47 Inspiring Larry Ellison Quotes For Entrepreneurs

Tech entrepreneur and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison currently the 7th richest person in the world with a net worth of $52.2 billion (as of 2018).

Oracle is the 2nd largest software company and is used by the CIA, the government, and e-commerce. While people are completely unaware they’ve ever used Oracle, chances are if you’ve ever done any kind of online transaction or purchase in your life you probably have.

Being the second largest software is not enough for someone with the warrior like, competitive spirit of Ellison and he is on a mission to overtake Bill Gates and Microsoft as number one.

If fact its that competitive spirit and will to win that helped Larry Ellison win the America’s Cup.

Larry Ellison’s words of advice have inspired millions of entrepreneurs around the world so I’ve decided to put together the best Larry Ellison quotes to inspire you to success.

47 Larry Ellison Quotes

1. “I believe people have to follow their dreams – I did.” – Larry Ellison

2. “I have had all of the disadvantages required for success.” – Larry Ellison

3. “When you innovate, you’ve got to be prepared for people telling you that you are nuts.” – Larry Ellison

4. “Being first is more important to me [than earning money]. I have so much money. Whatever money is, it’s just a method of keeping score now. I mean, I certainly don’t need more money.” – Larry Ellison

5. “I think about the business all the time. Well I shouldn’t say all the time. I don’t think about it when I am wake-boarding. But even when I am on vacation, or on my boat; I am on email everyday. I am always prowling around the internet looking at what our competitors are doing.” – Larry Ellison

6. “Life’s a journey. It’s a journey about discovering limits.” – Larry Ellison

7. “Great achievers are driven, not so much by the pursuit of success, but by the fear of failure.” – Larry Ellison

8. “The most important aspect of my personality as far as determining my success goes; has been my questioning conventional wisdom, doubting experts and questioning authority. While that can be painful in your relationships with your parents and teachers, it’s enormously useful in life.” – Larry Ellison

9. “You have to believe in what you do in order to get what you want.” – Larry Ellison

10. “You have to act and act now.” – Larry Ellison

11. “If you do everything that everyone else does in business, you’re going to lose. The only way to really be ahead, is to ‘be different’.” – Larry Ellison

12. “I’m addicted to winning. The more you win, the more you want to win.” – Larry Ellison

13. “When I started Oracle, what I wanted to do was to create an environment where I would enjoy working. That was my primary goal. Sure, I wanted to make a living. I certainly never expected to become rich, certainly not this rich. I mean, rich does not even describe this. This is surreal. And it has nothing to do with money. I mean, you buy clothes with money, and cars. But I really wanted to work with people I enjoyed working with, who I admired and liked.” – Larry Ellison

14. “Taking care of your employees is extremely important and very, very visible.” – Larry Ellison

15. “When you live your life in different ways, it makes people around you become uncomfortable. So deal with it. They don’t know what you are going to do.” – Larry Ellison

16. “When you are the first person whose beliefs are different from what everyone else believes, you are basically saying, ‘I’m right and everyone else is wrong.’ That’s a very unpleasant position to be in. It’s at once exhilaration and the same time an invitation to be attacked.” – Larry Ellison

17. “You can’t spend as much money as I have, even if you try. I’ve been trying.” – Larry Ellison

18. “All you can do is every day, try to solve a problem and make your company better. You can’t worry about it, you can’t panic when you look at the stock market’s decline. You get frozen like a deer in the headlights. All you can do is all you can do.” – Larry Ellison

19. “The only way to get ahead is to find errors in conventional wisdom.” – Larry Ellison

20. “When I do something, it is all about self-discovery. I want to learn and discover my own limits.” – Larry Ellison

21. “There’s a wonderful saying that’s dead wrong. ‘Why did you climb the mountain?’ ‘I climbed the mountain because it was there.’ That’s utter nonsense…You climbed the mountain because you were there, and you were curious if you could do it. You wondered what it would be like.” – Larry Ellison

22. “Bill Gates wants people to think he’s Edison, when he’s really Rockefeller. Referring to Gates as the smartest man in America isn’t right… wealth isn’t the same thing as intelligence.” – Larry Ellison

23. “I am so disturbed by kids who spend all day playing video games.” – Larry Ellison

24. “See things in the present, even if they are in the future.” – Larry Ellison

25. “Act confident, even when you’re not.” – Larry Ellison

26. “If I were 21 years old, I would go into biotechnology or genetic engineering.” – Larry Ellison

27. “I think I am very goal orientated. I’d like to win the America’s cup. I’d like Oracle to be the number 1 software company in the world. I still think it is possible to beat Microsoft.” – Larry Ellison

28. “You cannot innovate by copying.” – Larry Ellison

29. “You realize that life is short and fragile; and when you are facing walls of water, you understand your own mortality can change and how quickly things could change.” – Larry Ellison

30. “Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing. Sure, there’s the talent, but there also has to be the will. Give me human will and the intense desire to win and it will trump talent every day of the week.” – Larry Ellison

31. “When people start telling you that you’re crazy, you just might be on to the most important innovation in your life.” – Larry Ellison

32. “I think after a certain amount, I’m going to give almost everything I have to charity. What else can you do with it? You can’t spend it, even if you try. I’ve been trying.” – Larry Ellison

33. “Because software is all about scale. The larger you are, the more profitable you are. If we sell twice as much as software, it doesn’t cost us twice as much to build that software. So the more customers you have, the more scale you have. The larger you are, the more profitable you are.” – Larry Ellison

34. “If your cash is about to run out, you have to cut your cash flow. CEOs have to make those decisions and live with them however painful they may be. You have to act and act now; and act in the best interest of the company as a whole, even if it means that some people in the company who are your best friends have to work somewhere else.” – Larry Ellison

35. “I’d prefer people read about Churchill and how he wasn’t overwhelmed by Nazi Germany. Amazing; that the morale of a country rested on one person’s shoulders. Extraordinary people carried that country through its darkest hours; truly inspirational. I suppose that’s my theme. Whether it’s a biography or a movie; whether it’s fictional or true, I’m inspired by people doing great things.” – Larry Ellison

36. “We have been doing things that are contrary; the things that people tell us won’t work from the beginning. In fact, the only way to get ahead is to find errors in conventional wisdom.” – Larry Ellison

37. “I love problem solving. How to make the closet bigger in the house I’m designing. I know, it sounds funny. SAP is twice as big. Now, there’s no growth–what do we do? It’s all problem solving. Designing, building, problem-solving.” – Larry Ellison

38. “I enjoy the competition and the process of learning as we compete. The whole thing is just fascinating. I don’t know what I’ll do when I retire. When I go sailing, I look around … anyone want to race? I just love competing as opposed to just going out and watching the sunset.” – Larry Ellison

39. “It’s my job for Oracle, the number two software company in the world; to become the number one software company in the world. My job is to build better than the competition, sell those products in the marketplace and eventually supplant Microsoft and move from being number two to number one.” – Larry Ellison

40. “In some ways, getting away from the headquarters and having a little time to reflect allows you to find errors in your strategy. You get to rethink things. Often, that helps me correct a mistake that I made or someone else is about to make.” – Larry Ellison

41. “The things that caused problems for me in school are the same things that help me succeed in the world.” – Larry Ellison

42. “Think of it as you want it, not as it is!” – Larry Ellison

43. “It’s fascinating as we continue to innovate and lead the way in both the application space and the database space. In the very beginning, people said you couldn’t make relational databases fast enough to be commercially viable. I thought we could, and we were the first to do it. But we took tremendous abuse until IBM said, “Oh yeah, this stuff is good.”” – Larry Ellison

44. “If an open source product gets good enough, we’ll simply take it. So the great thing about open source is nobody owns it – a company like Oracle is free to take it for nothing, include it in our products and charge for support, and that’s what we’ll do. So it is not disruptive at all – you have to find places to add value. Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane. We don’t have to fight open source, we have to exploit open source.” – Larry Ellison

45. “Winning is not enough. All others must lose.” – Larry Ellison

46. “…Don’t mistake any of this for altruism…Fear and greed just doesn’t work. If you want to be successful, quality and service just works better.” – Larry Ellison

47. “Both my mother and I were determined that we weren’t going to stay on welfare. We always worked toward doing better, toward having a better life. We never had any doubts that we would.” – Larry Ellison

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