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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Oracle has grown and advanced because we've been consistently willing to cannibalize ourselves.

As much as people say they love change, they love it when you change - not when you want them to change. Even when it comes to processes they don't like, they're afraid of change.

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.

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.

We want to nurture startups on our platform, just like we did in the old world.

A core focus of our effort is based on the recognition that our customers have varying needs, and one of their most important needs is to have choice.

Managers used to say, 'I have a gut feeling.' Do you know what a gut feeling is for a professional manager? It's a pattern that they recognize. But if your system can recognize that pattern, if it's not just a couple of managers who know that pattern, then the system's gut feeling can tell you which way to go. That's really liberating.

Common sense will always prevail. America will advance the agenda for the greatest minds.

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?

I like to say it's an attitude of not just thinking outside the box, but not even seeing the box.

Digital India is the only way for citizen empowerment, which can bring government transparency and accountability to citizens.

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.

Most of the largest software companies in the world today are based on Oracle, and they were once startups.

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.

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.

The demographic of young people... in each hand is a phone, more powerful than a computer. It's a doorway to the digital nation, to education.

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

At Oracle, silver medal is first loser.