Bill Gates, Academy Class of 1992, Full Interview

[Music] microsoft was the first software company where we wrote software for personal computers and we believed that we could hire the best engineers there was a unbelievable amount of software to be written and we could do it well and we could do it on a global basis and the original customer base was the hardware manufacturers and we sold to literally hundreds and hundreds you know uh over 100 companies in japan over 100 companies doing word processors and industrial control type things we knew in the long run we wanted to sell software directly to users but we actually didn't get around that until 1980 when we had uh our first sort of games and productivity software that that people would go to computer store and actually buy the the software package paul allen and i had used that phrase even before we wrote the basic for microsoft we actually talked about it in an article in i think 1977 what's the first time it appears in print where we say a computer on it on every desk and in every home and actually the we said running microsoft software if we were just talking about the vision we'd leave those last three words out if we were talking an internal company discussion we'd put those words in and it's very hard to recall how crazy and wild that was you know on every desk and in every home you know at the time you have people who are very smart saying you know why would somebody need a computer even ken olson who would run this company digital equipment who made the computer i grew up with and you know that we admired both him and his company immensely was saying that this seemed kind of a silly idea that people would want to have a computer microsoft did the software for all the personal computers that came out there was the apple ii that we did a a basic for which was called applesauce basic there was a kilometer pet that we did a basic for there was a radio shack trs-80 that we did a basic for uh even atari who initially had their own mini basic uh ended up using our basic so our basic was running on every single machine including that apple machine and we later did a uh basic for the macintosh we we didn't mind doing uh low-priced contracts at the time because we always knew there'd be new versions and more software that we would do and you know so it worked out well you know as part of that apple deal i got to know steve wozniak which was actually an engineer and did software programming and a bit steve jobs who later i would do a lot of work with because he was deeply involved in the macintosh work we had plenty of ways to you know do new versions and do add-ons and things so now the the whole structure of the way we licensed things was that we knew we could write software more efficiently than if they hired the engineers themselves so we always was they were able to say hey you would have spent a half million developing that yourself you know we'll license it to you for uh inexpensive price we probably could have had prior higher prices but you know we were doing fine you know in fact that 6502 basic that mark chamberlain and i wrote we licensed to about 12 different people and so you know our profitability was huge even though it was a great deal for apple per machine they paid almost nothing we had a deal with these mitz altair people to pay us a royalty for each copy that was sold and so if people paid mints we got a royalty and if they just copied the program which was at the time on paper tape we didn't get paid and so there was a lot of this going on and the amount of piracy was going to determine whether microsoft could hire more people or not and so i wrote you know what was wasn't mean or i you know it was just it was called an open letter to hobbyist that said by the way you know this is copyrighted material and the more we sell the more software we'll be able to write and that started a debate that rages to this day it'll rage for decades to come should created people who do music or books or software be able to get a royalty for their stuff or should uh you know people pirated and you know there's a lot of complicated issues in in intellectual property but it it it started early in the computer industry and and a lot of people did uh actually respond to the letter by uh coming back and paying the license fee which was very low i mean we everything was very very cheap okay i've been talking about are basic and running that on a computer there's two ways you could run basic you can run it where the basic is right on the hardware and the only thing you're running is basic or you can put another layer of software in between called an operating system and it can take over some of the work like managing the printers and things and you can have many programs basic or a spreadsheet or a word processor running on top of that and as we got disks on these computers it made more sense to have that flexibility the early computers don't have disks they have cassette tapes and paper tapes and things like that but by 79.80 we're starting to get these big expensive actually initially eight inch floppy disks you know then five and a quarter inch finally three and a half inch now you know when's the last time you saw a floppy disk but they were very important we still have a hard disk disk built into the computer so you needed an operating system and so when ibm saw that we had written the software for all the personal computers they came to us sought our advice on the design but we said you should put a disc in and since they wanted to ship very quickly another company called digital research had done that work for the 8-bit machines and they were starting to do a version for this these new 60-minute machines we convinced ibm to do a 16-bit machine using this 8086 8088 processor well digital research really hadn't finished the work and then ibm was getting frustrated because digital research wouldn't sign even the non-disclosure agreement and then some of us uh particularly paul and a key person named kazhi kunishi who was from japan and worked with us said no no we should just do that ourselves and because of the quick timing we ended up licensing the original code from another company and turned that into ms-dos and so then subsequently ms-dos competed with this digital research cpm after about two or three years ms-dos became far far more popular than than cpm and then eventually we would take an ad graphics capability on top of ms-dos and then integrate the two together and so today when we talk about windows it actually includes all those ms-dos things in it that's the full operating system although mostly you think of the graphics and the windows and stuff there's a lot of more classic operating system capability that that's built in there the ibm initial deal is a flat fee deal another flat fee deal it had certain restrictions that prevented ibm from selling to other hardware makers so if people did ibm pc compatible machines we would get the revenue by doing business directly with those people and the the deal was very complicated but it was a deal that steve ballmer who's a key person at the company by that time and i thought a lot about and it was a fairly junior team from ibm so we tried to make sure that given our belief that personal computers would be hyper popular that microsoft would get a lot of that upside so they felt they got a very good deal which they did but as the industry expanded we um for new versions and for different machines we got that opportunity even though they did not pay us a royalty even in the early days if you set a computer on every desk in every home and you'd say okay how many homes are there in the world how many desks are there in the world you know can i make 20 bucks for every home 20 bucks for every desk you could get these big numbers but part of the beauty of the whole thing was we were very focused on the here and now should we hire one more person if our customers didn't pay us would we have enough cash to meet the payroll you know we really were very practical about that next thing and so involved in the deep engineering that we didn't get ahead of ourselves we never thought you know how big we'd be i remember when uh one of the early lists of wealthy people came out and one of the intel founders was there the guy around wing computers actually was still wang was still doing well and we thought boy if the software business does well the value of microsoft could be similar to that but it wasn't a real focus they the everyday activity of just doing great software drew us in and some decisions we made like the quality of the people the way we were very global the vision of how we thought about software that was very long term but you know other than those things you know we just came into work every day and wrote more code and you know hired hired more people it wasn't really until the ibm pc succeeded and perhaps even until windows succeeded that there was a broad awareness that microsoft was very unique as a software company that these other companies had been one product companies hadn't hired people couldn't do a broad set of things didn't renew their excellence didn't do research um so you know we thought we were doing something very unique but it was easily not until 1995 or even 1997 that that there was this wide recognition that we we were the company that had revolutionized software when i was very young i hadn't been exposed to computers so i was mostly just reading doing math learning about science and i wasn't sure what my career would be i knew i loved learning about things i was an avid reader but it was when i was 12 years old that i i first got to use a computer actually a very limited machine by today's standards uh that but that definitely fascinated me when i was first exposed well i was intrigued uh by figuring out what it could do and what it couldn't do and some friends and i spent lots of time the teachers got intimidated so we were on our own trying to figure it out actually we gave a course on computers to the other students and it became you know a fascination where we got paid for doing computer work and talked about forming a company but there was kind of a magical breakthrough when the computer became uh cheap and we could see that everyone could afford a computer uh that was much later but it uh that's what got us to really get together and and create a company for software i read a lot uh there were always contests at the library in the summer where you know if you read 10 books you got a little gold star you read 20 you got like two and uh there were like five or six girls and i that would always read like 35 books and we'd see you know who could do the most um it was a broad set of things eventually a fair bit of science fiction because that intrigued me some biographies you know understanding what different leaders had done and how they'd picked what they'd wanted to do and so i'd say science fiction biography were the the categories that had the most impact yeah the in among the science fiction uh things uh williams rice burrows wrote a martian series and i read that then he also had the tarzan books and there's an unbelievable number of them like 40 of them and i eventually decided to read those as well i didn't actually read catcher on the rye until i was 13 and you know ever since then i've said that's my my favorite book it's you know very clever you know it acknowledges that young people are a little confused but it can be smart about things and see things that adults don't really see uh so i've i've always loved it my second uh favorite book is is the book by john knowles called the separate piece and that's a phenomenal uh book i've i've been reading it to my son recently there's actually a movie made of it that's fairly good but you know i'd say the book uh is is incredibly good that's two young boys growing up one who is sort of intentionally trying to be good at things and the other eugene is just kind of naturally great at sports and has this wonderful energy and they have this great friendship and it happens to be at a time where the older boys are going off to war and they're trying to figure out what does that mean to them and the author talks about this period of his life is really defining how he the rest of his life how he sees everything is sort of in comparison to this period where he didn't really know where he fit in you know he thought of himself as maybe too calculating and the end of the book which i won't spoil is a bit of a tragedy with this friend of his but it it really talks a lot about what is our bargain with the world how do we grow up uh what are we worried about and and how do we take that into adulthood through eighth grade um i was sort of enjoying the fact that i could do reasonably well without any effort they had this thing where you'd you'd get an effort which would be one two or three and then a grade and so the idea i always wanted was an a3 where you had the least effort but the highest grade so my grades weren't all that great and then in eighth grade i had been at a private school for a couple years and decided that i better start getting good grades both in terms of having some freedom the way i'd be treated and thinking about college so from ninth grade on i had a a reasonably spotless uh grade record um so that i i got quite serious about grades at that point math was the thing that uh came most natural to me and you know you'd take these exams uh some of which were sort of nationwide exams and i did quite well on those and that gave me some confidence and i had some teachers who were very encouraging they let me read textbooks they encouraged me to take a college course on symbolic math which is actually called algebra so i felt pretty confident in my math skills which is a nice thing because not only the sciences but economics a lot of things if you're comfortable with math and statistics and ways of of looking at cause and effect that's extremely helpful i had a uh one named paul stockland who uh at the the school i was at who challenged me uh later one named uh fred wright who challenged me um then you know i i actually majored in math uh for the time i was at uh at college uh because you know it was a very interesting topic but it was kind of a strange topic because there's not a direct career for most people in terms of being a full-time mathematician so for all but very few people it's a tool that you use but not probably not what you're going to spend your life working on my parents had this notion that i had this high potential somehow and that i was not taking advantage of it uh you know the environment i'd been in sort of being a goof-off was more socially rewarding than being that serious and it was public school you know so they weren't pushing people all that hard you could read the textbook in the first week and you know sort of there was wasn't anything interesting gonna happen the rest of the the school year and so they had me take an exam to go to a private school and i thought well should i pass this exam or not you know you could fail it and they wouldn't you wouldn't have to go uh but that that sort of violated my sense of integrity that you know hey i'm good at taking tests i don't want to get confused about that so i i was admitted and they encouraged me to go it was a boys school originally strict during the time i was there it actually transitioned merged with a girls school and stopped having uniforms stopped calling the teacher's master so it it became pretty normal but it was a it was a change at first and the idea of just being kind of a goof off wasn't the sort of high reward uh position like it been in in public schools so that it you know my parents were right it it had the intended effect of of creating a more challenging environment and some teachers who uh were nice about saying that you know i should try harder and uh exposing me to a lot of math and science and eventually that's where i i got to to use the computer lakeside was a longer school day and it you know it's a change i had gotten super comfortable at public school kind of being goofy and you know here people were studying and at first because i i didn't get great grades they had me in a study hall and a few people who got really good grades didn't have to go to the study hall uh and nobody knew you know that i was actually clever so uh you know they were actually treating me like some average student anyway it was it was an adjustment and all the other kids there were uh making the adjustment as well so it took a couple years to get my grounding you know i'm super glad that i i went to that school it was a fantastic school i'll probably send my my kids to that school the lakeside's mother's club had a rummage sale every year to raise money for the school and instead of just funding the budget they always would fund something kind of new and interesting in addition and without too much understanding they decided having a computer terminal at the school would be a novel thing it was a teletype uppercase only you know 10 characters a second and you had to share a phone line to call into a big computer a time sharing computer that was very expensive it charged uh when you were connected up it would charge and then when you actually had a program running it would charge a lot more and so they set up this teletype and some of the math and science teachers you know played around with it one of them accidentally spent a lot of money uh with the infinite loop program they spent like 200 dollars by surprise and so they were a bit intimidated and a bunch of us kind of hung out there and tried out different things the programming language was basic which was quite novel at the time it had been invented by some dartmouth professors and so that was the first computer language i learned and i wrote i wrote increasingly complex programs and so that eighth grade exposure was was a pretty neat thing even though what the machine we were working on was was quite limited the idea of students playing around with the computer was very unusual at the time and in fact that computer um you know eventually the costs were high enough they they took it away but then some other computer companies had come around including one in seattle that a bunch of us went down and volunteered to help out and do some work for so we from that point on we always managed although it was dicey at times to find access to computers and that was very unusual in high school but it took a lot of initiative on our part to get those experiences but we wouldn't have done it if we hadn't had that that early eighth grade exposure the key point is that computers were immensely expensive uh and cost millions of dollars a machine that was far less powerful than than what you have in a a cell phone today and so that either you'd have a very important application or you just shared the machine with other people and still you had to pay quite a bit of money and so time sharing is where you're connected up and sharing the machine it's a lot better than sending your programs in because you can see when you make a mistake pretty quickly even so because they charge us so much we actually type the programs offline on a paper tape so that we didn't have any delay for typing and then when we got onto the computer we'd feed in that tape so that there was less less time online but it gave you a sense of okay what you got right wrong and you could try and correct things we also because at that time the dominant form of computing was using punch cards we actually did that quite a bit we were down at the university of washington used some of those punch card systems as computers became less expensive so called mini computers then more people had access mostly scientists and business people but also we managed to find machines that weren't being used at night the idea of a machine is something that an individual would use and that would just sit there idle when they weren't using it that only made sense about a decade later when the work that we and others had done had gotten the the price down so dramatically that the idea of a computer sitting idle you know doesn't feel like some huge waste of resources like it did when they were so expensive and rare programming is where you're describing to the machine how to do something and so telling how to play tic-tac-toe telling it how to play the game board game monopoly telling it uh how to convert numbers from one base to another and the idea of okay there's these simple instructions but if you put them together then you can synthesize something quite complex it's a fascinating kind of mathematical thing how can you make it fast how can you make it small and i went through several phases of doing more complex programs where people who were great programmers would look at my work give me feedback on it and you know you get so you you're you can be quite a good programmer and it was kind of a such a intense activity between the age of 13 and 17 that you know we learned a lot eventually one of the programs we took on was the idea of the scheduling of of our school when should the classes meet who should be in which section so you have all these requests for people who want different classes and keeping them small and not having the teachers teach too many classes in a row very complex kind of software problem and actually when the school first asked me to do it when i was 15 i said that i didn't know how and they asked some adults to do it and that didn't work uh and then about a year later i'd figured out how to do it and so my friends and i actually did the software that did all this high school scheduling it had some fantastic uh benefits to us and we got paid for doing it it was exactly the kind of complex problem that developed my skills very well and you know we got some degree of control over who is in our classes and so you know it combined the best of everything initially when that teletype showed up there were probably 20 kids who sort of sowed an interest and it was confusing enough that it got winnowed down to about uh eight or nine fairly quickly who were quite serious about it and then there were about four of us who were hyper serious you know kind of doing it day and night and two of them were two years older than i was and one i was my same age now in a high school people are two years ahead of you you know they don't socialize with the young kids all that much so the idea that we had this group of four of us it was kind of unusual we called it the lakeside programming group and one of the companies we'd been doing work for went bankrupt the one in seattle and so we went to one in portland oregon computer center corporation c cubed uh which had been in the university district in seattle and we'd spent a lot of time there and they were wonderful to us they weren't well run business so they went bankrupt so this company uh down in portland oregon said hey we're not just going to give you computer time you have to do something so we agreed to write this payroll program and a payroll program is surprisingly complicated there's all these taxes and reports and things at the state level and federal level anyway they said well if you could write one of those we'd at least give you free computer time and so i negotiated that deal and the two older members uh paul allen and rick said well you know this is there's not enough work to go around so we're going to take charge of this and i said okay you know i'm not that interested because i had in mind how i wanted to do the payroll program and so they they messed around for about three months didn't get much done uh and then said well you joined back up and i said okay but you know i'm so i'm in charge uh of this and you know it's going to kind of set a precedent for future activities but they said no no that's fine and so we worked we actually finished this payroll program it was a lot of work uh the friend who was my age kent evans and i ended up doing the lion's share of the work now tragically right as he and i finished that he was killed in a mountain climbing accident and um so then there were there were just three of us left who'd been extremely involved including paul allen who was the one who was reading the magazines even more than i was and he was the one who actually saw this computer on a chip so-called microprocessor in a very small obscure article but he saw that it would be deeply important and brought that to me in 1971 so we were still 15 i was 15 and he was 17 at the time so these cq people have this computer which is a time sharing computer and they're letting us come in at night and they had this deal with the company who made the computer digital equipment corporation that they had this acceptance period if they could find problems with it they could delay their rental payments and so they thought of us as kind of monkeys that might find some problems and help them delay their rental payments well that that was a fair analysis because at first we were just completely goofing around like we'd have try to run hundreds of jobs at the same time or have all the jobs try and grab the same resources to see if we could get the system to fail and we did in kind of this brute force approach and so that would they would report that as a problem and delay their rental payment well as a few months went by actually about four months by the end of it we had gotten very uh sophisticated in fact we'd gotten the source code of the operating system out of the garbage can and we're reading it and the kind of problems we were finding were far more subtle in fact we'd not only find the problem we'd look and we'd suggest how they might fix it well anyway digital equipment got so tired of this they said look you got to pay you're going to be able to find problems these these kinds of problems forever but we need to get paid and so then there was a question whether they would let us stay there or not and it was pretty tenuous um and so paul and i you know we understood the system well enough that we could look at all the passwords of the dairy various accounts and so you know we could use literally any account and um then people when they found out we'd done that they got kind of mad about that they weren't sure how mad they should be about it because we hadn't really caused any damage but you know wasn't a good thing you know computer hacking was literally just being invented uh at the time and so fortunately we got off with a bit of a warning but there actually was a period that because of that they said we weren't supposed to use the computer and it was over a summer and paul actually went up to the university of washington and found ways to use the computer and get connected up uh and he he took a while before he told me and then eventually he told me about that and we got we got back on i was really quite serious about math at the time and various science things uh polit actually read more science fiction than i had by i mean by a lot uh and so he and i would talk about that but i had plenty of things it was not wasn't some great tragedy but then we got you know pulled back in then that company went bankrupt and then we had the uh work for this portland company on the payroll program and then we had the the scheduling program and so you know we were lucky there were always kind of things that not only gave us an opportunity but exposed us uh to that next level you know after the payroll program then there was a computer project to use computers to control all the electricity grid and the dams of the pacific northwest it's a government agent called bonneville power had done a contract with a company called trw to use computers to do all this control and trw had committed to do all this really high reliability great software work well they found it more difficult than they expected and so they um were looking for people who understood uh these kinds of computers which paul and i paul allen and i had done a lot of work on this was the same computer that was at computer center corporation and at this portland company information sciences anyway so they they we were kind of famous but nobody had met us because we filed these prom reports and by the end of these problem reports we they were so sophisticated it was like who are these guys you know out in seattle telling us how to fix all this stuff and so when trw is saying hey we're desperate find us uh they're telling digital equipment who makes these things find us the best programmers and somebody says well there's gates and allen and somebody says well nobody's really met them but yeah but they're really good you know we ought to be able to track them down so they find us this one guy and we go for an interview and you know these two kids show up and i was i when i was interviewed i was 16 uh when they interviewed me so they're like well we can't hire you but you know then they talked to us about software and we clearly know a lot and when you're young and you know a lot people don't have any kind of intermediate thing you're either you know what you're supposed to be which is a kid who doesn't know that much or they think whoa what you know this guy's the limit well we were pretty good programmers but anyway so we got jobs at this trw and that exposed me to some programmers who are way better than i was who critiqued my work i could look at their work you know this one guy uh was really a phenomenal programmer and he would just take my stuff and rip it apart uh you know in this super constructive way anyway it was it was a brilliant thing and and so part of my senior year uh in the summer before and after the senior year paul and i were down in vancouver washington uh working on this project so it kind of took our understanding to a whole new level and it exposed us to a bunch of uh people there and you know paul the whole time ever since he'd seen that microprocess article was saying you know there's an opportunity here this is going to be big you know we ought to think what we're going to do about this so we kept kept talking about that in 1971 there's this obscure article on the microprocessor that intel has done the what was called the 4004 that paul said look this thing's going to keep getting better and it's going to be better than these mini computers many computers were like ten thousand dollars to 200 000 and paul and i had uh borrowed some of those and messed around with those and paul said no no you're going to have something better than the minicomputer that costs uh like a thousand dollars so we kept watching those chips get better and we did the scheduling program then my senior year we're down at at trw they're getting better and in fact in 1973 the 8080 chip comes out and paul you know shows that to me and i say okay this is better than most of these mini computers and so we think wow somebody's going to take that chip and do something well well in the meantime i start at harvard university back in cambridge massachusetts you know paul's saying hey this he's at washington state another place so i help him get a job out there in the boston area and we're just brainstorming uh you know what's going to happen with the microprocessor and i'm you know playing poker uh signing up for lots and lots of classes undergraduate classes graduate classes uh but then um [Music] finally somebody takes the 8080 chip and creates a kit computer and that's on the cover of the january 1975 popular electronics that comes out in december 1974 and so we get that and that's both exciting because finally this thing that we've expected has happened but the question is is it happening without us and so this company which is in albuquerque new mexico we call them up and say hey we can do software for this machine and they say oh yeah sure um so we very quickly uh work on a basic for this computer which i'm well equipped to do and paul is is had some brilliant ideas about how we'd simulate this machine because we didn't have one and that was was amazing um so we write this thing and we call them up and we say hey when you connect a teletype up how do you get the what's the software programming to get the characters in and get them to print them how do you do that this so-called input output and they thought well that's interesting you guys may not be flaky uh because you're actually you're the first one who asked that question which is if you're going to really write the software you eventually have to ask that question so they give us the answer and paul flies out with this paper tape of the software so i'm a student at harvard uh paul's working at honeywell but we spend was it six weeks and really write this thing which you know my whole career has sort of been building up to this thing it's a one of the most probably the most fun piece of software i ever wrote i mean it's unbelievable because it has to be very small there's only 4k bytes of memory and we don't have the real machine so you have to be very careful you get everything right anyway so paul takes it out and these guys mostly sell kit computers they'd only assembled a few of them and so they've got it connected up and that and paul puts it in and it runs the first time so when you turn a computer on there's nothing in it it doesn't even know how to go out to the teletype and read this paper tape that has all these funny numbers on it that are this program so you have to have you have to put in using the switches a little program that's the program called the bootstrap loader that is the instructions to say hey go read a bunch of numbers off of this paper tape put those into the memory and then go run that program so he wrote a bootstrap loader literally on the plane flying there he wrote a nice bootstrap loader it worked just fine later i wrote a really really small one uh because you it's a pain to have to every time the computer's turned back on you have to re-enter to the thing so the less of these funny little instructions the better anyway so he wrote that and uh everybody was amazed because we had to do everything totally right how we read this in instruction set manual and they they were selling these kit computers but they never really seen it do anything real and so you know paul would type in you know print two plus two print and he he ran programs and it worked the chip itself um was fairly expensive paul and i had bought a previous chip uh to do a very specialized machine we bought an eight service or eight to do a little funny program that did traffic volume printouts but this 8080 was much better and we'd never had one of those so we just read the book that described how it worked and then we made the big computer that we'd been using all those years uh and we're quite expert in uh paul had a really breakthrough idea of how to do this simulation thing and so that gave us the full power of that computer to edit and debug and those things but if we'd made any mistake in uh how we read this thing you know that paper tape wasn't going to work at all anyway so that was very exciting and we signed a deal with them that was called mits and their computer was called the altair and then i left harvard university and we started microsoft and so microsoft was initially based uh down in albuquerque new mexico and this is um 1973 when we when we get going you know we had been talking about that actually back at harvard and you know microcomputer software and nobody else had done a company doing software for these things and we thought it was a cool term microsoft when we had been kids and sending our names in for mailing lists we'd played around with a lot of company names including like allen and gates or things like that but we decided no it'd be better not to have our names in it because it wasn't like a law firm that was always kind of a small thing you know we thought hey we're going to have a big company so i'll have this you know a company name and so microsoft was a very natural choice well microsoft was only a few people and and we'd written this basic and the idea was to license it to lots of companies and then to write other software and so the head of mitts said he could help us market it to other people and take a sales commission for that and i wrote the contract so that if they weren't serious about promoting it and putting a lot of investment into that they would lose that right and that was the best efforts clause a very strong requirement and they never got serious about that and yet they kind of like the idea of them having the basic and other people not and so we were discussing that how we were going to resolve this problem because we needed to license that other people and we were doing all the work to license it to other people even though they were getting this commission and right at that time another company pertech bot mitts and then those people got confused about the contract and so that they weren't even paying us the money they owed us uh they were essentially trying to starve us and so we terminated the contract and it had an arbitration clause it was arbitrated that you know the arbitrator found that we were right uh out of five out of five reasons to terminate the contract we were only right about five of them uh and so that contract was terminated and then we had to like we ended up having to do uh built our our sales and marketing activities and by them we started to have some other programs as well so we started to hire more people and things really got going the big thing though is that because pertek moved that company out to california we no longer had a reason to be in albuquerque because you couldn't recruit his people there as uh easily as you could to other locations and so we talked about where to move and eventually in 1979 we move up to seattle my parents had been fantastic throughout my whole student career i mean getting me to go to lakeside that my senior at lakeside where i wanted to take time off and do this job at trw they've been very supportive of that letting me live down in vancouver washington i challenged him a little bit when some of the the my coworkers trw said i should skip undergraduate and just go to graduate school and they were not enthused about that it looked like i would have an opportunity to do that but i didn't i i just went to harvard and that was another case where they were right that you know socially being with other undergraduates was good i got to take graduate courses up at mit and i did that to a limited degree so i i kind of had the best of both worlds anyway when it came time to uh go on leave from harvard the policies of the school about if you're gone letting you come back are incredibly generous and so if the enterprise had failed then you know i would have been back and so my parents were a little surprised and kind of wondering what it meant but they were pretty supportive and in fact when we got into this legal dispute uh with per tech you know my dad gave me good advice he was uh very supportive on on that and so we saw that through and you know then as the company became successful they you know i hope they felt better about it you know the only really bad case was if if i stayed and the company was kind of mediocrely successful if it failed it would be okay if it was a big success it would be okay and they you know they could see i was very energized and i thought you know we needed to get in at the very beginning and not waste a year or two which is what i had left of my undergraduate course requirements college is amazing there's all these smart kids sitting around you can talk about anything you know there's courses you can go to [Music] there's tests to see if you know what you're talking about there's nothing better than a great college four-year experience and i would have stayed to the end if it hadn't been uh for the urgency you know i watch lots of college lectures uh online now because you know i i enjoyed that so much so you know unless you have something that's really uniquely amazingly time dependent uh you know it's a great thing to to finish the degree well i don't think it would have been a dramatic setback you you know we would have figured out what mistake we'd made and you know eventually gotten the thing running it turns out even though we were in this big rush there weren't many other people doing serious work at the time it was another couple of years before other software companies showed up and even then they weren't that serious about hiring people they didn't have people who really understood about writing software and how you created a company around writing software they didn't figure out the global nature of the market so we would have been fine but it it was certainly exciting that there was there was no mistake at all microsoft was at the center of the personal computer revolution in particularly in particular the creation of a software market where you went out to lots of companies and encouraged them to write software for different applications mundane applications wild applications that idea that that you would encourage people to be creative and build software and there'd be a whole industry around that microsoft believed in that and no one else did and so we got that going and that's led now to where you have all these great choices and it just keeps getting better and better and it's because of the volume of machines out there it can be sold very very inexpensively so that whole bootstrap getting the industry going making it it personal making there be lots of software that's what we are the most proud of i think the american dream is kind of a global dream now that young people can come up with new ideas and and create companies that make a contribution uh not just jobs but whatever their innovations that they bring about you know capitalism is this unbelievable open system that if you combine it with uh good infrastructure good education the creativity that we find uh for people who've had that those chances is always going to surprise us it's always going to come up with new seeds new medicines new software new movies you know things that are or make the world a better place the foundation got started um in the late 90s with my dad encouraging me uh an executive named patty stonecipher who left microsoft were helping out i was still very busy our kids were very young but we got going we put computers and libraries in many different countries including the united states we did some scholarship things we were learning about reproductive health and population issues and that kept growing and we met people who knew about vaccines and so it was a part-time thing global health was a bit over half the u.s focused uh library scholarship education work was over a quarter uh it was a final piece that relates to other things to help the poorest other than just health uh things things like finance and savings and it you know it grew and then i saw that i could make a unique contribution there and created a transition plan uh that was four years in the making and so now i'm full time at the foundation and playing a role of being the chairman and traveling a lot uh so it's you know it's equally challenging it's very fulfilling it's taking this these resources that i'm lucky enough to have because of the success of microsoft and giving those back to the society in a way that can have the biggest impact we need new vaccines we need cheap vaccines we need vaccines that are easy to deliver even in these the poorest places where something like having refrigerators is is tough to do and it does connect to my experience at microsoft of finding great scientists making sure they understand the problems that are important getting them focused on those things having milestones uh even if they're setbacks and making sure if this possibility is still there that they get the the proper backing this is something that governments don't do much of they they fund a lot of the great delivery the foreign aid is is very very important but on the discovery side there's been a deep under investment whether it's a malaria vaccine tuberculosis vaccine about 20 different diseases that if things go well we'll have vaccines for most of those within the next decade and so the foundation is really taking the lead financing those that scientific work and you know already some have been discovered some are getting out there but there's a lot more still to be done

Channel: Academy of Achievement

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Id: TOa4ufQxqFU

Length: 56min 22sec (3382 seconds)

Published: Tue May 10 2016