Quotes from Safra A. Catz

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

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.

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.

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.

At Oracle, silver medal is first loser.

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.

Whether you're a government entity, a large enterprise, or a startup, a true digital transformation takes advantage of technology to focus on the customer, automates work that does not need manual interference, and unleashes your people to truly make decisions that change the path of your company.

I know firsthand the complexities of leading an enterprise through business and technology transformation. It takes intense focus, a strong drive, and a clearly communicated vision to inspire and take an organization from where they are, to where they need to be - or where they want to go.

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

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.

Even in large corporations, smaller ideas may not get enough resources.

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.

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.

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.

There are so many immigrant-led success stories in the United States, and the fact that it's gotten so much harder for educated folks to stay here is really unfortunate.

I teach at the Stanford Business School, and about half of my students are foreign, many of whom, I hope, will stay and build businesses in U.S. But I must tell you that they also have opportunities to come back to India and start great companies and operations.

We provide business advice and guidance. We started it here in India first, and now we have taken it globally. India was the first for startup incubation in the world for us.

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

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

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

The truth is that technology is only valuable if it helps you run your organization better.

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.

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.

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