Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Hits Out at Gates
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
To make an analogy with Apple, if anything, his role at Microsoft was more like that of Steve Jobs, rather than that of Steve Wozniak; he provided the vision, he made the business calls that made Microsoft. Bill Gates does have a different style than Steve Jobs and doesn't have the same distortion field and attractiveness, but his speeches at Ted are great nonetheless (which makes me think he was bored at Microsoft :)).
1) Is it that to make it really big, to the likes of Microsoft, Facebook a founder has to play games and trick his own friends in a way that the founder owns majority of stake in the company. I am not necessarily saying it is bad, it is just a observation and want your opinion. It is totally possible that one of the co-founders is so passionate about the idea that he works hard by twice or thrice as much as other cofounder and in the process somehow manages to get hold of major equity. What do you think? Is it necessary to be evil to make it big? Does your passion blind you somewhere in the process where one cannot distinguish right from "not so much right"?
2) I dont see and havent heard about Steve Jobs being great friends with Steve Wozniak. So is Bill gates with Paul Allen. Facebook Mark Z and other cofounders have some fights between them too. Given this and stories from similar or smaller companies, it makes me think, is it possible to have a good and healthy friend ship like relationship with your co-founder after a period of time? Or with the turn of events in the company it is bound to happen that the relationship will go sour? What do you guys think?
Hopefully, he can ruthlessly solve a few of the long-running problems in the world.
(The excerpt in VF is very good: http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/05/paul-all...)
and a greater level of privilege to free speech, imho.
I guess Paul just wants the world to know that the image of Gates as our benevolent patron of philanthropy is itself revisionism, lest anyone forget that Bill Gates was one of the least loyal and trustworthy friends a person could ask for.
It doesn't surprise me that HN sides with the victor in cases like this, but I would argue that any serious business person should watch and learn carefully from the lessons of two close friends who changed the world and ended up disliking each other.
Are you referring to the discussion Gates and Ballmer had about diluting Allen? That seems to be a way to dilute a founder who was slacking off. The word partnership is used several times; this may imply that everybody was 100% vested already. If so, this is the only thing they could do to somebody who wasn't pulling his weight.
Ownership shares are not like salary (imho): they're not just for past work, but also for future contributions.
Without specifics on to what extent exactly they were planning to dilute him, I am not prepared to condemn BillG. YMMV.
Jobs' actual cheating through a straightforward lie to Woz wrt how much they got paid for Atari's contract job they did is FAR worse than a planning conversation BillG had. IMHO. http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/hackers/steve-wozniak/
I've met Bill Gates, so I'll stick with my personal opinion. You're entitled to yours.
Where have you supported that claim? If you've "met" BG, I invite you to post some already-known anecdotes etc about his conduct as a friend, which is exactly what I asked about.
Gates and Allen were friends at when they went to school together. I went to the same school some years after them, and drew my own opinions based on first and second hand experiences with both of them.
No matter what you believe about the quality of their friendship, there's a teaching lesson for co-founders in their story.
Here are some his "inventions":
You of 10 Years Ago != You of Today
People change with time, and are not necessarily the same as they were in the past. Forming a collective of ones entire life and cherry-picking various moments simply gives you highlights, both good and bad. They don't speak to what the person is right now.
Probably your best bet to gage someone is to look at what they've been doing recently, going back maybe no more than ~5 years. Here you'll see someone whose learned from their past mistakes, likely acting differently due to life lessons, and are essentially the most authentic "version" of a person they currently are.
At that level, money is more about points than bucks. He's not upset he can buy fewer baseball teams, he's upset that his status was being lowered and he was being disrespected and treated as prey/
As far as the former partners go, Cringely claims Allen has been dissociated financially for a long time:
> Maybe that�s just the sort of fiduciary discussion board members have to have, but it didn�t go over well with Paul Allen, who never returned to Microsoft, and over the next eight years, made huge efforts to secure his wealth from the fate of Microsoft. He sold large blocks of shares on a regular basis no matter whether the price was high or low. Then in October and November of 2000, just as he was finally leaving the Microsoft board, Allen did a series of financial transactions involving derivative securities called �collars,� that are a combination of a right to buy and a right to sell the stock at different prices such that both his upside and downside financial potential are limited. By the end of 2000, though Allen technically still owned 136 million Microsoft shares, his wealth was for practical purposes separate from that of Gates, Ballmer, and the rest of Microsoft.
Inasmuch as Cringely reported essentially the same anecdote as in the _Vanity Fair_ excerpts, I'm inclined to take him at his word when he writes about Allen's finances.
I've never understood that. At what point do you make enough money to say whatever the hell you want, without any fear of repercussions? What's the point of having all that money if you have to worry about what other wealthy people think of you?
The quote about Paul wanting significantly more shares for his contributions to SoftCard specifically ring true. SoftCard might have been a sales success, but comparing it's impact on Microsoft to Basic itself is a little off.
I don't discount the importance of SoftCard, it was actually key in the development of the relationship between IBM and Microsoft in the 80s, but even more key was the building of the relationship itself, which was largely driven by Gates.
Allen's attitude at the time reminds me of software developer coworkers who over emphasis the contributions that software development makes. I can understand Gates' reaction - Gates' job was not any easier and certainly not any less important, so why redistribute shares?
Is that a mistake?
"While my recollection of many of these events may differ from Paul's, I value his friendship and the important contributions he made to the world of technology and at Microsoft," Mr. Gates said in a written statement.
I hate to seem callous here, but, that might've completely made sense. God forbid if Allen had died, the company, still pre-IPO startup whose main product was MS-DOS (pre Office or any version of Windows) would want its shares controlled by people with business interests in the company. When you are a startup you want to align incentives properly and yes, people who are unfortunately unable to contribute, even if it's through no fault of their own probably shouldn't have huge amounts of stock.
Besides that allegation I don't really know what else here is that negative on Bill Gates.
edit: MS-DOS not MS-DOC. Mistyped
That's why even founders should be on a vesting schedule.
In all my commercial ventures, my partners were also my friends. I would never, ever even entertain doing something like this to a perfectly healthy partner, much less one with a serious health problem.
As noted by someone else, they should have simply retained first option to buy any portio of Allen's shares in the case where his shares would change hands. Actually that should probably apply to all major insiders.
Intentionally trying to dilute his shares, if this did indeed happen, is tantamount to stealing in my eyes.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20060330_0008...
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20060330_0008...
Edit: Beaten to the punch by about 2 hours. Oops.
And I can't help but draw parallels with The Social Network, which incidentally is also an account by an 'ousted' co-founder.
Many of his business investments, like the cable company Charter Communications, software company Asymetrix Corp. and set-top box maker Digeo Inc., have either flopped or fared poorly for him.
I don't think so:
He obviously wants his book to be successful (though not for monetary reasons) so it would make senese to write about something controversial - in this case putting Bill Gates in negative light is obviously the easist way to get attention.
At 13 he enrolled in the Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school. When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy an ASR-33 teletype terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school's students. Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. When he reflected back on that moment, he said, "There was just something neat about the machine." After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students—Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.
baloney.