“Leonardo Del Vecchio”
President and founder of the world-class glasses
Luxottica
Leonardo
Del Vecchio (born 22 May 1935 in Milan, Italy) is the founder and chairman of
Luxottica. The firm owns the Sunglass Hutand Lenscrafters chains with a total
of over 6,000 stores and 73,400 employees. According to Forbes magazine, he is
the richest man in Italy with a net worth of $20.3 billion, making him 38th
richest person in the world as of February 2015.
Background and Early Career
Leonardo was born to a poor
Milanese family. Leading a fatherless childhood, he was forced to live in an
orphanage at the age of 7 under the care of nuns and at the age of 14,
circumstances required him to work in order to support his impoverished family.
His first job was in Milan working as a novice with a tool manufacturer. He
joined evening classes studying industrial engineering at the age of 19,
continuing working during the day all along.
With time Leonardo became fascinated and much passionate about glasses and
frame and this drove him into moving to a small village in Venice known as
Agordo, where one can find all the players of the eye glass industry offering a
lot to learn about the trade from design to marketing.
In
1967, Leonardo took the decision to enter the glasses assembly business. He now
had 6 years of experience but it was not easy due to fierce competition.
Expanding his work, Leonardo found his own company, Luxottica. Ten years
later in 1976, Luxottica stopped making frames for other brands and launched
its own eye wear brand. Using extensive research, the brand went on to become
the market leader. There was no looking back; Leonardo’s effective
strategies helped him in developing a successful sales network.
Leonardo’s futuristic approach, timely decisions and strategies helped
Luxottica to have full control and take over every stage of the eye glass
manufacturing process. The Luxottica group now also began acquisitions in areas
of distribution and retail. The group eventually took over some of the most
famous Italian brands such as Lens Crafters, Persol and Vogue moving on to
acquiring Ray Ban, the most famous American brand. Over the years, Luxottica
has been seen to acquire all major eye glass brands including Oakley which was bought
for $2.1 billion, giving Luxottica a major break in the sports segment. In
addition to this, Luxottica now manufactures for the world famous brands such
as Versace, Ralph Lauren, DKNY, Ferragamo, Prada, Chanel and Armani.
“Larry Ellison”
Founder
and CEO of Oracle Corporation
Lawrence Joseph "Larry" Ellison (born
August 17, 1944) is an American internet entrepreneur, businessman and philanthropist. He serves as
executive chairman and chief technology officer of Oracle Corporation, having previously been chief executive from its
founding until September 2014. In 2014, he was listed by Forbes magazine
as the third-wealthiest man in America and as the fifth-wealthiest person in the world,
with a fortune of US$56.2 billion.
Background and Early
Career
Larry Ellison was born in the Bronx, New York, on August 17,
1944, to single mother Florence Spellman. When he was nine months old, Ellison
came down with pneumonia, and his mother sent him to Chicago to be raised by
her aunt and uncle, Lillian and Louis Ellison, who adopted the baby.
After high school, Ellison enrolled at the University of
Illinois, Champaign (1962), where he was named science student of the year.
During his second year, his adopted mother died, and Ellison dropped out of
college. The following fall, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, but he
dropped out after only one semester.
Ellison then packed his bags for Berkeley, California, with
little money, and for the next decade he moved from job to job at such places
as Wells Fargo and Amdahl Corporation. Between college and his various jobs,
Ellison had picked up basic computer skills, and he was finally able to put
them to use as a programmer at Amdahl, where he worked on the first
IBM-compatible mainframe system.
In 1977, Ellison and two of his Amdahl colleagues founded
Software Development Labs and soon had a contract to build a
database-management system—which they called Oracle—for the CIA. The company
had fewer than 10 employees and revenue of less than $1 million per year, but
in 1981, IBM signed on to use Oracle, and the company’s sales doubled every
year for the next seven years. Ellison soon renamed the company after its
best-selling product.
Oracle Corporation
In 1986, Oracle Corporation held its IPO (initial public
offering), but some accounting issues helped wipe out the majority of the
company’s market capitalization and Oracle teetered on the brink of bankruptcy.
After a management shakeup and a product-cycle refresh, however, Oracle’s new
products took the industry by storm, and by 1992 the company was the leader in
the database-management realm.
Success continued, and
as Ellison was Oracle’s largest shareholder, he became one of the wealthiest
people in the world. Ellison set his sights on growth through acquisitions, and
over the next several years he gobbled up several companies, including
PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems and Sun Microsystems, all of which helped Oracle
reach a market cap of roughly $185 billion with some 130,000 employees by 2014.
