How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates | Hacker News Reader

How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates

philip.greenspun.com

77 pointsr11t31 comments

My favorite BillG story (told by the CEO of a startup I worked for - and just found the real version via Google). Yes, it is a standard business koan (e.g. why would I fire you because we just spend X amount educating you) but can you imagine any average CEOs doing that?

"What are the greatest business lessons Bill has taught you over the years?

Very early in my career at Microsoft, around February 1984, we found a data-crashing bug. I wondered if I would get fired over it. I went to Bill with the head of development. I was then the product manager.

It was a classic meeting. Bill was on the couch looking down. I explained that we found this bug and that we thought we were going to have to recall the product. He nodded, did his rocking thing and kept looked down. We were both wondering if we would get fired. Bill wasn't saying anything so my anxiety was growing.

I explained that we're going to have to recall the product, and that it's going to cost several hundred thousand dollars and be a hit to our reputation. Bill rocks and looks down. We didn't have anything else to say. I thought: Is this when the ax comes?

Then Bill looks up and says: "You came in today and lost a few hundred thousand dollars. You come in tomorrow and hope you do better."

His expectation wasn't that we weren't going to make mistakes. He wanted to know that we took it seriously and learned from our mistakes. That's very motivating."

http://www.forbes.com/2008/06/25/raikes-bill-gates-tech-cz_v...

And, if you harbor doubts about Bill Gates' technical ability:

My First BillG Review by Joel Spolsky

"He was flipping through the spec! [Calm down, what are you a little girl?]

... and THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE MARGINS.

He Read The Whole Thing! [OMG SQUEEE!]

The questions got harder and more detailed."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

There is a nice little koan about technical management in that essay too: "he just wants to make sure .."

* Note - submitted this last night but should have put it in the original comment - my submissions auto-bury themselves.

I think this is about as accurate an account as you'll get in regards to how Bill Gates made his money.

Yes, his entire family was rich and his parents were well connected (when most people tell the story they leave out "Bill Gates got the call from IBM because his mother was on their board")

Yes he got unbelievably lucky (so much so that he turned down IBM, sent them to the makers of QDOS, and still made the deal after QDOS blew it)

and Yes, he's not a great hacker (he's smart and knows enough about technology but the couple Gen 1 Microsoft employees I've met say he can't code worth a darn)

But even with all that he would have failed if not for his keen business insight and technical accumen. I guess you need both luck and skill to become the richest man in the world (but I'm betting skill can still get you pretty rich)

> and Yes, he's not a great hacker (he's smart and knows enough about technology but the couple Gen 1 Microsoft employees I've met say he can't code worth a darn)

What? I'm pretty sure Gates is the quintessential technical founder. He wrote the original Altair BASIC implementation himself in something like a week, and snuck into University of Washington's computer labs in the middle of the night in high school. I don't think I've ever seen anything that implied otherwise.

Being able to create something quick that's workable doesn't really indicate that you're a good programmer.

As far as never hearing anything about it, I based the statement on a couple personal accounts. But "Barbarians Led By Bill Gates: Microsoft From The Inside" has an account of at least one programmer calling Gates code terrible. The programmer in question co-wrote the book so you have to take it with a grain of salt but it seems true because the story he tells is one that paints Gates in a positive light (he doesn't fire the guy for calling his code junk right to his face)

One often-overlooked aspect is that for business purposes, the first priority is to have something that gets the job done. Release early and often, then iterate towards perfection - but only for what your customer wants.

This generally means that its not great, but it works. If time permits, it is great to tidy / refactor bad code, but this is not always possible. Reminds me of an item posted a couple of weeks ago - "confessions of a terrible programmer"

Wait. Wait. Backtrack for a second.

The year is 1974, and Linux, Mac, and Windows haven't been invented yet. There is no IDE, no SDK, and no documentation. Actually, there's no development environment at all. There are no APIs, either. Ruby, Python, Java, and friends are till 10 years or more from being invented. And yet, Gates wrote an interpreted language, on his own, in a week. Put differently, Gates wrote a language in a CAVE, with SCRAPS, in a WEEK.

It's easy to think that now we'd just Google it and scrape it together using copypasta if we really needed to. Hell, not only was there not Google, but there was no technical community to ask questions. Don't forget what he was really working with there.

Being able to create something quick that's workable doesn't really indicate that you're a good programmer.

It doesn't?? Then what does? Quick and usable in the business world is practically the holy grail of programming!!!

Ever play the "Gorillas" game in GW-BASIC that shipped with many copies of MS-DOS.

Bill Gates wrote that.

And was proud of it.

Yeah. When I was a kid. Everyone played it and enjoyed it. So what? Donkey.bas on the other hand...

Gorillas.bas? Are you sure? I can't find a reference. In particular Wikipedia makes no mention of it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GORILLAS.BAS

(It was also QBasic, not GW-BASIC)

Donkey.bas, on the other hand, was co-authored by Gates, according to Wikipedia.

He also set up the class rosters for high school, surrounding himself with all the cute girls.

> and Yes, he's not a great hacker (he's smart and knows enough about technology but the couple Gen 1 Microsoft employees I've met say he can't code worth a darn)

I disagree. I've met & talked with an early Microsoft employee who interacted directly with Gates. He was very impressed with Gates' technical ability, and more importantly, his ability to convert technical knowledge into business advantage.

That's does not seem to contradict.

I've always wondered if the advice to avoid argument and criticism from "How to Win Friends and Influence People" was at odds with internal business meetings. It seems that extremely successful businessmen like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison create a culture where criticism and argument form the cauldron from which great ideas are culled. At the same time, the human mind is seldom changed by argument or logic.

My current opinion is that the Dale Carnegie way of business is great for sales or extremely flat organizations, but in larger or more established organizations, credible and aggressive (almost totalitarian) leadership can build "consensus" more effectively through argumentation, criticism, and decisiveness.

Does anyone have any tips on how best to arrive at decisions in a <4 person startup?

In a small place like that, consensus must rule because the founders are basically equal. At a place like Microsoft, Oracle, Apple - the answer is that the big guys built the place and gave everyone their jobs so therefore they answer to them. Who are you? Some guy who just went through college and took no risk in joining some giant in their field. Who are they? The guys who took the risks to start those places. So if they think your ideas are shit, then they can say it and you have to take it. But at a company of 4 people, who are you? You are just a co founder of a (probably as of yet unprofitable) little startup company. Where are you getting the power to call their work shit from? Plus, if its a guy like that their time is extremely valuable and you are wasting it with your shit ideas.

I bet if you go into microsoft and sit in on the development meetings between a team on basically the same level on the org chart, they aren't nearly as hostile as top down reviews.

I've been racking my brain for months trying to remember where I saw a quote that turns out to be in that article. "The reason that you've having trouble is that you don't know anything and you're not working very hard." Thanks for that.

Lesson 8 is the best part.

Anyone with Bill's off-the-charts intelligence, business savvy, and entrepreneurial drive would end up very wealthy even if they were born in the ghetto. Maybe not Bill Gates wealthy, but more than enough that they'd have no interest in reading this sort of thing.

Anyone is a lofty standard. Some is true, but you don't hear about the super smart guy who worked really hard but for some reason or another luck didn't go his way and then he had no safety net to fall on. I can take risks because although my parents aren't leaving me a trust fund, if shit REALLY hit the fan, I could always move in with them instead of starving in the streets. If you have nobody to lean on, risks seem a lot bigger when you have further to fall.

I actually know a lot of people who did that. They all got by. America at least is a very easy place if you're smart and hard working. That is not true in many parts of the world unfortunately.

A lot of people is still not anyone. I know several people on the other side of the coin who were incredibly smart and ambitious and resourceful and failed, with no one to fall back on, and now have some serious problems in their life. There is no doubt these guys would have bounced back a lot more easily if they had a trust fund to lean on.

I don't think anyone would claim that a trust fund is a disadvantage. But if the people you know are really smart, ambitious, and resourceful, then give them time. They're still just in process.

It might also be a cultural thing. American society is very ambitious, and the environment BG grew up in appears to be on the extreme end of it.

The intelligence factor is harder to measure, but I'm not sure if business savvy and entrepreneurial drive are things you're born with, or traits you pick up as you grow.

All that aside, there are stories where the down and out Joe bootstraps himself to riches through hard work/ambition/etc. so it's hard to say what is causing what. In fact I feel that I'm very ambitious/entrepreneurial, even though my parents were an engineer and chemist for a very large corporation.

Your assumption here is that Bill Gates was born with "off-the-charts intelligence, business savvy and entrepreneurial drive" and nothing about his upbringing affected this in anyway. I think even the strongest genetic determinist would have to concede that's not true, which throws doubt on him even having these qualities if he'd been born and raised elsewhere (ghetto, communist state, refugee camp etc.)

The first 3 steps seem to be optional. Larry and Sergey didn't have rich ancestors or get their ideas by buying them, and it doesn't seem to have harmed them.

True, but Google wouldn't have even been launchable without his family's connections to Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim and his $100k angel investment.

Mark Zuckerberg is a more apt comparison. With all of the money and privilege he had growing up, he'd better be changing the world.

Neither had family connections to Bechtolsheim that I know of. Where did you hear that?

Stanford CS "family".

Without knowing the story (but knowing some of the players), I'd guess that David Cheriton is also involved.

Stanford CS is a "family" you don't have to be born into. You can get into Stanford by being good.

What is interesting is how "optional" it actually is. Being very tall is also "optional" if you want to become an NBA player (Nate Robinson is 5'9"), having working legs is "optional" if you want to climb the everest, etc.

You are a product of your environment. --Clement Stone

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