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The Great Gatsby
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Safra A. Catz Quotes

First of all, we have infrastructure as a service, which Amazon has; we have platform as a service, which Microsoft has; we have software as a service; we have applications. Nobody has everything except us. We also have data as a service.

– Safra A. Catz

My greatest inspiration is my mother, the bravest person I ever knew. She overcame incredible odds, worked while raising two kids, and made it all look incredibly simple. Even in her final days succumbing to cancer, she fought like a champion.

– Safra A. Catz

What we need to do is run our business. We need to come up with a value prop that is so compelling that customers have to go for it.

– Safra A. Catz

At Oracle, silver medal is first loser.

– Safra A. Catz

Oracle is obsessed with security. It’s an absolute requirement for all our products. The real security issue is when customers take older products that were not built for the Internet, and kind of rack them and put them on the Internet.

– Safra A. Catz

I literally went down to my car and thought, ‘Oh my God, SAP bought Concur – maybe tomorrow they’ll buy Dairy Queen.’ It was the best thing that happened to me on the day I was named CEO of Oracle.

– Safra A. Catz

In 1986, Microsoft and Oracle went public within a day of each other, and I recall telling one of my colleagues that the software business will become big. So I started working with software companies in the mid-’80s and never turned back.

– Safra A. Catz

Hopefully in the future, generational challenges will be measured by achievement, not gender.

– Safra A. Catz

My dream job was to work in an ice cream shop. Two weeks and five pounds later, I realized it wasn’t for me. For many years, I had planned to be a corporate lawyer. As luck would have it, other than a summer internship, I didn’t end up doing that either.

– Safra A. Catz

Hardware ultimately is a scale game, and it’s a differentiation game. If you are literally selling products that are completely undifferentiated, like x86 servers, why would anybody pay you for that?

– Safra A. Catz

The most significant barrier to female leadership is the actual lack of females in leadership. The best advice I can give to women is to go out and start something, ideally their own businesses. If you can’t see a path for leadership within your own company, go blaze a trail of your own.

– Safra A. Catz

We got bigger, much scarier competitors. We ended up with Microsoft, a company with all the money in the world, the way I look at those guys. And IBM, another company that, historically, dwarfed us.

– Safra A. Catz

The way deals are done, every idea is looked at 50 different ways. Now, the market continues to change all the time. And we are always looking at everything in evaluating how it fits with our strategy.

– Safra A. Catz

Digital India is about empowering the citizen – it’s mobile, it’s cloud, it’s storage – we are in all those areas.

– Safra A. Catz

Oracle is my second job ever that did not involve waitressing. But I still have my waitress apron just in case this does not work out. It’s just that I fell in love with software when I was programming in college. When I was an investment banker, there were mostly mainframe companies and very few software ones.

– Safra A. Catz

When we do acquisitions, we decide what we want. We decide what fills a hole. And if the price is too high, our alternative is the $5 billion we spend on R&D every year. We’re not well-known for overpaying, because at Oracle we always have an alternative.

– Safra A. Catz

It is not a coincidence that Fusion middleware and applications have the same name. We knew what we needed it to be.

– Safra A. Catz

The worst decision, hands down, was wearing bright yellow when I was 9 months pregnant. I looked like a bumble bee. I have not worn yellow since.

– Safra A. Catz

My best decision was to choose to go to Wall Street over law. I learned a lot and focused on the expanding software industry at a time when the independent software industry was just beginning.

– Safra A. Catz

Microsoft does platform, not really infrastructure, and they do a little bit of Saas.

– Safra A. Catz

Netweaver was going to be the number one middleware player in the world. We heard about Netweaver day and night. Oracle became number one. No one talks about Netweaver.

– Safra A. Catz

SAP is a great company, but they have their work cut out for them if they want to compete in databases.

– Safra A. Catz

If you are in this business long enough, you hear about a thousand things that are going to kill you. Open source? Yeah, we are not dead yet. Cloud? That’s not new; it’s a new name.

– Safra A. Catz

It is absolutely critical for competitiveness in the United States for us to really raise the bar in education, especially in math, in science, in technology.

– Safra A. Catz

The fact is that our business is fundamentally really strong. We have a platform and a depth that no one in the tech industry has. This means we have competitors at every layer.

– Safra A. Catz

I learn from Larry Ellison every day. I’ve said this before: how is it to work with someone who thinks out of the box? Larry doesn’t see the walls at all; he does not see the box. He is an absolute, true visionary. And to be honest, I always find myself in a box! I’m comfy in my box. I’ve furnished it; it’s lovely.

– Safra A. Catz