Julian Guthrie's inside account of Larry Ellison's two America's Cup victories and his partnership with Russell Coutts, a car mechanic turned master sailor. It documents how Ellison brought the same strategic intensity he applied at Oracle to sailing's oldest trophy — building the best team around an underrated talent, obsessing over preparation, and refusing to accept that a dominance gap was permanent. The book also famously records the stack of books on Ellison's nightstand during the dot-com collapse.
This book is the subject of Founders episode #126, and Senra's framing centers on what Ellison was reading while Oracle was fighting for survival after the dot-com crash. Guthrie documented Ellison bookmarked a line in Lone Survivor: **'The real battle is won in the mind.'** The nightstand included Fate Is the Hunter, The Last Lion, The Jordan Rules, and Lone Survivor — a window into how a founder uses reading as tactical preparation, drawing lessons from Churchill, aviation decision-making, and military discipline.
Ellison's approach to the America's Cup mirrors his business philosophy: find an undervalued genius (Coutts had been fired by his previous team), obsess over every detail of preparation, and treat dominance gaps as temporary. For founders, the book is a case study in how competitive drive expresses itself identically whether the arena is enterprise software or ocean racing.