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 More Quotes by Safra A. Catz More Quotes From 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 names clouds long 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 wall independent law 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 player numbers night In the finance world, we used to spend all of our time looking backwards, reporting on what happened. Can I book it? What are the numbers? Now it's about looking into the future. It's about planning and integration. The role of finance is now that of a partner in the business. Safra A. Catz partner future business time Let your customers be your partners; let your vendors be your employees. What's necessary in this transformation more than anything else is courage and a willingness to change. Safra A. Catz your transformation change courage 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 best you women leadership Microsoft does platform, not really infrastructure, and they do a little bit of Saas. Safra A. Catz does little infrastructure microsoft 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 never day colleagues business It's critical to simplify and run the business in such a way that resources are released to invest in your main business. Safra A. Catz your run business way At Oracle, silver medal is first loser. Safra A. Catz first medal silver loser 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 cloud citizen digital india SAP is a great company, but they have their work cut out for them if they want to compete in databases. Safra A. Catz great company want work The Indian market is potentially the largest market in the world with the leadership at both central and state level focused on leapfrogging into the future. Safra A. Catz focused future leadership world Common sense will always prevail. America will advance the agenda for the greatest minds. Safra A. Catz will always common-sense america Even in large corporations, smaller ideas may not get enough resources. Safra A. Catz get resources enough ideas We want to nurture startups on our platform, just like we did in the old world. Safra A. Catz old like want world 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 same name fusion coincidence 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 down decision yellow hands 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 job me lawyer work 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 fact depth strong business
