining and together with page, he co-authored a paper entitled “The Anatomy of a Large Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine“. After putting their heads together, they began working on their theoretical project in earnest and bought a number of low priced computers which they would keep in their dormitory rooms. Using these computers, they began to build a search engine which quickly surpassed even Stanford’s computer search system. After working together for a while, in 1998 the pair decided to put their PhDs on hold in order to take their extraordinary idea to market.

At that time they had no money for product development or establishing a company, so they borrowed from friends, family and professors. With the money they had collected, they rented out a garage in Menlo Park to set up their headquarters and bought some servers to begin working. They were in the process of filing the paperwork to incorporate their company but as yet their company had not been formally established. With another $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim (the co-founder of Sun Microsystems) the duo officially incorporated their company as “Google, Inc” which was named after the mathematical term “googol”.

Ever since the incorporation of his company in 1998, Brin and Page have had unprecedented global success. Google Inc’s motto is Brin and Page’s combined vision and that is to make information universally accessible to everyone. Their contribution to enhancing the spread of global knowledge has been so great, that “The Economist” magazine even compared it to the modern equivalent of the invention of the mechanical printing press by Johannes Gutenberg. Google, Inc is now the largest Internet company in the world and Brin and Page own 16% of it.

In 2007, Sergey Brin married a biotech analyst named Anne Wojcicki. Brin’s wife is actively interested in spreading health information and the couple co-founded a company named “23andMe” that is devoted to research about the human genome project. They have a son (born 2008) and a daughter (born 2011) but the couple separated in 2013. Brin’s mother is suffering from Parkinson’s disease and is being treated at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, to which Brin himself has made a donation. Brin and Page have won numerous awards and honors, including being named the fifth most powerful people in the world by Forbes magazine in 2009. As of March 2018, Brin is the 13th richest person in the world with a personal wealth of US $47.5 billion.

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JACK MA

Jack Ma is the founder of the E-commerce giant Ali baba and is a stakeholder at Alipay, its sister company which is an e-payment portal. He is now officially the richest man in China with an estimatedJack Ma is the founder of the E-commerce giant Alibaba and is a stakeholder at Alipay, its sister company which is an e-payment portal. He is now officially the richest man in China with an estimated net worth of $25 Billion, on the back of the recent world record $150 Billion IPO filing of his company. Given all of this, Jack Ma only holds a 7.8% stake in Alibaba and a 50% stake in Alipay. Alibaba and Jack Ma, although are not household names out of China, you must know that Alibaba is worth more than Facebook, and processes goods more than eBay and Amazon combined!

This might be beginning to seem like the story of an arrogant and rich billionaire who hasn’t seen the dark. But don’t be mistaken by the numbers that you see above, they can fool anyone. Although as simple as it may sound, Jack Ma has had it hard in his life to get to where he is today. A true rags-to-riches story and definitely a one which will inspire you even in your darkest days.

Jack Ma Childhood

Jack Ma is one of those self-made billionaires with humble beginnings. Jack Ma was born in Hangzhou, located in the south-eastern part of China. He was born and raised along with an elder brother and a younger sister during the rise of communist China and its isolation from the Western regions. His parents were traditional Musicians-Storytellers and they didn’t make enough to be even considered as middle class during those days.

Former US president Richard Nixon’s visit to Hangzhou in 1972 improved the situation of tourism in his home-town and Jack wanted to make the most of this opportunity. Jack always wanted to learn English as a kid and he spent his early mornings riding on his bike to a nearby park, giving English tours to foreigners for free. It was then he met a foreign girl who gave him the nickname ‘Jack’ for his name was hard to spell for her.

Jack, after graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in English, worked as an English teacher at Hangzhou Dianzi University with a pay of $12 a month! Now here comes the part where it gets more interesting, even before he has received that degree and became an English teacher.

Rejected, But Not a Failure.

Jack Ma as an extremely lucky bloke who just became a billionaire in a snap. But it is safe to know that Rejections are synonymous with Jack Ma. You wouldn’t believe the number of times this man has been rejected and failed.

In his early childhood, Jack Ma Failed in his Primary School examinations, not once, but Twice!  He Failed Thrice during his Middle School exams. When applying to universities after his High school, Jack failed the entrance exams thrice, before finally joining Hangzhou Normal University. He even applied and wrote to Harvard University ten times about being admitted – and got rejected each time. This was only during his education!

During and after his Bachelor’s degree Jack tried and failed to get a job at a multitude of places. After spending three years to get into a University, Jack failed to land a job after applying to them 30 times! He recollects in his interview, “When KFC came to China, 24 people went for the job.  Twenty-three people were accepted.  I was the only guy who wasn’t.” He also one of the 5 applicants to a job in Police force and was the only one getting rejected after being told, “No, you’re no good.”

Also, on his Entrepreneurial undertakings, Jack Ma went on to fail on two of his initial ventures. But that didn’t stop him in any way of dreaming bigger.

Down, but not Out!

In one of his interviews, when asked about his rejections, this is what he had to say, “Well, I think we have to get used to it.  We’re not that good.” Overcoming the pain of rejections and treating rejections as opportunities to learn and grow was what Jack Ma made of it.

After finally coming to terms with all of his rejections and failures, Jack Ma visited US in 1995, for a Government undertaking project related to the building of highways. It was then that Jack Ma was first introduced to the Internet and Computers. Computers were pretty rare in China then, given the high costs associated with them and Internet or E-mails were non-existent. The first word he searched on the Mosaic browser was ‘Beer’, and it popped out results from different countries, but signs of China anywhere. He then searched ‘China’ and not a single result popped out! He decided it was time for China and its people to get on the Internet.

Finally, after persuading 17 of his other friends to invest and join him in his new e-commerce startup – Alibaba, the company began from his apartment. Initially, Alibaba didn’t had a single penny in investment from outside investors, but they later raised $20 Millio from SoftBank and another $5 Million from Goldman Sachs in 1999. Building trust among the people of China that an online system of payment and package transfers is safe was the biggest challenge Jack Ma and Alibaba faced, a challenge that Jack will cherish for his lifetime.

Having started his first successful company at the age of 31 and even after never having written a single line of code or selling something to anyone, Jack Ma runs one of the biggest E-commerce networks in the world. The company went on to grow rapidly, expanding all across the world, quickly growing out of its China shell. Only second to Walmart now in terms of sales per year, Alibaba has become the E-commerce giant that Jack Ma has envisioned for it. on the back of the recent world record $150 Billion IPO filing of his company. Given all of this, Jack Ma only holds a 7.8% stake in Alibaba and a 50% stake in Alipay. Alibaba and Jack Ma, although are not household names out of China, you must know that Alibaba is worth more than Facebook, and processes goods more than eBay and Amazon combined!

This might be beginning to seem like the story of an arrogant and rich billionaire who hasn’t seen the dark. But don’t be mistaken by the numbers that you see above, they can fool anyone. Although as simple as it may sound, Jack Ma has had it hard in his life to get to where he is today. A true rags-to-riches story and definitely a one which will inspire you even in your darkest days.

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WARREN BUFFETT

Warren Buffett, in full Warren Edward Buffett, (born August 30, 1930, Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.), American businessman and philanthropist, widely considered the most successful investor of the 20th century, having defied prevailing investment trends to amass a personal fortune of more than $60 billion.

Known as the “Oracle of Omaha,” Buffett was the son of U.S. Rep. Howard Homan Buffett from Nebraska. After graduating from the University of Nebraska (B.S., 1950), he studied with Benjamin Graham at the Columbia University School of Business (M.S., 1951). In 1956 Buffett returned to Omaha and in 1965 took majority control of the textile manufacturer Berkshire Hathaway Inc., turning it into his primary investment vehicle. From the 1960s through the ’90s the major stock averages rose by roughly 11 percent annually, but Berkshire Hathaway’s publicly traded shares gained about 28 percent per year. Though Buffett’s success with Berkshire Hathaway made him one of the world’s wealthiest men, he eschewed lavish spending and criticized governmental policies and taxation that favoured the rich over the middle or lower classes.

In June 2006 Buffett announced that he planned to donate more than 80 percent of his wealth to a handful of private charitable foundations. The main recipient was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—created by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife—which focused on issues of world health and education. Gates and Buffett had maintained a close friendship since the early 1990s, and the foundation was slated to receive Buffett’s funds in increments that would eventually raise its assets to an estimated $60 billion. The other organizations receiving donations were those run by Buffett’s three children and the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named for his late wife, which focused on women’s reproductive rights and funded college scholarship programs.

During the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–08, Buffett made a number of deals that, though questioned at the time, proved highly profitable. In September 2008 he invested $5 billion in the U.S.-based bank holding company Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., and the following month Berkshire Hathaway purchased $3 billion in General Electric Company (GE) preferred stock. In November 2009 Buffett announced that Berkshire was buying the railroad company Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation for about $26 billion; the investment group already owned approximately 23 percent of the railroad. In 2011 Buffett was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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BERNARD ARNAULT

We need not emphasize on how the French have been the face of the luxury fashion brands from since the 19^thcentury. Among those Frenchmen who were responsible for the fashion revolution, Bernard Arnault stands out for the reasons obvious. The man who owns Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Givenchy and Dom Perignon, some of the most precious French luxury fashion houses, is someone whose story is definitely worth knowing.

It is probably a given that someone like that would be incredibly rich, because Bernard Arnault also happens to be the 13^th richest man in the world. Also for the record, he is the richest man of France and one of the richest men in the whole of Europe.

Arnault must have had business in his blood, what with his father Jean Arnault being a businessman who owned a civil engineering company. After getting done with his engineering in the year 1971, Bernard Arnault, as expected, joined his father’s business.  Soon after, he brought about some remarkable changes to the establishment. He convinced his father to sell the company and from there on, they focused entirely on real estate, which was a wise move back then.

EARLY LIFE

After graaduating from the Lycée Maxence Van Der Meersch in Roubaix, Arnault was admitted to the École Polytechnique in Palaiseau, from which he graduated with an engineering degree in 1971.

His father, Jean Leon Arnault, a graduate of École Centrale Paris, was a manufacturer and the owner of the civil engineering company, Ferret-Savinel.

CAREER

He joined his father’s company after graduating from college. He started planning for the company’s expansion and growth and in 1976 he was successful in convincing his father to liquidate the construction division of the company and invest the proceeds in a more lucrative business.

The Arnaults received 40 million French francs from the liquidation of the construction division which they invested in real estate business, which was then a booming sector. Now renamed Ferinel, the company became a very successful one with a specialty in holiday accommodation.

Bernard Arnault became the director of company development in 1974, and was named the CEO in 1977. He succeeded his father as president of the company in 1979.

The French Socialists came to power in 1981, forcing Arnault and his family to move to the United States. Being the astute businessman that he was, he prospered there too, developing condominiums in Palm Beach, Florida. Eventually he began to build a U.S. branch of his family’s property business.

The political scenario in his native France changed in 1983. The French Socialists switched to a more conservative economic course and Arnault decided to return home.

The enterprising businessman saw a lucrative opportunity when the textile firm, Boussac Saint-Frères, went bankrupt. The textile empire comprised several businesses, including the couture house of Christian Dior. Arnault collaborated with Antoine Bernheim, managing partner of the investment firm of Lazard Fréres who arranged the financing for Arnault's acquisition of Boussac.
Arnault invested $15 million of his own money, and Bernheim helped him to raise the reminder of the reported $80 million purchase price of Boussac Saint-Frères. Upon this acquisition, Arnault sold most of the company’s assets, retaining only the prestigious Christian Dior brand and Le Bon Marché department store. He became the CEO of Dior in 1985.

After selling off most of the assets of Boussac, Arnault gained $400 million in the process. In 1987, he was invited to invest in LVMH by the company’s chairman, Henri Racamier. Arnault chose to invest through a joint venture with Guinness PLC that held 24% of LVMH's shares. Over the next couple of years, he continued to buy more shares in the company, spending several hundred millions in the process.

By January 1989, Arnault had managed to gain control over 43.5% of the shares of LVMH with 35% of the voting rights. He was then unanimously elected chairman of the executive management board.

After taking over LVMH, he fired several of the company’s top executives and chose to recruit new talent to revitalize the company. He was a tough taskmaster and was known for his inclination to quickly terminate employees who did not deliver according to his expectations.

He set about implementing an ambitious plan of growth and expansion of his businesses and acquired several other companies over the 1990s, including the perfume firm Guerlain (1994), Loewe (1996), Marc Jacobs (1997), Sephora (1997), and Thomas Pink (1999).

   AWARDS

• Commandeur of the Légion d'Honneur (10 February 2007)
• Grand Officer of the Légion d'Honneur (14 July 2011)
• The Woodrow Wilson Award for Global Corporate Citizenship (2011)
• Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (2012)
• The Museum of Modern Art's David Rockefeller Award (March 2014)

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REED HASTINGS

Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr. (born October 8, 1960) is an American entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is the co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Netflix and serves on the boards of Facebook and a number of nonprofit organizations.A former member of the California State Board of Education, Hastings is an advocate for education reform through charter schools.

EARLY LIFE
He was born as Wilmot Reed Hastings, Jr. on October 8, 1960, in Boston, Massachusetts to Joan Amory and Wilmot Reed Hastings. His father was an attorney for the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Reed graduated from a private school in Cambridge following which he joined the Bowdoin College where he studied mathematics. He also served in the Marine Corps officer training through their Platoon Leader Class in 1981.He graduated in 1983 and joined the Peace Corps—a volunteer program run by the United States government which sends volunteers to developing nations of the world. He went to Swaziland and taught high school mathematics from 1983 to 1985. He later stated that his experiences in Africa helped hone his entrepreneurial skills and risk taking abilities.He joined the Stanford University upon returning from the Peace Corps and earned his Master's degree in computer science in 1988.

CAREER

He embarked on a career as a software developer and accepted a job at Adaptive Technology. There he worked under Audrey MacLean, the CEO at that time, from whom he learned the value of focus. He quit this job in 1991.

Reed Hastings was an entrepreneur at heart and had always wanted to start his own company. Along with Raymond Peck and Mark Box, he formed his first company, Pure Software in October 1991. The company, which produced products to troubleshoot software, grew rapidly over the ensuing years.

However, the growing success of the company proved to be a challenge for Hastings as he realized that he was not prepared to manage such a rapidly growing company. An engineer by profession, he found the responsibilities of being the CEO quite daunting.The company went public in 1995 and Pure Software merged with Atria to form Pure Atria Corporation in 1996. However, some unforeseen issues cropped up after the merger and the combined company, Pure Atria, was acquired by Rational Software in 1997.Reed Hastings considered his experience with Pure Software to be a vital lesson in his entrepreneurial career. He then collaborated with Marc Randolph to co-found Netflix in 1997. Netflix was conceived as a media rental service which offered flat rate rental-by-mail to customers in the United States.By 1998 Netflix had started mail-order DVD operations. Initially customers were allowed to rent each DVD for a seven-day period. This system was changed in 1999—now subscribers could pay a set monthly fee to rent an unlimited number of DVDs.The company grew steadily over the years, and Hastings became known for the innovative management strategies he implemented in Netflix’s administration. He offered extraordinarily high packages to employees in order to attract the best talents and was also quick to fire those who were not putting in their best.

He employed aggressive expansion strategies and expanded Netflix through movie studio partnerships and marketing campaigns that emphasized the company’s catalog of indie films, documentaries, and other movies not easily available through other services. Netflix shipped its billionth DVD in 2007 and today it has more than 65 million subscribers. He joined the board of Microsoft in 2007 and served there until 2012. He is also a director of the board of Facebook since June 2011.

ACHIEVEMENTS

The Henry Crown Leadership Award was presented to Reed Hastings in 2014. Each year the award is given to an outstanding leader whose achievements reflect the high standards of honor, integrity, industry, and philanthropy that characterized the life and career of industrialist and philanthropist Henry Crown.

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LARRY ELLISON

Lawrence Joseph Ellison (born August 17, 1944) is an American businessman, entrepreneur, and philanthropist who is co-founder, executive chairman and chief technology officer of Oracle corporation.

 Larry Ellison is one of the richest people in the world with the net worth of $55.2 billion as of March 2017 according to the Forbes World’s Billionaires list.

Ellison has donated up to 1% of his wealth and is taking part in The Giving Pledge commitment campaign.

Larry Elison takes part in yachting competitions with his Oracle Team USA, he is a licensed aircraft pilot, and he enjoys playing tennis and guitar. Larry Ellison is a self-made entrepreneur and billionaire who achieved his success through trials and errors. His parents did not have a penny, and during all his life he has been making up for the miserable childhood.

The distinctive personality traits of Larry Ellison are persistence, strategic vision, and passion to innovations.

EARLY LIFE

Larry Ellison was born in New York City, to an unwed Jewish mother. His biological father was an Italian American United States Army Air Corps pilot. After Ellison contracted pneumonia at the age of nine months, his mother gave him to her aunt and uncle for adoption.He did not meet his biological mother again until he was 48.

Ellison moved to Chicago's South Shore, then a middle-class neighborhood. He remembers his adoptive mother as warm and loving, in contrast to his austere, unsupportive, and often distant adoptive father, who adopted the name Ellison to honor his point of entry into the United StatEllis Island. Louis Ellison was a government employee who had made a small fortune in Chicago real estate, only to lose it during the Great Depression.

Although Ellison was raised in a Reform Jewish home by his adoptive parents, who attended synagogue regularly, he remained a religious skeptic. Ellison states: "While I think I am religious in one sense, the particular dogmas of Judaism are not dogmas I subscribe to. I don't believe that they are real. They're interesting stories. They're interesting mythology, and I certainly respect people who believe these are literally true, but I don't. I see no evidence for this stuff." At age thirteen, Ellison refused to have a bar mitzvah celebration. Ellison says that his love affair with Israel is not connected to religious sentiments, but rather due to the innovative spirit of Israelis in the technology sector.

Ellison left the Universafter his second year, not taking his final exams, because his adoptive mother had just died. After spending a summer in Northern California, he attended the University of Chicago for one term, where he first encountered computer design. In 1966, aged 22, he moved to Northern California.

Early Career

Larry Ellison found his first job at Amdahl Corporation, a technology company founded in 1970 by Gene Amdahl in Sunnyvale, California. At the beginning of the 1970s, Larry Ellison worked for an electronics company Amtex, founded by Alexander M. Poniatoff in 1944 that faced stiff competition with Sony Corporation. At Amtex, he mostly worked on a database for the CIA, which he called “Oracle.”

In 1977, Larry Ellison met Bob Miner met at Ampex, who was Larry’s supervisor then. However, Bob Miner quitted Ampex soon, and on June 16, 1977, he co-founded a company called, Software Development Laboratories (SDL), together with Bruce Scott and Ed Oates with the investment of $800. A few months later Larry Ellison joined their enterprise as a business partner and invested $1,200 into the firm.

Later, Ed Oates introduced Miner and Ellison to a paper by Edgar F. Codd on the relational model for database management called “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks,” and Larry Ellison got inspired by it. Soon they started working on the database management system (DBMS). Companies used it for the distributed storage of the lists of clients, equipment data, financial notes, transaction information, correspondence, legal documents and so on.

Oracle Systems Corporation

In 1979, SDL was renamed into Relational Software Inc., and in 1982 officially became Oracle Systems Corporation after its flagship product, the Oracle RDBMS, which was an object-relational database management system. The initial release of Oracle RDBMS was issued under v2.0; there was no Oracle v1.0 as Ellison was sure that no one would buy version 1.

According to Ellison, the Oracle RDBMS could do unbelievable things at that time: to sort the best performing supermarkets from the whole supermarket chain or to sort and filter bestseller goods and products. Oracle RDBMS was able to process a vast amount of data, which became very alluring for the government and big business. There were only eight employees (including three co-founders: Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates) and the company revenue reached less than $1 million.

Starting from 1974, IBM Corporation was also working on the database products based on Codd’s theories at IBM’s San Jose Research Laboratory. They developed IBM System R, and Ellison wanted Oracle products to be compatible with it. However, IBM executives refused to share System R’s code.

By 1982, the revenue of Oracle reached $2.5 million with 75 micro- and mini- clients on board. Larry Ellison invested 25 percent of the revenue into R&D during 1982 to develop a commercially available and portable Oracle RDBMS, based on the C programming language compiler. Oracle’s contracts with government agencies had provided enough funds to let their team focus on the commercially viable products that would help them to occupy some market share from IBM and other IT companies of those times.

In 1983, Oracle RDBMS of v.3 became a commercially accessible and could be installed on all types of operating systems such as mainframes, workstations, personal computers, microcomputers, etc. Ellison was right, and Oracle’s investments paid off by doubling company’s revenue to $5 million. In 1985, the company’s revenue sales reached $23 million, and in 1986, the revenue sales reached $55 million. Oracle focussed on the leading clients such as government agencies and largest international companies in the automotive, aerospace, pharmaceutical and manufacture industries.

IPO

On March 12, 1986, Oracle Systems Corporation initiated its IPO on the NASDAQ (ORCL) stock exchange with the initial cost per share of $15 that increased to $20.75 at the close of the trading day by selling 2.1 million shares and raising $31.5 million.

Here is an interesting fact. You may question: how much are 100 Oracle shares worth today? Here is the answer: Oracle has had six 2/1 splits and four 3/2 splits. It means each initial share has grown to 324 shares. So 32,400 shares at $42.69 (cost per share as of March 08, 2017) equals $1,383,156.

After the IPO, Larry Ellison set up marketing subsidiaries in 17 countries to trade Oracle’s products in more than 35 countries. Soon Oracle introduced the SQL Star software that could process and retrieve data stored across the network’s computer systems.

Oracle’s Crisis

In 1990, Oracle faced its first crisis and finished the year with a negative net income and started losing money. The market value of the company was reduced by 80%, and it seemed as if the company was on the brink of bankruptcy. The same year, Oracle dismissed 10% of its employees, about 400 people. The main reason for the crisis was due to the aggressive marketing strategy. The sales team urged prospective clients to purchase all of the possible Oracle software at once by booking the value of the future license sales in the current quarter. As a result, such actions increased their bonuses, but when the scheduled sales failed to materialize afterward, this became a big issue. Being a public company, Oracle incurred additional costs to resolve class-action lawsuits from the shareholders regarding its overstated earnings. It was an incredible business fault, according to Larry Ellison. As a result, the company had to pay $24 million to its shareholders.

At the beginning of the 1990s, IBM had the biggest market share in mainframe relational database market with its database products such as DB2 and SQL/DS. While other competitors such as Sybase, Oracle, Informix, and Microsoft used the opportunity to occupy the niche for a relational database on UNIX and Windows and dominate mid-range systems and microcomputers.

From 1990 to 1993, Sybase was the fastest-developing company, and Oracle remained behind. But after three years of biggest sales and significant mergers, Sybase sold all rights of its software to Microsoft Corporation, which now positions its software under the name “SQL Server.” In 1994, Sybase was absorbed by Informix that became the most prominent rival of Oracle.

The database competition between Informix CEO Phil White and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison headlined Silicon Valley news for three years till 1997 when Informix reported significant earnings restatements and profit shortfall. Phil White got into prison for such corporate fraud activity, and IBM absorbed Informix in 2001 (Sybase programmers and code completed IBM’s DB2 software).

In 1997, Larry Ellison was included in Apple Computer’s Board of Directors after Steve Jobs returned to the company. Ellison served a director of Apple Computer for five years, and on September 20, 2002, he resigned from this position.

Larry Ellison commented: “I will continue to offer my advice to Steve and the executive management team at Apple, but my schedule does not currently allow me to attend enough of the formal board meetings to warrant a role as a director.”

Merger and Acquisitions

Larry Ellison is a great strategist. In his biography, he made a lot of strategic steps to the leading positions in the market to create a bigger software maker.

In October 1994, Oracle acquired a relational database management system (RDBMS), called Rdb division from DEC. It was the first official acquisition by Oracle.

On April 29, 2008, Oracle Corporation bought BEA Systems, Inc. for $8.5 billion. It was a company specialized in enterprise infrastructure software products. Larry Ellison was very determined in making Oracle Corporation number one in the computer technology industry and did all his best to catch up and surpass the giants in the software market.

On January 27, 2010, Larry Ellison agreed to buy Sun Microsystems, Inc. for $7 billion; that was one of the biggest acquisitions by Oracle. Once the deal has been finished, Oracle began to sell technologies, using new database and services based on Sun Microsystems technologies.

However, IBM and SAP remain Oracle’s main competitors.

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