Ed Oates, the project manager
Ed Oates retired from the company in 1996. "I had told Larry, when the company gets to 10,000 people, I'm out of there. I couldn't quit fast enough. I quit when the company had 20,000 people," he told attendees of a San Jose State University lecture he in 2011.
He then bought a high-end home theater store, called the Audible Difference which had clients like Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison. He sold it in 1999.
He is currently a member of the board of advisors of big data analytics company Auguri Corp. and is on the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Zoological Society and a guitarist in the band CHOC'D, with an album on iTunes.
Here's how he describes the co-founders: "What we brought to the table: Larry brought chutzpah. Technical wizardry, Bob Minor. Project management and knowledge of how computers worked at their core level, that was me. Notice we didn't have any business acumen. We weren't marketeers. We weren't sales guys. Other than a little bit of project management, we couldn't run a large organization to save our lives. We had to learn."
Bruce Scott, the first employee
Although Bruce Scott is widely considered an Oracle co-founder, technically he wasn't. He was its first hired employee -- or, if you count the founders, employee No. 4. He was the co-architect of the first three versions of the Oracle database.
Scott was with Oracle its first five years and left in 1982 to help launch Gupta Technologies with another ex-Oracle employee, Umang Gupta. (It was later known as Centura Software). The company created the first client/server SQL database and flew high for a while but eventually filed for bankruptcy, and its tech was sold to investors.
Scott landed on his feet, co-founding another database company, PointBase which was acquired by DataMirror, a company that would later be acquired by IBM. Ironically, PointBase is still being used in Oracle's WebLogic software.
Scott took on a number of other engineering roles in the Valley since then and in 2012 co-founded a startup called Cedarcone, a tool to help salespeople.
Bob Miner, the technical genius
Bob Miner was the architect of Oracle's database and for most of his career at the company he led product design and development.
In 1992, he left that role and spun off a small unit within Oracle that worked on advanced technology.
If Ellison was considered the hard-driving "brains" of the company, Miner was considered its heart, a well-liked manager that counterbalanced Ellison. He wanted his employees to see their families, not work through the night.
He died in 1993 at age 52 from a rare form of lung cancer caused by exposure to asbestos.
Larry Ellison, the hard driving business man
Until Thursday, the 70-year-old Larry Ellison was still going strong as the CEO of Oracle, the longest running CEO in the history of tech companies. He just announced he was stepping down as CEO after 37 years
He's one of the world's richest men with a net worth of $51 billion.
In the past couple of years he's turned his attention to other projects such as purchased a large as owner of the Hawaiin island of Lanai, which he his revamping into an eco-friendly agricultural paradise and resort.
