Bill Gates

“Gates told his friend that he would be a millionaire by the time he turned 30. He told another friend, I'm gonna make my first million by the time I'm 25.”

“Gates would go through garbage cans so he could poke around for important tidbits of information left behind on the day shift. I'd get the notes out of the trash with coffee grounds on them and study the operating systems.”

“For some time now, they had shared the same vision, that one day the computer would be as commonplace in the homes as a television, and that these computers would need software, their software.”

“They offered Gates and the other lakeside computer junkies an opportunity to try to crash the system. In exchange, they would get all the free computer time that they wanted.”

“There was at least nine months there when I did nothing with computers. Read he did. With the same kind of commitment he had made to computers, he consumed a number of biographies, Franklin Roosevelt's and Napoleon's among others, to understand how the great f…”

“Bill Gates would later tell a friend he went to Harvard University to learn from people smarter than he was, and he left disappointed.”

“The software program turned, turned the data into easily readable traffic flowcharts. They grossed about 20,000 dollars from this.”

“Gates received permission to miss part of his senior year so he could work full time at TRW.”

“The first 30 employees of Microsoft, there were 28 engineers, Bill Gates, and a secretary.”

“Someone once said Bill wants people to think that he is Thomas Edison when he is really Rockefeller. If he was Edison, he would be less dangerous. He is utterly relentless. He is indefatigable. He is absolutely focused, and he wants it all.”

“He says a key advantage I had was being fanatical. That is taking all of my capabilities day and night and just focusing on how do you write good software. I loved being a fanatic. Eventually, I reveled in it. I didn't believe in weekends. I didn't believe in …”

“Ed Roberts is no Bill Gates. And the problem is he built a company culture, which is the opposite of what most great founders want. They want you to fight back. They will not respect you if you are a sycophant. Everybody was scared of Ed Roberts, so therefore …”

“I don't think Bill Gates would have dropped out of Harvard without Paul Allen.”

“Software is a very unusual business. The development work is not that capital intensive. The first year we generated cash like mad, even though we had many customers who went bankrupt. In other words, we had a wide margin for error. I always wanted to have eno…”

“It is easier to write a program in sloppy code that goes on for pages than to write the same program on a single page.”

“In the early days, our sales approach was to say, if you had to write the software in-house, your fixed engineering budget would be X amount of dollars. And Microsoft's price is less than half of X dollars. We competed. Against in-house engineering budgets.”

“Bill Gates lives in binary states. This will pop up over and over again. He's either totally apathetic or completely obsessed.”

“When we got up to 30 employees, it was still just me, a secretary and 28 programmers. I wrote all the checks, answered the mail, took the phone calls.”

“Four years in, and they had just 11 employees. I think they might have had 12 because they take that picture, that famous Microsoft picture when they're moving from Albuquerque to Seattle. And there's only 11 people in the photo, but I'm pretty sure there was …”

“Gates held meetings that became known around Microsoft as the Borland War Councils, during which him and his staff plotted how to beat the Frenchman being Philippe Kahn. Gates reportedly walked into one such meeting and threw Kahn's picture down on a table and…”

“Bill was obsessed with cost control, and he is constantly hounding everyone in the company about it.”

“Steve jobs said that victory in our industry is spelled survival. It's very clear from his actions that Bill Gates agreed.”

“Ross Perot tried to buy Microsoft in 1979 for quote, mid seven figures. And this is what Bill Gates said. Bill Gates said, no. I want to remain independent. Now keep in mind, Microsoft's revenue that year was just 2.4 million dollars.”

“For many years, Gates had refused to even own a TV, preferring instead to spend his time reading books and magazines.”

“There are a lot of people in the world smarter than Bill Gates. There are very few people in the world that have his focus and endurance.”

“There is one person that I've gotten to know that just gives me young Bill Gates vibes. And it's the founder of cognition. His name is Scott Wu. And many people in the tech industry will know who Scott is. Many people out of it will not. And if you're one of t…”

“The deal that they signed with MITS gave them the exclusive rights to sub-licensed R software to any other company that wanted to use the AD-AD basic in their products would have to get the source code, which he describes as the recipe to basic, through MITS a…”

“Well, by 1990, Microsoft had become the first software company in history to sell more than a billion dollars worth of software in a single year.”

“Bill sold five percent of Microsoft for a million dollars. Can you imagine? Five percent of million of Microsoft for a million dollars to TVI, which is technology venture investors. Microsoft did not need the venture capital. Gates was essentially hiring the f…”

“A great programmer can outproduce an average one by 10 to one. With a genius, the ratio might be 50 to one.”

“Bill had would go out and he'd memorize the license plates of the cars in the Microsoft parking lot in the early days.”

“Bill believed that if you lost a 50,000 dollar contract, he considered it a 100,000 dollar loss because Microsoft lost to 50 and his competitor gained the 50.”

“At the end of every day, someone would take out the trash included in that trash would be used computer paper printed with lines of code, whatever the C cubed engineers are working on that day at night when the employees had all gone home. Paul and I went out …”

“He would keep a list of mistakes and it was a top 10 list. And he'd reread that to make sure they don't make the same mistakes in the future.”

“Most people hate to admit they're wrong, but it didn't bother Bill one bit. All he cared about was what was right, not who was right. That is what makes Bill very, very dangerous. If Bill has to choose, he'd rather win the war than win the argument.”

“This intentional fight that he picks against Bill Gates and Microsoft and how beneficial the positioning was. That he chose and how this message spread through the media and actually enhanced greatly enhanced not only his individual stature, but the stature of…”

“If you invent a breakthrough in artificial intelligence so machines can learn, that would be worth 10 Microsofts.”