Selling your company

But in Silicon Valley, unlike elsewhere in the country, even some of the biggest companies like Yahoo are “are still run by founders who are unwilling to sell for emotional reasons,” Mr. Ellison said, perhaps taking a swipe at Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s chief executive and co-founder, who has been frantically searching for an alternative to Microsoft’s bid.

Helge: The founder wants to be in charge!

“Sometimes,” he said, “they have a hard time separating their emotions from what’s best for shareholders.” Mr. Ellison even allowed that he would have a hard time selling his own business. “I’m very emotionally involved,” he said.

Helge: Separating emotions from business. What's best for the shareholders!

Hostility Has Its Rewards - Mergers, Acquisitions, Venture Capital, Hedge Funds -- DealBook - New York Times

Hostility Has Its Rewards - Mergers, Acquisitions, Venture Capital, Hedge Funds -- DealBook - New York Times: "MENLO PARK, Calif. — “It’s crazy to say you will only grow through innovation,” Larry Ellison, the hard-charging chief executive of Oracle, was telling me last week. “It’s bizarre that there’s a stigma to buying something rather than building it yourself.”

Helge: You can innovate with money.

Here in Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurialism is a religion, people have long taken a dim view of acquisitions. A big purchase was, as Mr. Ellison put it, “a confession that there’s a failure to innovate.”

Helge: Buy yourself into innovations!

That is until Mr. Ellison decided about four years ago to go Rambo on this high-tech province of button-downs and khakis with a hostile $10.3 billion bid for PeopleSoft. At first, the bid was considered barbaric. Everyone said Mr. Ellison was bound to fail. After all, as they love to say here, a technology company’s most valuable assets — its engineers — walk out the door every evening. And with a hostile bidder circling, PeopleSoft’s engineers were bound to run. Only they didn’t."

Helge: Changing from one home to another...What happens with the Yahoo and Microsoft marriage?