Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Oracle Corporation, the world's leading enterprise software company. A billionaire many times over, Ellison is one of the world wealthiest individuals. In 2000, he was estimated to be the richest man in the world. He achieved this success from the most unpromising beginnings. Born to an unmarried teenage mother, he was given up for adoption at the age of nine months and raised by his mother's aunt and uncle in a two-bedroom apartment on the South Side of Chicago. Although he showed an early aptitude for math and science, he dropped out of two colleges without completing a degree. Moving from Chicago to Berkeley, California, he managed to support himself as a computer technician for a series of banks and insurance companies. In 1977, he and two associates founded the company that became Oracle. With a core expertise in the undeveloped field of relational database management systems, the company grew rapidly. Under Ellison's leadership, Oracle rode out the collapse of the high-tech bubble in 2000. In the depths of the next recession, Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion. Oracle is now the world's largest business software company, supplying all 100 of the Fortune Global 100. In this podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 1997 Summit in Baltimore, Maryland, Ellison urges the Academy's student delegates to question the conventional wisdom of authorities and experts. Flaws in conventional wisdom, he suggests, present ideal opportunities for the innovator and the entrepreneur.