Paul Allen, every mention
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tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 68Ben Gilbert 23Steve Ballmer 8
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Paul Allen comes up
Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire · Acquired
- ▶ 1:17:36 David Rosenthal Uh, they acquire Starwave, Paul Allen's company, uh, after Microsoft.
Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 12:27 Ben Gilbert I'm racking my brain, maybe Bill Gates and Paul Allen, but even then it became very clear very quickly, Bill Gates is the guy.
- ▶ 3:03:20 David Rosenthal Just like Bill and Paul and Microsoft, it was extremely rare that because Google never needed to raise VC money after the Series A, Larry and Sergey, together with the employees in the option pool, you know, controlled the majority of the…
The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired
- ▶ 12:21 Steve Ballmer Paul, uh, Ellen and I went down there.
- ▶ 12:41 Steve Ballmer There was kind of a famous meeting amongst me and Paul, uh, and Bill and this guy, Kazuhiko Nishi, who ran our kind of affiliate in Japan.
- ▶ 35:44 Steve Ballmer Well, Paul Allen, I mean, Paul's the key.
- ▶ 35:48 Steve Ballmer Paul is the one who said, Bill said, we're never going to be a hardware company.
- ▶ 35:53 Steve Ballmer And when the Altair came out, the first real sort of microprocessor based computer, Paul says, okay, let's write all the software that these things will ever need.
- ▶ 36:11 Steve Ballmer So, and Paul was cracking on me in the early eighties.
- ▶ 1:34:54 Steve Ballmer I'm going to tell you why it's either, sure, because we were still on the Paul Allen strategy.
- ▶ 2:27:45 Steve Ballmer I don't know why Paul and Bill didn't hang on.
Epic Systems (MyChart) · Acquired
- ▶ 43:55 David Rosenthal They had kind of a cornered resource as a startup, you know, Microsoft did in Bill Gates and Paul Allen too, but Epic totally did too in Judy.
Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 8:05 David Rosenthal Steve Case, the founder of AOL, isn't interested in selling, but there's this whole thing where Paul Allen goes off by himself and he buys a large stake and that creates all sorts of headaches because Microsoft is like, well, if we can't…
Starbucks (with Howard Schultz) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:35:07 David Rosenthal Bill and Paul got a cold call from Kei Nishi, who was a guy in Japan who had somehow gotten a hold of the basic interpreter, loved it, and said, I'm so passionate about this, I want to bring it to Japan.
Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 9:25 Ben Gilbert His childhood friend and co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen, would say about him, you could tell three things about Bill Gates pretty quickly.
- ▶ 9:43 David Rosenthal So famously, speaking of Paul and where Bill and Paul meet, when Bill is in seventh grade, his parents enroll him at the Lakeside School,
- ▶ 12:46 David Rosenthal He and Paul got a sneak peek into the future there at Lakeside.
- ▶ 16:08 David Rosenthal Now, back to the timing thing for Bill and Paul and Microsoft.
- ▶ 20:30 David Rosenthal And one of his buddies who he forms it with is, of course, the high schooler, I think the 10th grader at the time, Paul Allen.
- ▶ 20:38 Ben Gilbert There is a fantastic photo, listeners, that we will tweet, of Bill and Paul sitting in the computer room at Lakeside.
- ▶ 24:03 David Rosenthal When Bill and Paul and their buddies come into C-cubed, they're now getting access to learn real hardcore systems programming languages, including machine code for the PDP-X.
- ▶ 26:14 David Rosenthal So the next year, Paul graduates from Lakeside and goes off to college at Washington State.
- ▶ 26:41 David Rosenthal Bill and Paul are like, we can take this new thing that's coming out of Intel, a microprocessor, which is promising to be a full computer on one chip, and we can use that, we can build
- ▶ 27:54 David Rosenthal So Paul's like, I got this.
- ▶ 29:28 David Rosenthal But Bill and Paul are getting experience with the microprocessor.
- ▶ 30:08 David Rosenthal And, you know, Bill and Paul are not the only ones having this insight here, too.
- ▶ 30:35 David Rosenthal But Bill and Paul, they absolutely see the vision for what this can grow into and become.
- ▶ 30:44 David Rosenthal Paul and I had talked about the microprocessor, and it was really his insight that because of semiconductor improvements, things would just keep getting better.
- ▶ 30:54 David Rosenthal I said to him, oh, exponential phenomena are pretty rare, pretty dramatic.
- ▶ 31:10 David Rosenthal And Paul was quite convinced of it.
- ▶ 31:16 Ben Gilbert This quote is incredible, because basically Paul Allen brings up Moore's Law to Bill Gates.
- ▶ 31:26 Ben Gilbert And for Paul, this is just an observation of, hey, there's an exponential thing happening here.
- ▶ 33:17 David Rosenthal Even Bill and Paul know the AD-O-E-T
- ▶ 33:43 Ben Gilbert It's literally a quote from Paul Allen.
- ▶ 33:52 Ben Gilbert And Paul says, when it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a 100,000, or better, but there were people who were one in a million, or one in ten million, and some of them wound up at Harvard.
- ▶ 35:49 David Rosenthal I told Paul, DEC can't sell any more PDP-Eights now.
- ▶ 36:59 David Rosenthal So Bill and Paul kind of are sitting around waiting
- ▶ 37:13 David Rosenthal Paul is so convinced that the revolution is coming that he actually drops out of Washington State, moves to Boston to be close to Bill so that they can be ready when it happens, and that summer they both get summer jobs at Honeywell as…
- ▶ 37:28 David Rosenthal Paul stays on into the next school year when Bill goes back to school.
- ▶ 37:32 David Rosenthal He's just like waiting, waiting, waiting.
- ▶ 37:34 David Rosenthal And then in December, 1974, Paul is walking across Harvard Square
- ▶ 37:42 David Rosenthal And he sees in a newsstand the January issue of Popular Electronics.
- ▶ 38:02 David Rosenthal And the legend has it that Paul grabs the magazine, runs over to Bill's dorm, throws open the door, throws the magazine on the desk, and is like, it's here.
- ▶ 38:29 Ben Gilbert And the funniest thing is, the starting gun went off, and Bill and Paul ran, and everyone else is still standing around.
- ▶ 41:59 David Rosenthal And Bill and Paul, they get him on the phone, and they say, we have a basic interpreter ready to go, ready to ship for the AT-AT Intel chip, and we want to provide it for you for your machine.
- ▶ 42:48 David Rosenthal And so Bill and Paul, they say, okay, great.
- ▶ 44:19 David Rosenthal Now back to the Trafo data days and Paul writing the emulator for the ADO eight at Washington state.
- ▶ 44:27 David Rosenthal Paul's like, we got this.
- ▶ 44:51 David Rosenthal So, Bill and Paul, remember, Bill still looks like he's 12 at this point in time.
- ▶ 44:55 David Rosenthal They decide that just Paul should go.
- ▶ 44:57 Ben Gilbert And does Paul have like a rockin' beard at this point yet?
- ▶ 45:00 David Rosenthal Oh, Paul is super seventies.
- ▶ 45:08 David Rosenthal So Paul gets on a plane, flies from Boston to Albuquerque, and, you know, in a total, like, epic legend moment, they didn't have a bootloader written for the basic interpreter.
- ▶ 45:21 David Rosenthal So they had the basic, it was all written, they'd done it on the emulator, and Paul's flying out with the tape, the computer tape, with the code of the basic interpreter on it.
- ▶ 46:12 David Rosenthal Paul's like, oh, let's try it again.
- ▶ 46:26 David Rosenthal Paul writes in the instructions, print two plus two.
- ▶ 46:38 David Rosenthal Paul's like, oh my god, the basic works.
- ▶ 46:45 Ben Gilbert And Ed actually has more eggs in this basket than he sort of led on, because when Bill and Paul call and say, hey, can you give us the teletype instructions, he reveals they're actually the only ones who called about that.
- ▶ 47:14 David Rosenthal Bill and Paul originally thought that it was gonna be the IBMs, the DEXs, the Japanese companies who are gonna make the first microcomputers.
- ▶ 51:22 David Rosenthal So Paul and Ed, they kind of hit it off.
- ▶ 51:25 David Rosenthal Paul decides to move out to Albuquerque to be close to the action here, and he actually joins Myths as their vice president of software.
- ▶ 52:11 David Rosenthal Bill and Paul kind of need to set up a company, but Paul is an employee of MITS at this point.
- ▶ 52:20 David Rosenthal So the founding of Microsoft at this point, micro dash soft is a two person partnership between Bill and Paul.
- ▶ 52:49 Ben Gilbert I think it's actually a Paul Allen name where he wants to put together microcomputer and software, and Bill's like, that's perfect, we're immediately just gonna run with it.
- ▶ 52:58 Ben Gilbert As it was a partnership, originally they were gonna call it something like Allen and Gates, and then they ultimately are like, no, Microsoft is perfect.
- ▶ 53:21 Ben Gilbert And Gates makes this really clear to Paul Allen, who is often tempted to do hardware stuff, and Bill is very hardcore about saying, no, what we're uniquely good at in the world is software, and we should stick to that.
- ▶ 54:02 David Rosenthal Paul is 40%.
- ▶ 54:04 David Rosenthal Later, it gets changed to Bill is 64%, and Paul is 36%.
- ▶ 54:11 Ben Gilbert And Bill's case that he makes on that to Paul is, hey, you took a job, and you were doing this on the side, I was all in, and Paul's an agreeable guy, and 36 is still a nice percent,
- ▶ 54:40 David Rosenthal This is a big lesson that young Bill and Paul are going to learn here.
- ▶ 56:37 David Rosenthal On the other hand, what are Bill and Paul gonna do here?
- ▶ 57:41 David Rosenthal And the next year in 1976, everybody's so excited about this new market, the vision that's happening, the demand, the Altair, the sales that Paul Allen
- ▶ 1:06:41 David Rosenthal So, Ed though, unbeknownst to Bill and Paul, he has another reason that he's dragging his feet on these deals, which is that he's about to sell the company.
- ▶ 1:10:12 David Rosenthal So, Bill and Paul and Microsoft, they do all these deals, and they do them all as cash up front, fixed cost, all you companies, you're gonna pay us, and then you include the basic in the machines that you're selling, and we're gonna get…
- ▶ 1:13:32 Ben Gilbert B, Bill was doing it himself, Bill and Paul, so the importance of technical co-founders, and their overhead was crazy low, and so they could do these deals where they don't make very much money because they were, I think, at the end of 77,…
- ▶ 1:15:25 David Rosenthal Really, it's just Bill and Paul's time and dedication to this industry that nobody else is making that investment.
- ▶ 1:15:45 Ben Gilbert I also think this moment galvanized something important, which is Bill and Paul could sort of look around and see there is going to be so much value created by microcomputers and by software.
- ▶ 1:17:05 David Rosenthal Bill gets a call from a guy named Kazuhiro Nishi or Kei Nishi, who's a computer enthusiast in Japan, has gotten a hold of Microsoft Basic, totally shares the same vision as Bill and Paul.
- ▶ 1:17:20 David Rosenthal He doesn't have a Paul, you know, nor is he technical himself.
- ▶ 1:18:43 David Rosenthal He was like, you know, if we're gonna build this into the opportunity that I see, the vision that I see, and that Paul shares with me,
- ▶ 1:25:17 Ben Gilbert In 1980, you've got the management team coming together with Steve and Bill and Paul Allen, and you've got the IBM thing going on, and you've got them moving to Seattle, and we haven't even talked about Charles Simone yet, but this was the…
- ▶ 1:30:04 David Rosenthal They're finally observing the same thing that Bill and Paul did, you know, all the way back in the TRAFO data days of this is an exponential cycle, like Moore's law, this is exponential, and exponential gets real big very quickly once you…
- ▶ 1:35:40 David Rosenthal Bill has just convinced Steve to drop out of business school at Stanford and come help him and Paul run the company.
- ▶ 1:35:50 David Rosenthal Steve is the first person besides Bill and Paul to get equity in the company when he joins and it's eight and a half percent
- ▶ 1:36:27 Ben Gilbert In fact, it created some tension with Paul Allen, where Bill asked Paul if they could go to five percent.
- ▶ 1:36:33 Ben Gilbert Paul said sure, and then Bill actually offered him eight and a half percent, and Paul got upset, and Bill said, I'll eat the three and a half percent.
- ▶ 1:38:08 David Rosenthal Now, there was one off-the-shelf operating system out there from a company called Digital Research, which was run by Gary Kildall, who I think, as we talked about earlier, Bill and Paul had actually intersected with back in Seattle.
- ▶ 1:39:08 David Rosenthal Bill, and I'm sure Paul too, but Bill is the only person in this industry that has the vision for what this can become.
- ▶ 1:45:01 David Rosenthal So, Bill and Paul and Microsoft, they've learned about this.
- ▶ 1:48:48 Ben Gilbert This is in Paul Allen's memoir.
- ▶ 2:04:00 David Rosenthal The next year in 1981, Microsoft reorganizes from the partnership between Bill and Paul with the handshake deal that Steve's going to be cut in on the partnership into a stock company, a C corporation.
- ▶ 2:11:48 David Rosenthal We should say, too, vis-a-vis Paul, tragically, in, I believe it was, 1982 83, he's diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, and he ends up taking a leave and then fully leaving the company.
- ▶ 2:36:44 David Rosenthal This is around that same time when Paul Allen gets Hodgkin's disease and leaves the company, so his presence as sort of great technical leader is very much missed, but they bring in someone from Xerox to manage the development of Windows.
- ▶ 3:31:22 Ben Gilbert So we talked about the partnership being 64% Gates, 36% Paul Allen.
- ▶ 3:31:27 Ben Gilbert 1980, Steve Balbar comes in and gets eight and a half, 8.75, something like that, percent of the company, so dilutes Gates and Allen down.
- ▶ 3:32:35 Ben Gilbert Paul Allen owned 28% of the company.
- ▶ 3:33:49 David Rosenthal I totally think it's the latter, and I think it's that the minimum fixed cost threshold to be that, you know, in Bill's words, slightly better than your competitors and get the positive spiral going was low enough that it could be paid for…
- ▶ 3:34:30 David Rosenthal You couldn't buy the experience having written emulation software for microprocessors that Paul had.
- ▶ 3:40:27 David Rosenthal Bill and Steve and Paul and everybody at Microsoft, they were incredibly talented, incredibly smart.