As Microsoft celebrates its 50th birthday, I had the chance to sit down with my friend and the company’s cofounder, Bill Gates. We discuss his memoir, Source Code: My Beginnings, Microsoft’s impact over the past 50 years, and how the next phase of the digital revolution is the most exciting one yet.
As Microsoft celebrates its 50th birthday, I had the chance to sit down with my friend and the company’s cofounder, Bill Gates. We discuss his memoir, Source Code: My Beginnings, Microsoft’s impact over the past 50 years, and how the next phase of the digital revolution is the most exciting one yet.
Click here for the episode transcript.
Bill Gates: Back in my youth, hearing, "Oh, some lab had a computer that wasn't being used from midnight to 3:00 AM," I would get up and try to get in there and get access. Now when I say a computer on every desk and in every home, people are like, "Well, what's so revolutionary about that?" And it's crazy that the dream came true.
Brad Smith: That's Bill Gates, Microsoft's co-founder and someone I've known for more than 30 years. As Microsoft prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary, Bill and I sat down to talk about his new book, Source Code. From Bill's early days in Seattle to the rise of the software industry today, his journey has been nothing short of remarkable. My conversation with Bill Gates, up next on Tools and Weapons.
Great. Well, Bill, thank you for being here. This is a great opportunity to catch up. Here we are approaching the 50th anniversary of the company that you started when you were a student. When you think back to those days as a kid, did you ever dream that you could create a company that would survive for 50 years producing software?
Bill Gates: No. I was worried about surviving to the next year and I think that was part of our strength is we always thought what happened to companies like Digital or Wing that were the great ones as I was going up and how they lost their way. And so, we were always running scared. We knew the dream, personal computer, computing was going to be gigantic and was going to change the world, but whether or not year by year we could stay on top of that, I was always pretty modest and able to worry a lot.
Brad Smith: You've added yet another great book to the list of things that you've done over your career. Source Code: My Beginnings, your beginnings, Microsoft's beginnings, really the software industry's beginnings as well, but it's actually a story that starts with you as a kid.
Bill Gates: Yeah, I was 13 in 8th grade out at this private, at the time, boys school, Lakeside, and the mother's club put aside some money to get us a terminal so we could dial in to a big General Electric computer that ran the basic language. That was a fairly new thing. And I was good at math, and so Paul Allen challenged me to come down and see if I could work with him to figure it out. Two other kids, Kent and Rick, really got obsessed. The teachers found it intimidating, so they left us alone. In fact, at one point, they had us teach computer programming in one of the math classes. And although the programs back then were so simple, Tic Tac Toe was one of my first, the idea that it would work or not work and thinking, "Okay, what can we get it to do and how do these computers work? How good are they going to get?" just was so fascinating. That was my childhood, was thinking about software.
Brad Smith: One of the interesting things I find about your book is it captures not just the state of technology, but call it the state of the world and call it the late '60s, early '70s. It really was a world before software. Everything was managed on paper, processed by hand, including how people got paid. And you went out and you got a contract to create a software program called Payroll. You really were kids working in an adult world.
Bill Gates: Yeah, the exposure we had to adults writing software who would give us feedback, it was really pretty phenomenal. And each project we did, we got a little more sophisticated until the one I was able to take time off my senior of high school and do, which was a very complex project where digital equipment and TRW had sent some of their very best people to do this power grid control, and that's where I really got the final help of what it meant to be a very good programmer.
TRW had bid the project and had missed the deadline. So they were paying penalties and they were saying to Digital Equipment, whose computers, PDB-10s, were being used, find us everybody who's good at these computers. And one of the people, Bud Pembroke, who'd worked with us on that Payroll project, knew that we knew that PDB-10 very well. So he said to them, "Okay, you're desperate. There's Allen and Gates." And they're like, "They're somebody you haven't mentioned. Oh, my God, go get them." And he said, "But they are kids." They said, "We don't care."
So I go down there, I'm like 16, but I look about 13. They hire us, they pay us. It's a really amazing project to try and get it to be reliable enough and how you process the data, and so many good people were there that they got a kick out of how quickly I could write code and then telling me where I wasn't doing it well. And that was a really maturing product project.
Brad Smith: Now, one of the interesting recurring storylines from Lakeside and then your student years at Harvard was computer time was scarce. It was controlled. Wasn't even necessarily for sale. So you all are always scrounging around one way or another. Even at Harvard, you're sneaking Paul Allen who's not a student at Harvard into the Harvard Computer Lab. You get in a little bit of trouble.
Bill Gates: Yeah, it's hard to think now when you let your personal computer sit there idle, all the processing cycles. Back in my youth, hearing, "Oh, some lab had a computer that wasn't being used from midnight to 3:00 AM," I would get up and try to get in there and get access. So we did anything because they were expensive, but that's what we needed, computer time to try out our software development. And so that's when the microprocessor comes along, we say, "Wait a minute, this whole thing about computing being expensive is going to come to an end."
And maybe because we were so young or just the mathematical concept of exponential improvement, somehow we saw that in a way, and Paul deserves credit because he was the one reading all the hardware and chip things and telling me that Moore's law was doubling every two years. And I was the one who said, "Wait a minute, that's like the grains of sand on the chessboard." The numbers get very big very quickly. And I literally used the word free computing, which will mean it'll be used millions of times more. And the only thing that will limit that is what kind of software is available to help you get jobs done. And that's where we thought we could come in.
Video Clip VO: What is the essence of Microsoft?
Bill Gates: I think there's a lot of elements that go into it, a vision of what software could do.
Video Clip VO: What was the vision? What was your vision?
Bill Gates: Well, computer on every desk and in every home.
Video Clip VO: I don't have one on my home or in my desk.
Bill Gates: We're working on that.
Video Clip VO: Vice versa.
Brad Smith: You and Paul founded this company, Micro-Soft. Micro for the microcomputer, Soft for software, as you said earlier, on a dream. How would you define looking back the way you all thought of that dream?
Bill Gates: Well, it's crazy that the dream came true. I mean, now when I say a computer on every desk and in every home, people are like, "Well, what's so revolutionary about that?"
Brad Smith: But that was the original tagline, the original mission statement.
Bill Gates: Yeah, and we actually made it come true. No, it's wild that take the seven most valuable companies in the world. I know all these people. It was car companies and oil companies and now they're way down the list and the company Steve Jobs built or Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, people who came in a little later but had the same dream that something magical was happening with software.
Brad Smith: And before you could make the dream come true, you did have to build a company that would last week by week, quarter by quarter. Paul was focused on hardware. You were focused on software and the business, but you also understood there were certain skills that you needed help in addressing.
Bill Gates: Yeah, in the early days, I tried doing everything and I was so worried about having enough revenue that even products that weren't done, I would go to these Japanese companies and say, "Hey, we'll do this and we'll customize it for that." And we were falling behind. And so the ability to hire enough people, and I thought back to the great friendship I had with Steve Ballmer at Harvard where we talked about the world. And Steve, although different than me, also has an amazing amount of energy. And so I knew I needed Steve to come. It was a tough recruitment. My parents helped me out, but then he drops out of business school and that's a huge milestone for Microsoft because his ability to think about how we organized and how we hired people and then later bringing in some adults like Jon Shirley, Frank Gaudette, Mike Maples, Steve is key to letting us really scale up. And so, he and I, day and night, I'm bringing a technical view, he's bringing a people view and that works phenomenally.
Brad Smith: And the dream did come true.
Bill Gates: Totally. I mean, I remember when the Forbes 400 list came out and I saw Gordon Moore from Intel was on there and thinking, "Well, I'm seeing a computer on every desk and there are a lot of desks. I don't have to make that much money per desk." So then, it's bizarre. We go public. We use that as a way to even increase the visibility of the company. And next thing we know, Microsoft's an incredibly valuable company. I think around 2000 is we became the world's most valuable company.
Mr. Chairman, the software industry, which contributed over 100 billion to the national economy last year, is an open economic opportunity for any entrepreneur in America. I believe the American people are bursting with a natural curiosity and energy that will keep this revolution going well into the next century.
Brad Smith: Here we are at the 50-year mark of what you created. When you look at the next quarter-century for, say, the world of technology, what's the next great dream that we all should be thinking about?
Bill Gates: Well, amazingly, I would still say that the progress of the digital revolution as we enter this next phase is the biggest change agent in the world, even more than insights in biology and energy. And in fact, it'll be at the center of accelerating those things. And so computing did become free and a lot of great software was written. The internet connects all these things, mobile phones come along, but here now we're talking about real deep intelligence. And it's early days in the world of intelligence, but as we improve the accuracy, as we get the memory done properly, we are going to go from intelligence being a very scarce thing, medical diagnosis, enough personal tutors for all the kids in the world, to where that becomes abundant.
So it's even more profound than computing becoming free. So I'm so excited because if you think of any specific problem, drugs for malaria or cancer or Alzheimer's, we're going to have it. I also, like many observers, worry that it's pretty disruptive because it's so novel, it's moving quickly and there's no upper bound to how good it gets, but this is the most important thing going on born out of that digital revolution.
Brad Smith: One of the things that I think is so interesting about the course of your career is you have never separated yourself from the world of technology, but you've progressively added a real focus on more and more other fields. I still remember, I think the day I saw this for the first time, you gave a talk to our employees back in the early 2000s. You were still an employee, but you were spending more time on foundation work as well. And I went home and told my wife, "Bill can go as deep about a mosquito as he can about code and software." So you see perhaps better than most people how to use this technology to address all of these fields. It's become a catalyst, but how do we bring people together to really master what is now very much a multidisciplinary quest?
Bill Gates: Yeah, I've been fascinated to go out to Newark schools and see Khanmigo, that Khan Academy Sal built on top of the partnership Microsoft has with OpenAI, and to see, okay, how is it being used? Can this tutor help with motivation? Can it help with the fact that five kids are behind, five kids are ahead and they're going to be bored if we don't do it really well? We're doing medical diagnosis work in Africa where you have such a shortage of doctors that most people never meet one. And we're helping pregnant women get advice. We're helping farmers get advice. And so it's really cool to see how we take the cost, the accuracy, the memory, all those things and really turn it into practical applications, and it's great progress. And so the time I spent with Microsoft on the horizontal technology, giving a little advice, hearing where we're making progress really helps my foundation work, which is health and education and some agriculture are the big things that we do. And so it's really fun back and forth across those things.
I did, during 1975 to 2000, suppress my polymathic instincts and said, "No, I just have to do software or else somebody's going to get ahead of me." And it's when Steve agreed to step up as CEO that I went back. I created the Gates Foundation in the year 2000. I was part-time, but I had to study why kids die and biology and mosquitoes. And then, in 2008 is when I shifted to be full-time foundation and only part-time since then to help Microsoft.
We're working in Southern Africa, moving the malaria border up so that Mozambique and Zambia become malaria-free. And so, project by project, that malaria map will shrink and shrink and shrink.
Brad Smith: One of the other interesting things about your post-Microsoft focus has been not only this diversity of fields, but you have always focused so much on the needs of the developing world, the Global South. I remember when you were first saying, "I'm not going to be traveling to the same place as you guys anymore. I'm going to Africa. You all are going to these other places." 25 years later, we're all going to Africa frequently. But in some ways, I think the history of technology has not been kind to the Global South, especially if you look at electricity as this great general purpose technology that 700 million people still don't have, including 43% of the people in Africa. How do you think about AI in this context?
Bill Gates: Yeah, historically, it's been very slow trickle down. So even on medicines that are more necessary in these countries, you can have a 20-year leg. And the foundation needed to say, "Okay, the private markets do very, very well at many things, but let's find a few things where philanthropy is unique." A disease like malaria, where there is no market because the people have it are very poor. So their voice in the marketplace is muted and let's take this wealth that Microsoft's success created and give it back to those most in need.
The kind of value of looking out for inequality, that's really my parents and their very community-driven values. And then, you apply my numeric thing of, okay, how do you save children's lives and are the very important things being done? And that led me to learn about nutrition and infectious disease and get out there in the field, and it's been very successful. Child death went from 10 million a year to 5 million a year, but we still have a lot more to do.
For technology, it's always been a little tough because you've got to make it super, super cheap. Now with AI, the fact that a cell phone, now that those networks are getting out there, you can have the cloud taking your native language, and even a feature we're just calling a funny phone number. Behind it, there will be a cloud service giving you agricultural advice or telling a pregnant woman about her antenatal checkups. Now, getting those cloud capacities available, I'm sure I'll be coming to Microsoft and my friends in the Middle East and saying, "Okay, a form of foreign aid will be to set aside some of that capacity for these very basic health and education things." And we're doing the experiments and even this idea of gathering the linguistic data and getting in into all the AI models, the cooperation has been fantastic.
Brad Smith: One of the things that I find interesting in the book and that I also see just in knowing you and talking with you is you see in the book the success of Microsoft as a company was more than a business. It was personal to you. I mean, you poured your heart and soul every day into the success of this company. And in a very similar way, when you deal on a daily basis today with the fact that there may be a million people in Africa who would lose access to an HIV drug or to a vaccine or to food, that feels as personal to you now as Microsoft did then. Is that a fair statement?
Bill Gates: Absolutely. I love the work I'm doing at the foundation. I'm backing innovations like I did at Microsoft. Now, some are things like vaccines, but picking the right team of people, putting them together, figuring out the odds of success, what should the backup plans be, and then go out into the field and seeing, "Okay, this thing is working. This thing is not working." So everything I learned at Microsoft, plus some additional things, have put me in, which for my second career has been amazingly fulfilling. It's exceeded my dreams as well. So talk about lucky, I've had two careers that have gone miraculously well. But yes, being a student, being curious, over time learning how to build teams and relationships, I couldn't be doing what I'm doing today without the mistakes and the things I did well that I learned so much at Microsoft.
Windows 95 is so easy, even a talk show host can figure it out.
Brad Smith: One of the other things I found working with you in the early 2000s, intense days of anti-trust cases and the like. Everybody said, "Bill Gates, he must be intense." You always had a sense of humor, this ability in the middle of an intense conversation to step back and just laugh at what was going on in the right way. Where did that come from?
Bill Gates: Yeah, the lawyer who's deposing me, David Boies, he didn't appreciate my sense of humor, so I need to turn it off sometimes. I think that was such an intense situation and we did some of our best work was to really tell our story there and having you help with that. I mean, when I write my second book, really talking about the emotional and the challenge... I mean, I'm not trying to get anyone to feel sorry for me. My life is not what anybody should feel sorry for. But I think there are some lessons out of how we went through what felt to me like it could've killed the company altogether. There were literally proposed remedies that would've eviscerated Microsoft altogether. And so through that intensity, you've got to have a sense of humor. There was that time when I was testifying, and during the break the clerk comes up to me and says, "Oh, Mr. Gates, I know people who have your scholarship. What are you doing in DC?" And all my complex testimony that day, the press covered that.
Brad Smith: Yes, it was true.
Bill Gates: Coming up to me and it made me seem at least a tiny bit more human than my image at the time was.
Brad Smith: And if we look at the Microsoft today and where we're going the next several years, it's a product of some big bets and lots of little decisions as well. One of the biggest bets I would say that you were involved in making, Steve was involved in making, our board, I was there in the room, was the choice of Satya Nadella. It was announced 11 years ago now. Looking back, how do you think about that day and that decision?
Bill Gates: Well, I'll tear up on this because it meant a lot to me. I've had two successors, and boy do I feel lucky because as I went off to do the foundation work, the one thing that plagued me was was I going to see the company fade in terms of its excellence and would I be haunted by, should I go back? Should I not go back? So the fact that Steve took us to new heights and the fact that, through a process that almost made the wrong decision, although you and Steve and I never wavered from knowing Satya would be good, and he's been even better at navigating what even today remains one of the most complex CEO jobs in the world. It makes me feel so good that I get to just come in and play very bit role of doing product reviews, learning about AI, getting some help from Microsoft on the work that I'm doing, and it's allowed me to throw everything in and to have the incredible resources that my Microsoft ownership created.
Brad Smith: So as we draw to a close, I want you to think back a little bit to these 50 years and where you started and where you are, and there are people who are listening to this who used to work at Microsoft, who do work at Microsoft, work somewhere in the world of technology or just use our products every day. What would you wish for all of us to think about as a parting thought?
Bill Gates: Well, 50 years is a long time, and it's so weird that in my 20s, we considered people in our 40s and 50s to be old people who didn't get what was going on, but maybe they could help us a little bit. The idea that I'm 69 turning 70 and I'm still trying to help out and getting to do amazing forward-looking projects, it's wild. We have come so far, and to always try and adjust, okay, this is the new world where even intelligence is coming and how do you shape that in the right way, which will be super important. So I'm very proud of Microsoft. We've had amazing people, Paul, Steve, Satya high up, but so many incredible people, and it's so cool that it's still an amazing company all these years. It's not like some other industry came along. We've managed to stay at the forefront.
Brad Smith: Well, it's a company that started with a dream from kids who were accepted into an adult world because of what they could do rather than how old they were or mastering all the other skills of adults. I still think we're an industry that has a lot of dreams ahead of us. Thank you for trying to help out as you put out. You accomplish more in a day by trying than a lot of people do in a lifetime, and I hope you will keep at it.
Bill Gates: Well, thanks. I'm still a student and working with Microsoft helps me learn a lot.
Brad Smith: I think we all are forever. So Bill Gates, thanks for joining me.
Bill Gates: Thank you.
Brad Smith: See you.