Despite trillions of dollars of economic damage, Bill Gates is optimistic that a strong pipeline of therapies and vaccines will carry the US through the pandemic. PHOTOGRAPH: JEFF PACHOUD/GETTY IMAGES
Bill Gates is one of the most influential and successful business men, developer, and philanthropist of all of modern history. Gate’s original claim to fame is his trillion dollar business, Microsoft. It is practically impossible to not know about this company unless you haven’t had any human interaction for the past 30 years. They manufacture anything from software to hardware to games and consoles to personal consumer electronics. But as you can probably guess he wasn’t always the billionaire tech guru we know today.
William Henry Gates the third was born in 1955 in Seattle, Washington to William Henry Gates the second and Mary Maxwell. As a child, Gates always had an interest in learning anything and everything. He spent the majority of his time reading and honing his competitive spirit as his parents encouraged him to do so. By age 13, Gates had been enrolled into Seattle’s Lakeside Prep Private School where he would go on to write his very first software program and fatefully meet his future business partner Paul Allen.
Bill Gates (Left) with Paul Allen (Right) in 1981
Through a “rummage sale” held by the school, Gates and Allen were able to use the proceeds to purchase a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal as well as time on a General Electric computer. Gates used this opportunity to create his very first computer program, a computer vs player tic tac toe game. This launched a passion for computers that was unparalleled by anything else in his life. He even got excused from some of his classes to be able to spend additional time on the GE computers coding in BASIC. After his proceeds dried up, Gates and his friends spent their time on PDP minicomputers exploiting bugs in the operating system to get free computer time that would eventually be the cause of a multi-month ban from the Computer Center Cooperation’s (CCC) systems. After this ban, Gates and friends offered their expertise in finding bugs in the OS in exchange for free computer time, creating a longstanding agreement between the boys and the CCC that would hold up until sometime in 1970 when the company went out of business.
The following year, Gates was approached by the school to automate the class scheduling system along with his best friend and first business partner Kent Evans who would go on to be killed in a freak climbing accident before the project was finished. Gates then partnered with Paul Allen to finish the project. Unfortunately for the school, Gates wasn’t one to not exploit loopholes when he sees one. So, the end result of the class scheduling system allowed Gates to place himself in classes exclusively filled with girls during his senior year.
After high school, Gates graduated as a National Merit Scholar and was accepted into Harvard Pre-Law with a 1590 SAT. Although his major was Pre-Law that didn’t stop him from taking computer science and math classes as the majority of his schedule. While at Harvard University, Gates would drop out after two years and go on to meet his Microsoft CEO successor Steve Ballmer who stayed and graduated Harvard Magna Cum Laude.
Prior to his start with Microsoft, Gates got a summer job working for a company that manually analyzed traffic flow patterns which gave Gates the initial idea to create his first company with Allen called Traf-O-Data. The company would offer an automated way of collecting and analyzing traffic flow pattern data to help traffic engineers create reports. The business was noted as a great idea with a horrific business model as Gates and Co had done no market research and had failed time and time again in acquiring capital investment into the business and they were forced to shut it down in 1980 after six years of consistent net loss. However this failure did nothing more than allow Gates and Allen to focus on Microsoft, the company they had previously started in 1975.
By 1986, Microsoft went public making him the youngest self made billionaire in the world at the time (Now a record held by Mark Zuckerberg). During the first five years he served as the head developer and eventually transitioned into management and then as an executive. It has been commonly stated by Gates that if it were not for the failure of or experience with Traf-O-Data then Microsoft would never have been able to reach the heights it has today.
I am one that believes “everything happens for a reason,” and this story did not disappoint! From Gates’s perspective, it was probably unmotivating tough to the ego for his first business to fail, but it is the fact that he persisted through that initial blow that allowed him to find success. This is a great life lesson: let life’s failures fuel a fire for greater achievement. Persevere, learn from mistakes, make no mistakes the next time, and who knows – maybe become the next self-made billionaire!
I thought it was interesting to hear about Bill Gates and his climb to the top of the technological world. I found it odd that his original major going into college was Pre-Law, and think it is incredible that he was the youngest self-made billionaire after dropping out of college. I also got a chuckle out of the bit that stated that he placed himself in a class full of girls his senior year. Great post!