"Mark was my close and irreplaceable friend, and trusted colleague," Ellison wrote to the announcement posted on Hurd's personal website. "Mark leaves his beloved wife Paula, two wonderful daughters who were the joy of his life, and his much larger extended family here at Oracle who came to love him."
Secret passages and skipped meals: Oracle's CEO Mark Hurd gave us a rare peek at what it really takes to run a $37 billion company
On Friday, October 18, 2016, Oracle founder and chairman Larry Ellison announced that Mark Hurd had passed away at age 62. He had been ill and was forced take a leave of absence from his job as CEO of Oracle last month, a role he shared with CEO Safra Catz.
In 2016, Hurd invited Business Insider's chief tech correspondent, Julie Bort, to spend a day with him watching him work. Bort ran after him during one of his biggest days of the year, when he met with customers, analysts and gave keynote speeches at Oracle's annual, massive tech conference. We are republishing that article, unedited, in its entirety.
Oracle had $37 billion in revenue that year. It has since grown its top line to $39 billion.
With $37 billion in annual revenue, Oracle is one of the world's biggest tech companies. And every year, tens of thousands of customers, partners, industry analysts, and journalists descend upon San Francisco for the company's OpenWorld tech conference.
It is a pinnacle week for the company's top execs its two famous CEOs, Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, and its even more famous founder, Larry Ellison, who stepped down from the CEO role in 2014 to become executive chairman and CTO, though he's still very much the leader of the executive triad.
Oracle invited me to spend a full day shadowing Hurd last week at OpenWorld as he met with customers, analysts, and others on the biggest day of the conference.
During the week, Hurd met with nearly 500 people either in one-on-one meetings or in small groups, answering their questions, solving problems, issuing reassurances, and explaining the company's plans and strategy all at a surprisingly exhausting pace.
It was a rare close-up look at the hard work a CEO does to run global tech company., "
Our day together started at 8 a.m. at a local Starbucks. Hurd had been up for hours already (since about 4:30 a.m.), working. He always wakes up that early. He warned me to wear comfortable shoes.
Mark Hurd
Hurd surprisingly does not travel with an entourage of assistants. Hes famous for his memory, and doesnt need a lot of hand-holding on his schedule. This day, it looked as though he had an entourage, but the crowd was mostly a PR representative and me. We were sometimes joined by the top Oracle exec responsible for the whole event and an Oracle exec responsible for a particular roundtable or meeting.
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Meeting with customers is clearly one of Hurds favorite things to do. He was in high spirits, happy and joking with me and others all day. He was funny. Hes also a singularly focused guy: sales and operations. Hes so oriented toward that, that at one point, I mentioned the singer Adele, and he quipped, "Now thats productivity! She had one bad breakup and she turned it into a dozen songs."
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Our first stop was the opening keynote for a special program called Leaders Circle. This is an invitational program for a few hundred Oracle customers, and its for business people rather than technical folks. Hurds keynote and Q&A session was the kickoff. The group also heard from Safra Catz and Larry Ellison, and has its own special track of sessions and meet-ups.
Oracle
Before the Leaders Circle keynote, Hurd spotted his friend Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moodys Analytics, who was also speaking at the show and at the Leaders Circle conference. They chatted before the event kicked off.
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One of the funniest moments of the day came early. The room filled with about 150 Leaders Circle participants, and Hurd, ever punctual, started his keynote right on time. He noticed a row of empty seats reserved for Oracle employees and commented on the missing employees. In his best CEO voice, he said: "Dont worry, well find them." The room of managers laughed. Shortly after, those seats were dutifully filled. It was actually a packed room.
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Hurd gave the crowd a mini version of his major public keynote and then did a Q&A. The keynote included predictions of how cloud computing would eat the world within 10 years. This belief is why Oracle is hurling itself into cloud computing as fast as it can, spending billions to build new data centers, launching new cloud services, converting all of its software into cloud offerings, and pitching it all heavily to its customers.
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In all of his keynotes, Hurd gleefully reported that Oracle was the "fastest growing" big cloud player, referring to its revenue growth (not the total dollars of new revenue). Its on track to be a $2 billion business, and most of this is from companies that have never used Oracles business applications before, Hurd says. Two billion isnt nothing, although its still a small fraction of the companys $37 billion in revenue.
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Hurd has spent the past four years revamping the sales force to sell cloud computing. His big bet: hiring thousands of recent college grads and creating a new training system for them (a program called Class Of). It was a controversial decision at the time and angered some, who worried that he was trying to replace experienced sales pros with lower-paid kids. Today, the Class Of program is working extremely well in bringing entry-level salespeople to Oracle, Hurd tells us. And hes proud of the whole sales team for embracing the program.
Jacob Gerson (right), Camille French, Dan Elfman, Ryan Thomas
However, Oracles customers, and the tech community at large, are not ready to crown Oracle the cloud leader. During Hurds main conference keynote, after telling attendees many times that Oracle was the fastest-growing cloud, Hurd did a live poll with the audience. At least one-third of them said they thought Amazon Web Services was the fastest growing. The numbers were still coming in, with AWS hitting 30%, when Oracle pulled this poll off the screen.
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Other than that polling question, Hurd was happy with that keynote and somewhat relieved it was over, he told people the next day. It was a complicated thing live polling combined with videos and on-stage appearances from customers, including a few friendly jokes about Larry Ellison. Executives worry about Murphys law during their big live presentations.
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After the Leaders Circle keynote, we literally ran to the next event: an invitational roundtable breakfast for human-resources execs. Someone has mapped out the shortest routes between each room where Hurd is scheduled to talk, which almost always involves cutting through a back kitchen ...
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... or dashing through some secret-passage-like back hallway. (These pictures are blurry because Im running to catch up. Hurd moves fast, and no one was waiting for me.)
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At one point, we were whisked to an event at another venue by hired chauffeured cars. I didnt ride with Hurd; the PR rep and I rode in a second car.
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The second roundtable of the day is clearly one of Hurds favorites: a Q&A with HR execs. Oracle sells a lot of HR software, but this talk led by Oracles head of HR, Joyce Westerdahl was about how Oracle hires, manages, and trains its employees. Hurd lights up when he talks about managing and motivating people. The audience asked a lot of questions, everything from how Oracle handles international hiring to how to keep good people, and he openly answered everything.
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Hurds big advice: Focus on training direct supervisors, especially providing incentives that reward them to nurture all their employees, not just their stars. If employees have a good supervisor, they love their jobs. If they dont, they leave, he says. Oracles Gretchen Alarcon, who heads Oracles HR product team, also told the room how Oracle uses its own HR software to track employee satisfaction.
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As much as his schedule allowed, Hurd stopped and talked to employees as he saw them, whether they were attending a roundtable talk or manning the booths in the hallways. If you were an Oracle employee in the room with him, he seemed to know about it.
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Before each roundtable or keynote, the executive in charge of that meeting would brief Hurd. Just before a Q&A with market research analysts, he talked to the VP of analyst relations, Ricarda Rodatus. She joined Oracle from SAP a couple of years ago. She told him which analysts will be in the room and the questions they are likely to ask. Instead of detailed product questions, this group has become interested in the culture change needed for Oracle to sell and support the cloud, she told him.
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Hurd doesnt do much of an introductory spiel for this group. He just takes questions. Hes a bit wary of this crowd and tells them so, joking to them that analysts are always a "tough crowd" and that a 50-minute grilling "is exhausting," which gets a big laugh.
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In truth, hes feeling good about Oracles cloud strategy and its growth, and can easily answer their questions about its products, plans, and culture change.
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One big surprise for me: CEOs arent given any time to eat or take bio breaks. At nearly 1 oclock, with no real breakfast (I grabbed a small muffin at the HR panel), Im hungry so I sneak a piece of chicken from the analysts buffet. But that means Im eating when he finishes his talk ...
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... and they all run out of the room immediately to get to the next thing. I was left scrambling to grab my stuff and running to catch up. Hurd has not eaten anything all day. Im lucky I havent been drinking too much coffee, so I dont need my own bio break.
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The big event on this day is Larry Ellisons keynote. About an hour before it begins, we head backstage where an army of Oracle people are working behind the scenes, such as these people handling the online streaming of the conference. Backstage security is tight. At one point, I fall just a few steps behind Hurd, and two security people stop me. My badge doesnt give me access to backstage. My PR companion has to fetch someone with authority to let me through.
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Loads of people are working back here. Theres a crew that works on graphics and crews that monitor all the tech ...
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... and theres an IT team. Streaming a live keynote to millions of people around the world is no small feat.
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Theres also a backstage office for executives, their support staff, the marketing team, and a few VIPs.
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Food and snacks for the execs are in this room, but Hurd doesnt get a chance to eat right away. People need to talk to him before he heads on stage to introduce the pre-keynote speaker, Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka.
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All the top Oracle execs have a dedicated space in this room where they can plug in and work if they need to.
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Ellison has his own private dressing room next door. It is set up with everything he needs to practice his keynote and his live demos. I never saw him backstage, although I caught a quick glance of Hurds co-CEO, Safra Catz, as she dashed in and out of the executive offices.
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We ran into Sikka backstage before his keynote. Some people are still shocked about how close a partner he is with Oracle these days. He led the development of the HANA database at Oracles arch competitor, SAP, before taking this CEO job a few years ago. Hes known industrywide as a nice guy, and hes friendly with the folks at Oracle, including CMO Judy Sim, whos posing with him here.
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I get a sneak peek of the main stage. Heres the view from the stage as people start to filter in. Thousands of people will soon fill this room for Ellisons keynote.
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However, some of them prefer to watch it on giant screens set up outside and start to line up out there.
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Behind me on stage is the worlds largest LCD screen. Its so big and impressive that when Ellison turned around and saw it during his keynote, he said, "Cool! Ive got to get one of these for my house." The crowd laughed.
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Because Im with the CEO entourage today, Im in the reserved seating in the front rows. They even printed a sign with my name.
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Backstage, I also have my "own" office where I can plug in and work quietly. I try that for a few minutes ...
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... but its way more fun in the main backstage office, where I can watch the live keynote ...
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... and where I run into Oracle luminaries like longtime board member Ray Bingham and Chief Corporate Architect Edward Screven, who reports to Ellison. If Ellison didnt have the title of CTO, Screven probably would. Both of them are very nice and chat with me.
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Bingham tells me the story of how Ellison got him to join the board in 2002. In the early 1990s, Bingham worked for Cadence Design Systems. Ellison was on Cadences board, and the Cadence CEO was on Oracles board. But after two exhaustive reviews by consultants, Binghams IT team recommended that Cadence buy SAPs financial ERP software, not Oracles. Each CEO quit the others board over it. But Ellison apparently held no grudge a few years later, he reached out to Bingham to join Oracles board. Bingham was so impressed by the olive branch that he accepted.
Oracle
Bingham also tells me this little-known fact about Ellison: Despite his industrywide reputation for being hard-nosed, he never loses his cool, never yells even during sensitive conversations like executive compensation and is always calm and respectful.
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Screven tells me another little-known fact about Ellison: Hes a great listener, even when someone disagrees. As long as the other persons viewpoint is backed up with facts, research and data, Ellison will hear it out. Screven also mentions that Hurd is known around the office for his legendary memory for figures. In meetings, Hurd will rattle off all kinds of relevant stats from months or years ago.
Flickr/Emma, Michael and Elway's Excellent Adventures
When Ellisons keynote is about to begin, the members of everyones entourages find seats. Hurd and Catz are in the front row, and they share a quick moment before Ellison comes on stage. Catz once said that the three of them have "so much fun" working together.
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Ellison delivers a keynote that is mostly about why Oracle thinks its cloud is better than Amazons. Amazon has been trying to get Oracles database customers to dump Oracle and move to Amazons own database. Ellisons keynote is one big "game on" to Amazon.
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See: Larry Ellison says Oracle's new cloud will crush Amazon but the rest of the world isn't so sure
When the keynote is over, Hurd has more customer meetings. This small roundtable is a group of customers from Latin America, where Oracles cloud sales are going well. They ask him about Oracles products and the companys commitment to the region given Brazils weak economy and the political meltdown in Venezuela. Hurd visits various Latin American countries every few months and assures them of the regions importance to Oracle.
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Hurd also tells customers little tidbits of what its like to run the company. For instance, he and the marketing team were panicked two weeks before the conference when the party headliner, Billy Joel, canceled. Oracle wouldve had more than 10,000 people at a party with no music. But because Oracle books these stars for multiple shows, they consider Oracle a great customer, and Joel helped Oracle land Sting and Gwen Stefani to replace him. They even agreed to sing a duet.
Business Insider/Julie Bort
The afternoon schedule included about 20 minutes of downtime, when Hurd answered my questions. We mostly talked about how he revamped the sales force with the Class Of program.
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Stay tuned for more onHurd's Class Of program, publishing soon.
Then we dash off to a roundtable with Oracles Global Business Unit customers. These are US customers in various vertical industries like retail and banking. Its after 5 oclock, and this is a wine-and-cheese thing, but Hurd is talking and neither eats nor drinks.
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Robert Weiler, the vice president of GBU, joins Hurd at this meeting. Customers ask them for product roadmaps for specific apps and about options for financing cloud purchases. And like all the other customers all day they want assurances that Oracle is really committed to the cloud and wouldnt shut it down if they moved their apps there. Hurd insists that this isnt a "head fake" from Oracle that Oracle has already spent billions on data centers and on revamping its applications, with more R&D to come.
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This roundtable ended at nearly 7 p.m. Hurd went on to more meetings that night, mostly to prep for his next days schedule. Finally, he had time to eat a steak dinner with an employee. My day with Hurd ended here. I was plenty tired and hungry myself. Hurd met a total of 496 people in these small, private meetings this week, Oracle tells me. While OpenWorld is the biggest annual Oracle conference, this was a typical day for him. Hurd tells me he does special events like this every few weeks all over the world.
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