Ask HN: How did Steve Ballmer get 8% when he joined Microsoft?

8 points·a3voices··6 comments

He was employee #30. I'm just wondering why he was given so much?

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ballmer

Microsoft, perhaps in part by virtue of being outside the Valley, never took venture capital. Like a traditional business there was a little FFF [friends, family, and fools] money, but essentially it was bootstrapped.

This meant that Gates and Allan could essentially make Ballmer a third founder five years after the company's founding - a point where venture capital funds are often looking toward creating an exit and would definitely be disinclined toward diluting equity for the sake of a hire.

The independence of Gates, Allen. and Ballmer allowed Microsoft to structure employee equity and tine the IPO in a way that made 12,000 millionaires and retain enough equity to effectively ignore Wall Street until Gates and Ballmer began reducing their stakes over the last two or so years

Did he get 8% at start, or did he accumulate 8% over the years through stock awards?

Back then MS was a tiny company. 8% wasn't seen as much and they wanted a somewhat older management type with some qualifications. I think BillG might have known of SteveB from his short stint at Harvard.

Bill Gates is older than Steve Ballmer, they were friends, and his stint at Harvard was not short

FOB, smarter than Bill, and probably the only guy who'd taken an MBA class.

What Ballmer brought to Microsoft was a different skill set. It was no more about an MBA class or two than it was about the CS classes Gates took during his year at Harvard. Running a business was something that interested Ballmer analogous to Gates interest in programming.

Diversifying the skill set of the core team was probably a key factor in Microsoft's successful growth over the next three decades

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