Source Code

School

We’d often go for seven days or more at a stretch, guided only by topographic maps through old-growth forests and rocky beaches where we tried to time the tides as we hustled around points.

I’m of the generation where I cannot even imagine that kids were allowed to be raised this way. I do wonder what lasting impact the constant helicoptering leaves on kids these days. The downside, of course, is safety. One of Gates’ closest friends - I’d argue the friend he would have started Microsoft with over Paul Allen - dies in an accident in high school.

Like hiking, programming fit me because it allowed me to define my own measure of success and it seemed limitless, not determined by how fast I could run or how far I could throw. The logic, focus, and stamina needed to write long, complicated programs came naturally to me. Unlike in hiking, among that group of friends, I was the leader.

From the beginning, we see that Gates is incredibly willful and ultra competitive. He always wants to be the leader in whatever is being done.

“His mother had prepared us for him for she seemed to feel that he was a great contrast to his sister. We heartily concurred with her in this conclusion, for he seemed determined to impress us with his complete lack of concern for any phase of school life. He did not know or care to know how to cut, put on his own coat, and was completely happy thus.”

As a father of a two year old who just started going to school this week, this passage is incredibly funny.

The things that interested me included reading, math, and being alone in my own head.

Very similar to Elon and Jobs. There is a certain type of hyper-intellectual person who simply prefers being lost in their own world, and it’s probably better to not fight it.

Somewhere around third or fourth grade, I realized that it wasn’t cool to be reading the World Book for fun, or playing hearts with your grandmother, or wanting to talk about why bridges don’t collapse. A summer reading program at our library was only me and girls. At recess other kids broke off with their cliques, and I’d be on my own. Bigger kids picked on me.

Unlike Elon who was physically (and brutally) bullied, Gates’ bullying was mostly social and verbal in nature. That said, I don’t think it had any less of an impact on him.

I worked in the library for the rest of the year, often skipping recess to immerse myself in finding and reshelving books, not noticing other students or that it was time for lunch.

And after the bullying, who could blame him?

Kent was way ahead of us. He was always talking about where he wanted to be in ten years, in twenty years, and strategizing how to get there. He seemed certain he was destined for great things and just had to figure out the best of the many paths to achieve them. Together we read through a stack of biographies of famous people, leaders like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Douglas MacArthur. We spent hours on the phone dissecting their lives. We analyzed the paths they followed to success with the same teenage intensity that other kids at that time spent deciphering “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

Gates, like so many other founders we’ve covered, was a voracious reader. But the most interesting part of this book to me was that Bill was not even the most impressive person in his peer group! That person was clearly Kent.

In my emerging worldview, the logic and rational thinking demanded by math were skills that could be used to master any subject. There was a hierarchy of intelligence: however good you were at math, that’s how good you could be at other subjects—biology, chemistry, history, even languages. My model, as simplistic as it was, seemed to be borne out at school, where I felt I could map a student’s math ability to their broader academic achievement.

I think the book is extremely well written. It can’t have been easy to admit things like this, but you very quickly get a sense of his personality. He was an incredibly intelligent, ultra low EQ child who was a bit arrogant and willful.

I told him that I wanted two copies of each book. He paused for a second, clearly puzzled by the request, but then turned and gathered the books. To this day I’m not sure my parents noticed that they paid double. My plan was to leave one copy at home and one at school. This was less about the inconvenience of carrying books back and forth than it was about appearing as if I didn’t need to study at home. I’d turn myself into one of the scholarly elite—but I wasn’t ready to let go of my smart-aleck, devil-may-care façade. While everyone else groaned under the weight of their heavy textbooks, I went home each day conspicuously empty-handed.

I used to do this in middle school as well. At some point it became “cool” to get good grades without studying, but of course that was quite difficult. So we would all pretend to not study. Trying hard was very lame. And so I would have my extra secret stash of books at home.

I devised an allocation plan based on my judgment of who was doing the most work, dividing our compensation into elevenths. I assigned Paul an insulting one-eleventh and Ric two-elevenths. Kent demanded that he and I be equal, so we each got four-elevenths. Paul and Ric shrugged and agreed. They probably thought we’d never finish the program.

In another life, Kent and Bill would have started Microsoft. Even this early on, you can tell Bill thinks of himself as significantly better than Paul - one-eleventh! Yikes.

Kent, as always, immediately saw a bigger opportunity. He was convinced that with our success at Lakeside, we could entice other schools around the country to pay us to manage their schedules using our software.

This is why I’m so convinced Kent would have been a world class entrepreneur. He, faster than Gates, realizes the opportunity. Every story in the book (and there are many) are like this.

The clearest memory I have is of sitting on the steps of the school chapel and crying as hundreds of people filed inside for Kent’s memorial service.

This is the flip side of giving your headstrong teenager so much freedom. I really can’t say if this style of parenting is truly so much better. Maybe it’s because my kids are too young, but I really wonder. Then again, thinking back to when I was a teenager, I was looking for absolutely any excuse to get away from my parents.

More than anyone I’d ever met, Kent was driven by the promise of all the amazing places his life would take him, from career success to an overland trip through Peru in a Land Rover that he’d acquire somewhere, somehow. That summer he had been cooking up a plan to serve as an assistant forest ranger, even though he knew they didn’t accept many high school kids. This optimism about what he—and I—could accomplish was the through line of our friendship. So was the assumption that we’d be doing it together.

Rest in peace.

One legacy of my friendship with Kent was the realization that another person can help you be better. That summer Paul and I forged a partnership that would define the rest of our lives, though we didn’t know it at the time. A partner brings something to the relationship that you lack; they inspire you to up your own game. With Paul as my partner, I felt more assured about tackling a challenge that was on the edge of my capabilities.

This is incredibly kind of Paul. Think about it - he’s graduated and is in college, but for the sake of a high school classmate (who, let’s be honest, didn’t treat him that well) mourning his friend, he offers to help out. He burns an entire summer coding with Bill. And of course, as a result, they become a lot closer. I don’t know if I would have done the same had I just entered college.

Our work styles, Paul and I learned, were complementary. My approach was rapid-fire, in your face. I prided myself on my processing speed—that I could come up with the right answer, the best answer, on the spot. Impatient, real-time thinking. And I could work and work and work, for days on end, rarely stopping. Paul’s style was quieter, calmer. He had a lot going on inside. He mulled things over. He’d listen, process on his own. His intelligence was patient. He could wait for the right answer to arise. And soon it would.

This yin and yang would ultimate transform Microsoft into one of the most valuable companies in the world.

Harvard

Early on we were sitting in a meeting when one of the programmers said something about “five nines.” I had no idea what he was talking about. As I listened, I figured out that he meant that the computer system we were building had to assure that power would be running 99.999 percent of the time—five nines. That level of efficiency would mean downtime of just 5.26 minutes a year—virtually uninterrupted power.

Non-technical readers may not realize that AWS (which powers so much of the internet) has 5 9’s of reliability. It is an absolute feat of engineering.

The person had completely torn it apart—he wasn’t just fixing syntactical issues, but the whole structure and design of what I had written. Normally, my first reaction would have been to defend myself. But this time, as I sat reading the comments, studying the code, I thought to myself, Oh wow, this guy’s so right.

Interning for Bonneville, Bill finally sees a programmer who is better than him. He immediately puts his competitive attitude aside and starts learning. It’s amazing that, despite all the ego, Bill is the perfect junior engineer - hard working, soaking up as much knowledge as he can, and eager to prove himself.

The Venus-bound probe made history when NASA destroyed it minutes into its flight after controllers realized its radar systems weren’t working. The source of the problem was a tiny glitch—likely one missing “-” in computer code John Norton oversaw. Legend has it that Norton was so haunted by the error that for years he carried a newspaper story of the Mariner fiasco in his wallet, neatly folded like a piece of origami. He consistently returned my work with corrections that raised it to levels I didn’t know existed. He was quiet, confident, and always focused on the job in front of him. It was never about his achievements, but about how he could channel his knowledge to make the work better and the project successful.

On the flip side, John Norton is the perfect tech lead. Does not takes things personally, is more than willing to share the knowledge, and offers incredibly valuable criticisms.

The engineers got a kick out of my eagerness to take on whatever they threw at me. They’d give me an assignment just to see how fast and how well—or not—I could write it, knowing that I’d spend all night trying. Sometimes they had already written the code themselves, so when I was done, I’d compare my work to theirs, absorbing lessons from their smarter subroutines and clever algorithms.

Like most world class entrepreneurs, Bill is incredibly obsessive. He drives himself insanely hard, and the entire time he is soaking up knowledge.

For most of my school life I had viewed math as the purest area of intellect. In the bigger pool of Harvard, as obvious as it sounds now, I realized that despite my innate talent, there were people better than me. And two of them were my best friends.

Very much like Bezos discovering that there were people who were always going to be more gifted as physics than he. Gates goes into a similar crisis of confidence and then pivots to computer science.

Listening to his explanation I thought, Wow, the guy is totally off base. Sure, he was one of the world’s foremost experts on the topic, but I thought I knew better. “You are wrong,” I blurted out, dismissing his approach for what I saw was an obvious flaw. He looked flustered and attempted to explain. I wasn’t having it. I shot back that his metric of efficiency was dumb and blah, blah, blah. He started to explain again. “No, you’re completely wrong,” I repeated. I shot up out of my seat and stalked out of the room. What the rest of the class, all graduate students, thought about this freshman storming out of class I can only guess. I’m sure nothing good. I paced around outside, replaying the incident in my head. After about fifteen minutes, my certainty gave way to dread. I realized, in fact, that I was the one who was wrong, completely and totally wrong. What did I just do? What a fool I am. It made it worse that he was one of the most congenial professors I had met. Plus he’d been kind enough to give me—an undergraduate—entry into his class. I went back after the class let out and apologized. He couldn’t have been nicer about the whole thing. Ultimately, we formed a good relationship. Professor Buzen took the effort to teach me the ins and outs of the Honeywell operating system he was working on, and my comeuppance brought new awareness that I needed to listen and learn. Even today I cringe when I think about my rudeness.

Truly, there is nobody more insufferable than a smart teenager. Kudos to Bill for including this.

It was incredibly flattering. The DEC people were kind to even consider me. And yet, I didn’t take the job. I felt bad. I think at that moment I just needed a confidence boost. For an afternoon I was back in a world that I fully understood, with people who spoke my language and who affirmed that I had something to contribute.

1. DEC is so, so important to the entire computing industry.¹

2. It’s amazing how even the most talented people in the world, occasionally, have crises of confidence.

In the late spring I got severe stomach pains, bad enough to send me to the ER, where they diagnosed me with ulcerative colitis. Two weeks in the hospital with a fever that spiked at 106 degrees marked the close of my first year of college. Part of me doubts the diagnosis. I’ve never had the problem again. I also can’t help but wonder if stress, fatigue, a poor diet, and my general angst about what I was doing with my life played a role in whatever hit me that spring.

The whole time, Bill is wrestling with whether he should drop out of school and join DEC or start MicroSoft full time.

Again and again, my dinner conversations with Paul led back to software. Software was different. No wires, no factories. Writing software was just brainpower and time. And it’s what we knew how to do, what made us unique. It was where we had an advantage. We could even lead the way.

“Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do, until this is true.” - Naval Ravikant

Okay, if math isn’t it, then find something else.

Micro-Soft

From my dorm room early one night in February I dialed the telephone number listed in the Popular Electronics article. When the woman who answered the phone connected me to Ed Roberts, the MITS president, I thought: How big can this company be if I can get the president on the phone?

Amazing how small the entire industry was back then. MITS was, at one point, the hottest computing company!

Paul fine-tuned the 8080 simulator he had developed (the code that let us use the PDP-10 tools as if we were using an 8080-based computer). As the simulator got better, so did the speed at which we could program. I could type my handwritten code into the PDP-10 and the mainframe would emulate exactly what the Altair would do. When my Altair program crashed, I could use the PDP-10’s powerful debugging tools to quickly figure out where I had made a mistake. We were sure that no one else had tricked the PDP-10 in this way. And we were sure that gave us an advantage over anyone else who might be trying to write software for the Altair.

[sic]

With Paul’s simulator and his development tools, the job went fast. I could write code, pull it up on the PDP-10, and stop the program right where it found the problem. Then try to fix it and move on. I had spent a huge chunk of my life in that weird, almost magical feedback loop: write, run, fix—a zone in which time seems to stop. I’d sit down at the terminal after dinner and then look up surprised to find it was two in the morning.

The first edge Microsoft ever had was in tooling! The developer experience was world class, and this enabled them to move faster than anyone else. This is the type of flow state that you want to let all your developers easily slip into.

Paul typed in a few BASIC commands to demonstrate our magnum opus. PRINT 2+2 4 OK With that, the first piece of software written for the first personal computer came to life.

So much for hello world!

One thing we needed was a name for our partnership. Up to that point Paul and I had been calling ourselves Traf-O-Data and using the company’s stationery every time we sent a business letter.

I cannot believe this was the first name.

It was Paul who had the next thought: Since we were writing software for microcomputers, how about combining those two words? I agreed. We had our name: Micro-Soft.

Still the hyphen, ew.

In line with the hippie ethos of the nascent personal computer world, it was generally accepted that software should be free. Software was something to be copied from a friend, openly shared, or even stolen.

Back in those days, software was just assumed to be free. It was a contrarian take that people should pay for software!

It took a leap of imagination to see that someone had spent thousands of hours designing, writing, debugging, and doing their best to get it to run. And since it had always been free, why shouldn’t you give it away? But Paul and I wanted to build a business. Our conviction, arrived at over many late-night talks, was that as personal computers got cheaper and cheaper, and spread into businesses and homes, there would be a nearly unlimited corresponding demand for high-quality software.

Bill ends up writing a 3 page memo and putting it in the most popular computer magazine of the day. He absolutely lambasts those who were giving away his software for free. It creates an incredible stir, but most importantly, starts changing the tide.

Software companies didn’t exist—or at least the kind of software company Paul and I wanted to build didn’t exist. And our product was something our potential customers thought should be free. But we had our one customer and faith that we could build from there.

MITS was their first (and only) customer at this point.

We never cooked at home, and aside from a jar of pickled pigs’ feet that Chris bought as a joke, our refrigerator was mostly empty.

Pretty typical bachelor life.

Looking back now with the knowledge of how the Micro-Soft story would play out, it seems obvious that I should have just quit school at that point. But I wasn’t ready.

It’s wild that this whole time, Bill is still in school. Insane.

Saturday, July 24: 2:45 Try Steve Jobs. Give his mom message. Tuesday, July 27: 10:55 Try Steve Jobs. Busy. 11:15 Steve Jobs calls. Was very rude.

So, so funny. Microsoft employee #1 Ric was trying to get a hold of Jobs after seeing the Apple folks at a conference to try and sell him their BASIC. (Jobs would later tell him, in less kind words, that they already had a version of BASIC, and if they needed another one, Wozniak would do so.)

Until that point, we were a band of friends whose futures didn’t worry me. If everything blew up, I was confident that we’d head off in our various directions and be fine. But now we were hiring people we didn’t know and asking them to move to New Mexico and cast their lot with us, an eighteen-month-old company with an unclear future. It was a bit daunting. To me, those early hires made Micro-Soft feel like a real company.

It’s starting to get very real. People are starting to give up real futures for Micro-Soft.

I found college intellectually fulfilling in a way that was distinctly different from Micro-Soft. I signed up for a course in British history during the Industrial Revolution and used my applied math wild card to talk my way into ECON 2010, a graduate-level economic theory class. There was another undergraduate in the class, a math major named Steve Ballmer.

Just imagine - if Bill hadn’t stayed, Micro-Soft would have never hired Ballmer. They would probably be worth an extra trillion at least, right?

I closed the letter: “For all that talk about hard work and long hours, it’s clear that you guys haven’t talked about Microsoft together or even thought about it individually, at least not near enough. As far as ‘putting out your last measure’ the commitment just isn’t being met. Your friend, Bill.” The warning about the drinking aside, my tone wasn’t unusual for the time. Of the three of us, I had always been the taskmaster, the one who incessantly worried about losing our lead, and fearing that if we weren’t careful, we’d be sunk.

It’s brutal but it’s true.

Like one of those watertight hatches on a submarine, I could shut out the rest of the world. Driven by the sense of responsibility I felt for Microsoft, I had closed the hatch door and locked the wheel. No girlfriend, no hobbies. My social life centered around Paul, Ric, and the people we worked with. It was the one way I knew to stay ahead. And I expected similar dedication from the others. We had this huge opportunity in front of us. Why wouldn’t you work eighty hours a week in pursuit of it? Yes, it was exhausting, but it was also exhilarating.

The entire time he works at Micro-Soft, he is driving himself insanely hard. In Overdrive, Microsoft is literally described as a series of death marches.

Keeping Microsoft going was a lonely job. I needed a twenty-four-hour-a-day business partner, a peer who would hash out and argue through big decisions with me, someone who would pore over scribbled lists of which customers might or might not pay and discuss what our bank account would look like as a result. Shouldering a hundred things like that every week on my own was a burden that at that time I felt should be acknowledged by an even bigger stake in what we were building.

This is a nice justification, but Paul Allen’s biography tells the other side. Bill and Steve are literally scheme-ing behind Paul’s back to take his equity and redistribute it to Steve. Really scummy behavior.

Back in Albuquerque, I told Paul I wanted to make the split sixty-four–thirty-six. He pushed back. We argued, but eventually he gave in. I feel bad now that I pushed him, but at the time I felt that split accurately reflected the commitment Microsoft needed from each of us. We signed an agreement in early February and made it official. (A little over three years later, that slice of the company would come up again as I was trying to convince Steve Ballmer to quit business school to join Microsoft. As an incentive, I included that extra 4 percent as part of his package. He joined in 1980 and became the twenty-four-hour-a-day partner I needed.)

Yeah, there was more to it than that.²

To a company, all focused on personal computers. In that moment, I felt that the industry had arrived. On the first day I was talking to a crowd of people about our Extended BASIC when out of the corner of my eye I noticed a handsome guy around my age with long black hair, a tightly cropped beard, and a three-piece suit. He was a few booths away, holding court with his own gaggle of people. Even from a distance I could tell he had a certain aura about him. I said to myself, “Who is that guy?” That was the day I met Steve Jobs. Apple, though smaller than many of the other companies, stood out. Even then the trademark design sense that would make Apple—and Jobs—so iconic in coming decades was on display.

Incredibly iconic day.

Getting the deal was a big confidence boost. I had wanted to charge TI a flat licensing fee of $100,000, but I chickened out. Fearful that the company would balk at six figures, I asked for $90,000, which was still the biggest deal we had signed aside from NCR, which we had to split with MITS. When TI visited Microsoft for the first time, our new office manager had to run out to buy extra chairs so there’d be a place for everyone to sit.

Remember that, thanks to a lawsuit, this entire time they’re not earning revenue from MITS until the arbitrator resolves the dispute.

I don’t know if our company lunch that week prompted what happened next, but Microsoft got a lucky break: Bob Greenberg, who had worked with us for less than a month, told me he would loan Microsoft $7,000, enough to help make our payroll. Years later, neither Bob nor I could remember whether I asked or he offered, but the loan transpired, with the agreement that Microsoft would pay him interest of eighty dollars a month. (When he learned of the loan, Bob’s father chastised him. Already upset that he’d taken the job at Microsoft and not at a brand-name company, he said, “When you get a job, they pay you. You do know that, right?”)

It’s crazy that a top 5 most successful business of all time nearly went bankrupt. If Microsoft almost went bankrupt then you can almost guarantee your little enterprise will. Only question is what will you do when that day comes.

After giving it a lot of thought, I concluded that Seattle ticked the most boxes: The University of Washington was a great source for programmers, and the distance from Silicon Valley afforded a higher degree of secrecy and a lower risk of losing employees to rivals.

Distance from Silicon Valley is highly underrated.

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¹ Creative Capital is a must read. The founding of the venture capital industry, the start of real computer companies, and so much more.

² Idea Man is a must read. In some ways, Paul was the real brains behind Microsoft’s technical dominance over the industry. How he’s treated by Bill is simply not right, but in the end they’re all billionaires so what does it matter?