We all get to decide how much like Larry Ellison we want to be but you cannot deny the success and related success of companies and people he has/had a hand in from Oracle to Netsuite to Saleforce to Tom Siebel.

A post on FoundRead sums up two of Larry’s rules the first relating to start-ups and the second related to work focus:

1.  Eat what you kill.  Or at least act like you killed it.

This is the other people’s money (OPM) trap and this hits at the core of treating the money you raise from others like it’s yours and that it may be all you get.

2.  Are you building it or selling it?

I like this one.  You do one of two things in a company – help build it or help sell it.  If you do something else, you won’t do it for long.

“Marketers are sales people. If they think of themselves as anything else, they’re not doing their job.”