Idea Man

Bill and I had already found a groove together. I was the idea man, the one who’d conceive of things out of whole cloth. Bill listened and challenged me, and then homed in on my best ideas to help make them a reality. Our collaboration had a natural tension, but mostly it worked productively and well.

Later I’d discover that MITS’s own engineers doubted that an 8080 BASIC was possible. If we’d been older or known better, Bill and I might have been put off by the task in front of us. But we were young and green enough to believe that we just might pull it off.

Childhood

I was reading on my own well before kindergarten. I can remember leafing through some illustrated primer when the page clicked into focus and the words suddenly made sense.

He’s too humble to outright say it, but he was clearly extremely gifted. This is as close as we get in the book to him ever verbalizing it.

As my father raised the basement windows to clear out the gas, he said, “You’ve got to be more careful with your experiments, Paul.” But I also heard what he didn’t say: He never told me to stop. In the Allen household, children were treated like grown-ups. Our parents encouraged us at whatever we tried, and exposed us to Bach and jazz and flamenco, but it was more than that. They respected us as individuals who needed to find our own place in the world.

There seems to be this amazing pattern of nearly every gifted future entrepreneur of a certain era tinkering with bombs.

One day early that fall, I saw a gangly, freckle-faced eighth-grader edging his way into the crowd around the Teletype, all arms and legs and nervous energy. He had a scruffy-preppy look: pullover sweater, tan slacks, enormous saddle shoes. His blond hair went all over the place. You could tell three things about Bill Gates pretty quickly. He was really smart. He was really competitive; he wanted to show you how smart he was. And he was really, really persistent. After that first time, he kept coming back. Many times he and I would be the only ones there.

Note the emphasis on the persistence. That is what set Bill apart, not the intelligence.

Left to ourselves, Bill and I would program until we were starving and then walk across the street to a hippie enterprise called Morningtown Pizza.

Intense periods of work where you would just get lost in the zone. Forgetting to eat is a marker of this type of flow state.

Bill and I knew that our mentors had access to TOPS-10 source code and were working to debug and enhance it. We also knew that it was off-limits to us, which made it ten times more fascinating than whatever we were working on. On weekends, after everyone had left, Bill and I would go Dumpster diving in the building’s courtyard. We’d flip up the metal cover and I’d interlace my fingers to give Bill a boost—he couldn’t have weighed more than 110 pounds. He’d lean down into the big container and scoop up anything that looked promising. After several trips, he found a treasure: a stack of stained and crumpled fanfold printouts. I can remember the smell wafting off the coffee stains and thinking, This is a little gross, but I don’t care.

When was the last time you were so desparate to learn something that you literally went dumpster diving?

Fatigue is no factor when you’re seventeen and caught up in something. I camped out at C-Cubed as long as my eyes stayed open, and as days became weeks, I began to eke out some progress.

The best work happens in brief periods of intensity.

Then as now, teenagers were often underestimated. Along with Bill and Ric and Kent, I’d shown how much young people could grow if given the chance. We were still years away from our mentors’ level, but we weren’t bad. And we were getting better.

Out of all the 100+ quotes in the entire book, this one stays with me the most. Teenagers are nearly adults. They’re basically just as capable - they just lack the wisdom to not know what should be a bad idea.

Though I wouldn’t make much money, I was glad to step in and get reacquainted with a PDP-10. Bill stayed depressed for weeks, but his spirits gradually lifted as we immersed ourselves in the project, going at it full-bore in McAllister Hall like old times. Often we’d work past midnight and sleep on cots we’d brought to campus.

Again and again, these guys were obsessed workaholics.

Bill and I became closer that summer. Our age gap no longer seemed to matter; we had what I call high-bandwidth communication.

After Kent passes away (discussed more in Source Code), Bill and Paul become close for the first time.

In conversation, the phrase meant that we’d shift from one topic to an earlier one without bothering to acknowledge the new context. Someone overhearing us would have made no sense of it: “So then we can move this string…” “You’re right, the other thing will never happen if that’s true….” “Exactly! That’s the variable we used the last time.”

This is the level of high bandwidth we should strive to achieve in close working relationships. You don’t get this without insane hours working on the same problem together.

Traf-O-Data, the name we’d use for both the traffic machine and our partnership. (Much later on, I asked Bill how he’d come up with it, and he said, “I got it from jack-o’-lantern.” I thought that was really strange.)

The first name of Microsoft. Good lord, man.

Four dollars an hour was a pittance for an experienced programmer, even then, but Bill and I couldn’t believe our good fortune. Here was a chance to work together again on a PDP-10, and for pay!

The best engineers are technologists. We do what we do not for the money, but for the joy. If you can find a way to get people working on things they love, you’ll provide more happiness and save a lot of money.

Freed of school obligations and family constraints, Bill and I happily hunkered down for coding sessions and test cycles that ran twelve hours and more. We were both natural night people who would peak at ten or eleven P.M. and remain at optimal efficiency for quite a while after that. No matter how long it took, we’d stay to find that last bug. When Bill felt himself flagging, he’d grab a jar of Tang, pour some powder on one hand, and lick it off for a pure sugar high. (His palms had a chronic orange tinge that summer.) Often we would work for two days straight and then crash for eighteen or twenty hours, which Bill called “getting slept up.”

The more I see it, the more I’m convinced: this is the optimal working style for anyone who wants to accomplish great things.

I offered a word to the wise: “You know, Bill, when you get to Harvard, there are going to be some people a lot better in math than you are.” “No way,” he said. “There’s no way!” And I said, “Wait and see.” I was decent in math and Bill was brilliant, but I spoke from experience at Wazzu. One day I watched a professor cover the blackboard with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felt a little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was OK with being a generalist. For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his PhD at sixteen.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to thirty hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students 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. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.

Remember that in those days there was no computer science major - computer science was just a branch of math (and a less respected one at that).

MITS

I’d only brought forty dollars; I was chronically low on cash, and it would be years before I’d have a credit card. I blanched when Ed pulled up to the Sheraton, the nicest hotel in town, and escorted me to the reception desk. “Checking in?” the clerk said. “That will be fifty dollars.” It was one of the more embarrassing moments of my life. “Ed, I’m sorry about this,” I stammered, “but I don’t have that kind of cash.” He just looked at me for a minute; I guess I wasn’t what he’d been expecting, either. Then he said, “That’s OK, we’ll put it on my card.”

Too funny. Imagine coming in for a job interview and you don’t have enough money for the hotel room, and your potential employer covers it.

To a man, my coworkers declared that I was making a big mistake. It was crazy, they said, to ditch an established firm for some fly-by-night start-up selling hobbyist kits in the desert. “Your job’s safe at Honeywell,” they kept telling me. “You can work here for years.” I knew that my move was a risk, but I was disappointed in my colleagues. I wanted to hear something like: Good luck, young fellow, and more power to you. I’m afraid that I was less than gracious in my going-away party speech: “I guess I don’t have anyone to congratulate me for leaving except myself.”

I agree with Paul - this is extremely disappointing. The cynicism of the risk averse is only matched by their lack of fortitude. These people dress up their lack of courage in “wisdom”, but in reality they just wish they could do anything meaningful with their live at all. And since they can’t, they make themselves feel better by pulling anyone who does take a risk down a peg. The risk averse contribute nothing to society. They are leeches, and I cannot stand them. And yes, I do hate that I was one of them for so long.

After hours, we’d often wind up at Denny’s, where we’d be so revved up from our work that we’d freak out the waitresses. I remember a night when one of them looked from one pale face to the next and asked, “Are you guys speeding?” “No,” Monte replied, “we’re programmers.”

Have you ever felt so passionate about anything that someone’s only logical explanation was that you were on drugs?

Bill and Monte fell into the habit of working until sunup or whenever the school system said we had to stop. I can picture Bill debugging BASIC on a Teletype in the corner, flipping through the printout listing in his lap and typing with fierce intensity. He lived in binary states: either bursting with nervous energy on his dozen Cokes a day, or dead to the world. He’d work until drained and then curl up on the floor in his office and be asleep within fifteen seconds.

Absolutely love it.

In Boston and the Bay Area, in labs and corporations like Honeywell, microcomputers were viewed as a passing fad. But the doubters didn’t faze us. We were certain that the tech establishment was wrong and we were right, and the proof came each day in the mail sacks bulging with orders for the Altair and our BASIC. In that little ramshackle building in Albuquerque, it felt as though anything was possible.

True missionaries.

From the time we’d started together in Massachusetts, I’d assumed that our partnership would be a fifty-fifty proposition. But Bill had another idea. “It’s not right for you to get half,” he said. “You had your salary at MITS while I did almost everything on BASIC without one back in Boston. I should get more. I think it should be sixty-forty.” At first I was taken aback. But as I pondered it, Bill’s position didn’t seem unreasonable. I’d been coding what I could in my spare time, and feeling guilty that I couldn’t do more, but Bill had been instrumental in packing our software with “more features per byte of memory than any other BASIC we know,” as I’d written for Computer Notes. All in all, I thought, a sixty-forty split might be fair.

This is a slippery slope. This won’t be the last time this happens, and ultimately it signals the end of the partnership.

Ed and Bill had a lot in common. They were equally driven and persistent, and both thought they were smarter than just about everyone else. (Usually they were right.) Ed respected people who were creative and productive, and he understood our value to MITS. One day he brought an old friend to our office and said, “I can’t control these guys. But they’re so smart I’ve got to keep them. They’re just so good at what they do.”

In Nolan Bushnell’s famous Finding the Next Steve Jobs, he drops a bit of wisdom I’ve never forgotten. You let people break the rules based on a log scale of how skilled they are. If you’re Steve-freaking-Jobs, then fine, you don’t need to shower. Everyone else? Shower please.

When David Bunnell ripped up their sign in the hotel lobby, I realized that MITS had stronger competition than it had banked on. Early innovators rarely stay way out in front for long. Everybody sees what’s been done and starts to copy the heck out of it, and sometimes the followers do a better job.

Microsoft would then take this strategy to heart and use it for the next two decades.

My work was so all-consuming that the rest of my life went on hold, and Rita and I canceled our plans for marriage. At age twenty-three, I just wasn’t ready.

In the end, sadly, Paul would never marry and never have kids. Life is rarely willing to be put on hold.

When Bill asked me for a walk and talk one day, I knew something was up. We’d gone a block when he cut to the chase: “I’ve done most of the work on BASIC, and I gave up a lot to leave Harvard,” he said. “I deserve more than 60 percent.” “How much more?” “I was thinking 64–36.” Again, I had that moment of surprise. But I’m a stubbornly logical person, and I tried to consider Bill’s argument objectively. His intellectual horsepower had been critical to BASIC, and he would be central to our success moving forward. That much was obvious. But how to calculate the value of my Big Idea—the mating of a high-level language with a microprocessor—or my persistence in bringing Bill to see it? What were my development tools worth to the “property” of the partnership? Or my stewardship of our product line, or my day-to-day brainstorming with our programmers? I might have haggled and offered Bill two points instead of four, but my heart wasn’t in it. So I agreed. At least now we can put this to bed, I thought. Our formal partnership agreement, signed on February 3, 1977, had two other provisions of note. Paragraph 8 allowed an exemption from business duties for “a partner who is a full-time student,” a clause geared to the possibility that Bill might go back for his degree. And in the event of “irreconcilable differences,” paragraph 12 stated that Bill could demand that I withdraw from the partnership.

And even this, believe it or not, would not be the end of it. I really feel bad for Paul. This is not right. Either have the balls to fire him or stop this bullshit.

I wondered how Bill had arrived at the numbers he’d proposed that day. I tried to put myself in his shoes and reconstruct his thinking, and I concluded that it was just this simple: What’s the most I can get? I think Bill knew that I would balk at a two-to-one split, and that 64 percent was as far as he could go. He might have argued that the numbers reflected our contributions, but they also exposed the differences between the son of a librarian and the son of a lawyer. I’d been taught that a deal was a deal and your word was your bond. Bill was more flexible. In my experience, he believed that agreements were open to renegotiation until they were signed and sealed. There’s a degree of elasticity in any business dealing, a range for what might seem fair, and Bill pushed within that range as hard and as far as he could.

Bill really does not deserve Paul.

Ed Roberts

As always, Ed found something else to do. He bought a vegetable farm in Georgia, entered medical school in his midforties, and became a country doctor.

It’s amazing to think what a remarkable second career someone can have, even in their mid-forties.

Ed did indeed create the first truly commercial personal computer, the first widely affordable general-purpose machine. He spearheaded every aspect of microcomputer marketing, from publications and conventions to a retail dealer network. His imagination was boundless. The Altair even debuted a digital camera interface back in 1976. And he gave two college dropouts the opportunity of their young lives. But Ed was wrong about being forgotten. When he passed away in April 2010, his obituary made the front page of the New York Times.

It’s a sad, brutal truth that in the business world the innovator often doesn’t win.

I’d made up with Ed a long time before, and he and Bill had gotten past their differences. When Bill flew out to see him a few days before he died, Ed was talking about the latest nanotechnology and how he might work with it. He was looking ahead all the way to the end.

Rest in piece, Ed¹.

Micro-Soft

Our near-disaster in arbitration was one more lesson for us. Going forward, we would aim for maximum market share in any sector we entered. You could never have too many customers.

Remember that they almost went bankrupt because MITS refused to pay them royalties until arbitration was finished.

Bill consciously aspired to be “hardcore,” a favorite adjective dating back to his Harvard days. He’d gulp his Cokes and work in his office deep into the night, and come in the next day cranky and bloodshot. When he really wore down, he’d take a catnap. Just after Miriam started, she was alarmed one Monday morning to find her boss sprawled on the carpet. She ran to see Steve Wood, who’d taken over from Ric as office manager, and cried, “Help me! Bill’s on the floor, and it looks like he’s unconscious!” Steve puffed calmly on his pipe and said, “Ah, he was probably here all weekend, don’t worry about him. Just go back to work.” “But what do I do if somebody calls for Mr. Gates? What do I tell them?” “Tell them he’s out,” Steve said, “and you won’t be lying.”

I wonder if this is where Elon got his “hardcore” verbiage from? As far as I can see, Bill was the earliest user I’ve seen, particularly among the famous tech entrepreneurs.

Microsoft was a high-stress environment because Bill drove others as hard as he drove himself. He was growing into the taskmaster who would prowl the parking lot on weekends to see who’d made it in. People were already busting their tails, and it got under their skin when Bill hectored them into doing more. Bob Greenberg once put in eighty-one hours in four days, Monday through Thursday, to finish part of the Texas Instruments BASIC. When Bill touched base toward the end of Bob’s marathon, he asked him, “What are you working on tomorrow?” Bob said, “I was planning…

Bill craved closure, and he would hammer away until he got there. On principle, I refused to yield if I didn’t agree. And so we’d go at it for hours at a stretch, until I became nearly as loud and wound up as Bill. I hated that feeling. While I wouldn’t give in unless convinced on the merits, I sometimes had to stop from sheer fatigue. I remember one heated debate lasting forever, until I said, “Bill, this isn’t going anywhere. I’m going home.” And Bill said, “You can’t stop now, we haven’t agreed on anything yet!” “No, Bill, you don’t understand. I’m so upset that I can’t speak anymore. I need to calm down. I’m leaving.” Bill trailed me out of his office, into the corridor, out to the elevator bank. He was still getting in the last word—“But we haven’t resolved anything!”—as the elevator door closed between us.

I love how little Paul holds back in this book. An outside perspective on Bill’s character is extremely valuable.

Bill came to my house to discuss our options. He was dead set against moving to the Bay Area. He’d seen how people in Silicon Valley changed jobs every year or two, which couldn’t be good for our long-term projects.

I very much agree with this. The Bay Area is amazing as long as you are the top dog. Once you’re not, the vultures circle and pick off your people one by one.

If you look closely at that photo, you’ll see just about everyone smiling. That captures our spirit back then. When I talk about the early days at Microsoft, it’s hard to explain to people how much fun it was. Even with the absurd hours and arguments, we were having the time of our lives.

Something about the early days - when it’s just purely about the work and no politics - is always the best in nearly every company.

Applications

Rosen described a dividend discount valuation model that had taken him twenty hours to program in BASIC; he created a more flexible version of the same thing with VisiCalc in fifteen minutes. “Who knows?” he concluded. “VisiCalc could some day become the software tail that wags (and sells) the personal computer dog.” That was our philosophy, too; we believed that software was more valuable than hardware. But we hadn’t counted on someone outflanking us with a whole new approach.

Paul is the first to recognize the threat posed by VisiCalc.

At Microsoft we’d had good excuses for putting off a move into applications software. The field was competitive and highly fragmented, and Bill and I had decided that we wouldn’t enter a market unless we knew we could be number one. And with our programmers straining to fulfill our language contracts, it was hard to see how we could plunge into a whole new sector. Still, I’d had pangs as I watched WordMaster evolve into WordStar, the first widely accepted application of its kind.

He’s also the first to realize that applications, and not programming languages, would be the most valuable tier.

From the start, we’d built Microsoft around the premise that our products would be universal. Wherever the general-purpose microcomputer market went, we’d be there. But as personal computing matured from an enthusiast subculture into a mass medium, I came to see that languages would soon be outweighed by applications.

And thanks to Paul, they start pivoting into the app layer.

There are two phases to any invention. The first is the moment of inspiration. The second is the execution, which is less exciting but more than challenging in its own right.

This is Elon’s philosophy as well - it’s why he holds engineering in such high regard. For him, bringing the innovation to the masses (the scaling of it, dealing with real world forces outside a laboratory) is much more laudable and difficult.

As we thought it might, VisiCalc helped to drive Apple’s sales through the roof; Jobs had nearly a year’s head start before the spreadsheet was developed for other microprocessors, and he exploited his lead well. The Apple II went from 35,000 units in 1979 to 210,000 in 1981, lagging only the Atari 400/800 and the TRS-80. It became a hit on college campuses and made a notable dent in the small business market.

The era of the applications has officially begun.

Under the circumstances, I felt that our 64–36 partnership split was out of whack. Bill had set a precedent by claiming extra equity for his work on Altair BASIC, another exceptional contribution. Now it was time, I thought, to augment my share. A modest adjustment in the ratio seemed only right. But when I made my case, Bill would have none of it. “I don’t ever want to talk about this again,” he said. “Do not bring it up.” In that moment, something died for me. I’d thought that our partnership was based on fairness, but now I saw that Bill’s self-interest overrode all other considerations. My partner was out to grab as much of the pie as possible and hold on to it, and that was something I could not accept. I didn’t have it out with Bill at the time. I sucked it up and thought, OK…but one day I’m out of here.

Paul basically comes up with the idea of the SoftCard which brings compatibility with a ton of apps that weren’t explicitly developed for Microsoft. It also provided them an insane amount of revenue in a recession year. Thus, he goes back to renegotiate after a massive win. Absolutely not fair how Bill treated him here either.

In April 1980, shortly before leaving town on a business trip, I agreed that we should offer him up to 5 percent of the company, because Bill felt certain that Steve wouldn’t leave Stanford unless he got equity.

This is Ballmer.

Programmers like Gordon Letwin were furious that Bill was giving a piece of the company to a person without a technical background. I was angry for another reason: Bill had offered Steve 8.75 percent of the company, considerably more than what I’d agreed to. It was bad enough that Bill had chosen to disregard me on a partnership issue we’d specifically discussed. It was worse that he waited till I was away to send the letter. I wrote him to set out what I had learned, and concluded: “As a result of discovering these facts I am no longer interested in employing Mr. Ballmer, and I consider the above points a major breach of faith on your part.” Bill knew that he’d been caught and couldn’t bluster his way out of it. Unable to meet my eyes, he said, “Look, we’ve got to have Steve. I’ll make up the extra points from my share.” I said OK, and that’s what he did.

Very, very cowardly. If you’re going to be a killer, be a killer. Don’t backstab your partner and then not have the guts to even look him in the eye, come on man.

“The contrast couldn’t have been sharper,” he’d say later. Xerox was “an old company in an old industry going downhill, walking in the dark. It’s not that they didn’t know the answers. That’s normal. But they didn’t know the questions.” Charles’s decision shocked his PARC colleagues, who couldn’t believe he was moving to such an obscure software operation. (Six years later, the two companies’ market values would cross. As of late 2010, Xerox was worth $15 billion, or about 7 percent as much as Microsoft.)

In basically the same year, Paul Allen and Steve Jobs would both visit Xerox and steal a bunch of ideas that were languishing and unappreciated by Xerox’s upper management.

We were working on a crash schedule with a client who was famously intolerant of slipped deadlines. We’d overnight floppy disks with each day’s progress to IBM in Boca Raton, where the software was tested. If some setback made a day unproductive, one of our programmers (unbeknownst to me) would “accidentally” reformat the disk before shipping. When IBM called to complain that they’d gotten a blank disk, he’d apologize for the error and correct it in the next shipment, buying time.

Genius move.

Under the new ownership split, Bill kept 51 percent of the equity and I retained 30 percent. The other stakeholders were Steve Ballmer, 7.8 percent; Marquardt’s Technology Venture Investors, 5.1 percent (for an investment of $1 million); Vern Raburn, 3.5 percent; Gordon Letwin, 1.3 percent; and Charles Simonyi, 1.3 percent. I kept my title as vice president, later amended to executive vice president According to my formal employment agreement, I would receive a base salary of $100,000 as a corporate officer on top of my $60,000 manager’s pay. Bill got $25,000 more as president.

They decide to incorporate so they can start giving top performers stock options like Silicon Valley, in order to retain them. I think it would have been a good gesture by Bill to take the same amount, if not less, than Paul.

Sometimes we’d go on recruitment trips and share a twin room in the frugal Microsoft tradition. One morning I awoke to a series of grunts. I cracked my eyes open to find Steve doing push-ups by the dozen at seven in the morning. I thought, This guy is really hardcore.

Picturing Ballmer having armpit stains at 7AM.

Above all, we were after the brightest lights. A great programmer can outproduce an average one by ten to one; with a genius, the ratio might be fifty to one.

Steve Jobs noted the same thing. You cannot overpay for good people because the variance is so high.

We might pay slightly under the norm, but our pitch was persuasive: Would you rather work on some process-control project for Dow Chemical or a state-of-the-art word processor for the IBM PC? An ambitious young software engineer wouldn’t think twice about joining us.

Tale as old as time for startups.

For me, the poignant postscript to this story was the fall of Digital Equipment Corporation, the company we idolized in our youth. Early on, its top management had resisted the shift to personal computers. As late as 1977, its president told the World Future Association, “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” Five years later, DEC swallowed its pride and released a well-designed microcomputer called the Rainbow 100, but shot itself in the foot by using the old 8-bit CP/M system. When DEC finally got around to implementing MS-DOS, the company required a customized version that was incompatible with thousands of PC applications, and it flopped. In the mainframe and minicomputer worlds, DEC had achieved small miracles by marching to its own drummer. If, ten years earlier, you had told us that IBM would forge a new path for microcomputers and that the maker of the PDP-10 would straggle in late and be unable to adapt, we would never have believed you.*

This is a rather bittersweet moment. I’ve never met or interacted with anyone from DEC, but after reading Creative Capital I can’t help but really love this company.

They issued the final boarding call—no Bill. I was resigned to finding the next flight when he rushed up to the gate, out of breath. It was too late; the plane was already inching away from the jetway. But Bill never stopped running, through the boarding gate and into the jetway itself, with me trailing. Upon reaching the motor control panel, he did a quick scan and began pushing buttons. Then I realized what was happening: Bill was trying to move the jetway back up to the plane so we could board. Aghast, I called out, “Don’t do that!” An airline agent rushed over; I was sure that we would both be arrested or, at the very least, escorted from the terminal. But the man said, “Sir, sir, hold on. We’ll get the plane to come back.” To my astonishment, that is exactly what happened. They returned the plane, allowed us to board, and we got home on time.

This would never happen in today’s post-9/11 age.

Bill kept running big decisions by me. Our dynamic was more intertwined than the partnership at Apple, where Steve Jobs was the grand thinker and Steve Wozniak the crack hardware designer. Bill and I were both generalists at heart. That was a big strength for Microsoft, but it also meant that no subject escaped debate.

Very interesting contrast.

Jobs was disgusted—you could see the contempt on his face. “What the fuck is going on?” he snarled at Hertzfeld, who’d probably been up all night getting things ready and was now trying to shrink under the table. “These guys came all the way down here to see this thing, and this is the best we can do? This is the best we can do? We get thirty seconds and a frozen screen? What the fuck is wrong with you?” He railed on as Bill and I traded glances and uncomfortably watched the performance. It seemed to me like an exercise in humiliation for its own sake. We couldn’t believe that Jobs would attack a subordinate in front of outsiders.

I burst out laughing.

Jobs, played by Noah Wyle, comes off as a charismatic but ruthless and mean-spirited jerk. The next time I ran into him, I asked him what he thought. And Jobs said, “I thought the guy who played me did a fantastic job.” He just didn’t care about what people thought of his public persona. Bill was different; he wanted to be viewed as tough but fair. He could be callous and rude, but he had a warmer, human side, too. And no one doubted that his excesses, for good or ill, were spontaneous.

Kept this quote purely for the insight into each’s respective character.

When someone threatened to quit, Bill took it personally and did all he could to change the person’s mind. What he never considered, though, was that he might lose me. Whenever we locked horns, I’d have to raise my intensity and my blood pressure to meet Bill’s, and it was taking a toll. Some people can vent their anger, take a breath, and let it go, but I wasn’t one of them.

Let’s not forget, he also fucked you three different times.

Too angry and proud to make an emotional appeal, I never went in and told Bill, point-blank, “Some days working with you is like being in hell.” So my grievances hung in the air, unstated and unresolved. By the time we fought over DOS 2.0, our partnership was living on borrowed time.

Remember that at this point in the book, he’s working close to 80 hours weeks while doing chemo.

After resuming the radiation, I was in Bill’s office one day talking about MS-DOS revenues. Our flat-fee strategy had helped establish us in several markets, but I thought we’d held on to it for too long. A case in point: We’d gotten a fee of $21,000 for the license for Applesoft BASIC. After sales of more than a million Apple II’s, that amounted to two cents per copy. “If we want to maximize revenue,” I said, “we have to start charging royalties for DOS.” Bill replied as though he was speaking to a not-so-bright child: “How do you think we got the market share we have today?” Then Steve came by to weigh in on Bill’s side with his usual intensity. It would have been two on one, except I was approximately half a person at the time. (Microsoft later switched to per-copy licensing, a move that would add billions of dollars in revenue.)

I love that he’s keeping score. Talk your shit Paul!

When I asked him whether two buttons might be better, he passionately lectured me: “You know, Paul, this is all about simplicity versus complexity. And nobody needs more than one button on a mouse.” I said, “But Steve, people have more than one finger, and there’s going to be things they might want to do with a right click, too.” Jobs dismissed my point with a shake of his head. He believed in making the entry-level experience as unintimidating as possible—and that there was usually one and only one correct way to do things. At Microsoft, we tried to balance simplicity with power. I considered the trade-off worthwhile if an extra feature made a program or device more functional.

This is Paul talking to Jobs about the apple mouse.

In 2005, after twenty-two years of one-button worship, Apple relented and released the multibutton Mighty Mouse.

You can tell he loved adding this bit to his book.

They were bemoaning my recent lack of production and discussing how they might dilute my Microsoft equity by issuing options to themselves and other shareholders. It was clear that they’d been thinking about this for some time. Unable to stand it any longer, I burst in on them and shouted, “This is unbelievable! It shows your true character, once and for all.” I was speaking to both of them, but staring straight at Bill. Caught red-handed, they were struck dumb. Before they could respond, I turned on my heel and left. I replayed their dialogue in my mind while driving home, and it felt more and more heinous to me. I helped start the company and was still an active member of management, though limited by my illness, and now my partner and my colleague were scheming to rip me off. It was mercenary opportunism, plain and simple.

Again, during chemo he’s working, and they’re talking about redistributing his equity right out from under him. With friends like these who needs enemies?

A year or so earlier, Tandy had asked us for a decimal floating point math program for their early notebook computer, a must for precise financial calculations. I’d never done one before and sweated bullets for months to get it right. And Bill said, “I wrote all that code.” “Really?” I said. He’d say these things with such conviction that it made me wonder for a moment: Had I written it? I went back and found the source code and printed it out, and of course it was mine. Bill hadn’t written a single line; in fact, he wasn’t even writing code at that point. The next day I went back to his office. I dropped the listing on his desk and said, “OK, Bill, here’s the math package. Show me what you wrote.” It was a strange moment. Bill froze in mid rock, glanced down at the code, and muttered, “Yeah, you did write it.”

Yikes.

“It’s not fair that you keep your stake in the company,” he said. He made a lowball offer for my stock: five dollars a share. When Vern left, the Microsoft board voted to buy back his stock at three dollars a share, which ultimately cost him billions of dollars. I knew that Bill hoped to pressure me to sell mine the same way. But I was in a different position than Vern, who’d jumped to Lotus in apparent violation of his employment agreement. I was a cofounder, and I wasn’t leaving to join a competitor. “I’m not sure I’m willing to sell,” I countered, “but I wouldn’t even discuss less than ten dollars a share.” “No way,” Bill said, as I’d suspected he would. Our talk was over. As it turned out, Bill’s conservatism worked to my advantage. If he’d been willing to offer something close to my asking price, I would have sold way too soon.

In other words, fuck you, Bill.

Post-Microsoft

When the fight was over and the fish safely in the boat, my dad grinned like I’d never seen him grin before. It was as though he’d reconnected with the best days of his youth. He’d caught the biggest trout he would ever catch, and he was content. Near the end of our stay, out of the blue, my father looked at me and said, “No matter what happens to me, always take care of your mother and your sister.” It wasn’t like him to be explicit about such things. But perhaps he’d had a premonition.

His dad would pass literally the next day.

We’d left a lot of things unsaid, and now I hadn’t had a chance to say good-bye.

This part really hit me hard. As I was reading this, my own father was admitted to the hospital for a heart attack. Life really does come at you fast.

By the late 1990s, Microsoft was the largest and most profitable software company in history, growing at the same rate as the personal computer industry—very rapid growth, indeed. Armageddon seemed unlikely, yet Bill still saw the glass as seven-eighths empty.

Only the paranoid survive. But over time, that has to take a psychic toll on you.

Bill was never one to hype future earnings. He’d make modest predictions to set the stage for the company to shine when it exceeded projections. But as Microsoft’s stock price rose by a multiple of nearly a hundred in the 1990s, he found those victories harder to pull off.

Under promise and over deliver.

Still on the company’s board, I advised Bill to temper his stance: “Look, Microsoft is going to win anyway from the momentum of the market and the position we’re in. You don’t need to be so aggressive.” I questioned Bill’s assertion that Internet Explorer had to be embedded within Windows for the operating system to work right, a key point of dispute in the federal lawsuit. There was no technical necessity for the bundling, since Windows could be tied to any competent browser and work just as well.

Of course, he would be right. Microsoft would lose that lawsuit.

Bill insisted, as a matter of legal principle, that a company had the right to add features to a product even when that product monopolized the market. What he failed to grasp, despite warnings from many, was that the government’s case wouldn’t hinge on its legal merits. The attack on Microsoft was at bottom political. A target had been painted on the company’s back.

In a way Bill is right, of course. But this wasn’t an ethical question but a legal one. And historically, the courts had ruled against companies in Microsoft’s position. From an empirical point of view, it was a losing hand.

Redlining from stress, he showed a side of himself that many would have found surprising. He’d been trying to move the company forward all these years, he said, but the strain of expectations had grown too much for him. “I’ve been trying to pump air in the balloon,” he said, “and now the balloon’s popping. I can’t keep it going anymore.”

The stress was mounting on Bill.

EVEN THOUGH HE’D seemed frayed of late, I was stunned when Bill announced that he was stepping aside to become “chief software architect” in January 2000, with Steve Ballmer succeeding him as CEO.

Twenty something years of 7 days a week, no vacations, and ‘7 hour turnaround’. That’s got to take a toll.

While Steve had long served as Bill’s top lieutenant, you got the sense through the nineties that he wasn’t necessarily being groomed for Microsoft’s top spot.

And his performance showed.

It took a while for Bill to come around to what seemed obvious to the rest of the board. Whatever his strengths and weaknesses, Steve was the only viable successor.

CEO by default is not confidence inspiring.

I left Microsoft a quarter century before Bill did, and we’ve both had our signal triumphs since then. But in certain respects, neither of us has been quite as good alone as we were together. I missed Bill’s laser focus on competition in the marketplace, his ability to execute my ideas and keep me from getting too far ahead of what was doable. And I’d like to think that Bill missed my ability to divine where technology was headed and my knack for meeting its trajectory with something big and original. In my post-Microsoft years, I discovered how challenging it was to operate without a pragmatic partner and business maven. Even so, I have no regrets about taking my own road. It has led me to rich experiences in a great range of pursuits—to the life I’d always dreamed of, even back in the early days, when I was happily chained to my terminal and striving to perfect the next line of code.

I’m not going to include all the passages, but he has a really stark and scathing criticism of Microsoft in the Ballmer years. And you can tell it’s not from a place of animosity.

One night we were playing the Sonics, and Sam Perkins—six nine and 235 pounds—barreled after a ball that was sailing out of bounds straight over my mother’s head. She threw up her hands as Perkins crashed into her, and then I noticed her holding her wrist. “It’s broken,” she said calmly. At halftime the team doctor iced and taped it, and I asked if she wanted to head home. “No,” she said firmly, “we’re going to watch the rest of the game.”

What a woman!

Bill approached Bert in a buffet line on the lawn, and the conversation turned to my interest in America Online. Bill said, “Why would Paul want to compete with us? I’m just going to tell Russ Siegelman [the Microsoft Network leader] to keep losing money every year until we have the number-one market share in online. How does it make sense to compete with that?” When Bert relayed Bill’s remarks to me, they had the intended effect. A year earlier, I’d attended a meeting at Microsoft where Bill had told Case that he was thinking about buying all or part of America Online—or, à la Khrushchev, that he might decide to “bury” the smaller company. Now it sounded like Bill had settled on a burial.

Suddenly my stake seemed less attractive, especially without any synergy between America Online and my other ventures. I dumped my stock and took a $75 million profit.

Paul had a massive stake in AOL! And he only dumped it because he thought Bill would compete against AOL, only for that to never materialize.

Still, one hard fact remains. Had I held on to my 24.9 percent of America Online, I would have been sitting on a $40 billion bonanza, more than all the money I’d make from my stake in Microsoft.

I’d be more angry with Bill about this than the whole Microsoft thing honestly.

In November 1993, after Microsoft backed off from a last-minute bid, I paid over $300 million for 80 percent of Ticketmaster.

[sic]

Though his business had been computerized for years, he fought me tooth and nail over taking it online.

[sic]

“You don’t understand this business, Paul! I’ve been doing this forever, and people aren’t going to print out their tickets at home—it ain’t gonna work, Paul! I’m not going to do it! And the tickets can be forged or stolen, and then what do we do?”

[sic]

Two years later, Fred grudgingly gave his blessing to our ticketing Web site.

[sic]

When customer number one had completed the first transaction, our Web people called him and said, “Congratulations, you just bought the first concert ticket in the history of the Internet! Can you tell us why you decided to buy online?” The man said, “Because I don’t like talking to people, and I don’t like talking to you.” And he hung up.

This whole pisode only increased my hatred of Ticketmaster. Not only was their CEO a total scumbag who charges the most insane fees I’ve ever seen, but he’s also just a certified moron? Lovely.

After a dozen years in the glamorous, high-wire world of film production, I would have done about as well with a certificate of deposit. I just didn’t mesh well with Hollywood. I could never tell how much of what people told me was real.

[sic]

My net loss in the cable business was $8 billion.

The movie business is just far to sleazy.

My illness didn’t turn my head around the way Hodgkin’s had, but it has left its mark. I want more than ever to cram as much as I can into life.

And live he did. What a guy.

After I left Microsoft, the wealth that I’d helped create there—and then the company’s explosive growth—freed me to pick up where I had left off. At times I cast my net too widely. But my choice of ventures wasn’t arbitrary. Most of them were seeded long ago, in my youth. Over the last twenty-seven years, I’ve been able to do things I once only imagined. I have now lived half my life post-Microsoft. What we achieved there will always be a source of pride. But my second act, in all its range and variety, is truer to my nature.

You can see it in the words he writes. He was just flat out happier post Microsoft.

Few things worth doing can be done alone. To get past the conceptual stage, ideas need to become crusades; you’ve got to convince people to join you.

In other words, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

SOME PEOPLE ARE motivated by a need for recognition, some by money, and some by a broad social goal. I start from a different place, from the love of ideas and the urge to put them into motion and see where they might lead. The creative path is rocky, with the risk of failure ever present and no guarantees. But even with its detours and blind alleys, it’s the only road that I find fulfilling.

A brilliant summary of Paul Allen and his character. Rest in peace, Paul.

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To be honest, this book was incredibly depressing. After having read Source Code and Overdrive, I was really hoping to hear more of the same. Bill Gates the modern Rockefeller was really starting to be my hero. By all means, ruthlessly destroy the competition. But don’t treat your partner like this. Even worse, if you do screw someone over, don’t be a fucking coward about it. This book was something of a ‘never meet your heroes’ revelation.

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¹ Another excellent article on the life and history of Ed. And the aforementioned New York Times obituary