How Bill Gates and Warren Buffett met | Hacker News Reader

How Bill Gates and Warren Buffett met

cnbc.com

47 pointswslh9 comments

Was Gates' mom the kind of person who would be going to dinner parties with Buffet even if her son wasn't a billionaire at that point? I know the Gates were kind of big, but I always assumed in a modest regional way, and not the kind of go to dinner with the most influential people in the world kind of way.

Apparently. She was on a charity board with the CEO of IBM. That's how Microsoft got it's DOS break.

She was the first female president of King County's United Way, the first woman to chair the national United Way’s executive committee where she served most notably with IBM's CEO, John Opel, and the first woman on the First Interstate Bank of Washington's board of directors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates

Yes! And somehow this part is always left out when telling the tale of MS and Bill Gates. While in my opinion, it's one of the biggest reasons of the success.

No company can survive and strive so many years because of a single event like this, not even multiple few lucky events.

I don't also think other people have had the gut and attitude to negotiate a non exclusive agreement with IBM at that time.

You are absolute correct. And in no way I want to say Bill Gates didn't deserve his success.

But it's hard to argue that this didn't have any effect on the deal that basically made Microsoft.

See, now that is TWICE as informative as the entire article. I never knew that.

> "It's important to associate with people that are better than yourself."

We hear this repeated often, but how does it really work? It's impossible to do if everyone tries to follow this advice, because if you associate with people who are better than yourself, then they themselves being with you associate themselves with people worse than themselves.

It only works if we consider "better" in multiple dimensions; I associate with people who are better than me in a given dimension, while I'm better than them in some other dimension.

But then isn't it simply trivial / obvious that everyone is better at something and worse at something else?

I think they have to be better than you in something you care about (or aspire to be better at) for it to matter to you. Seems like you're overcomplicating this... :-)

Probably a little more practical to say, "Be sure that some of the people you associate with are better than yourself."

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