Words Of Wisdom – Bill Gates
Bill Gates is one of the world’s most famous entrepreneurs, businessmen, and philanthropists. As the principal founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates is one of the most influential humans on the planet, a position he has used to help the world, it is estimated Gates and his wife Melinda have given away $28 billion via their charitable foundation – including $8 billion to improve global health.
As a teen at Lakeside Prep School, Gates wrote his first computer program on a General Electric computer. It was a version of tic-tac-toe where you could play against the machine. Once his school discovered Gates’ coding abilities, they let him write the school’s computer program for scheduling students in classes.
Along with fellow student Paul Allen, he began ditching class to work in the school’s computer room. Their work would soon pay off. When Gates was 15, he and Allen went into business together. The two teens netted $20,000 with Traf-O-Data, a program they developed to measure traffic flow in the Seattle area.
Gates scored a near-perfect 1590 out of 1600 on his SATs and was accepted to Harvard to study mathematics and computer science.. He left Harvard University in 1975 to fully devote himself to Microsoft with his childhood friend and fellow computer whiz Paul Allen.Their vision was their would be “a computer on every desktop and in every home”
The pair moved the company to Seattle in 1979, and that’s when Microsoft hit the big time. When Gates learned IBM was having trouble obtaining an operating system for its new PC, he bought an existing operating system from a small Seattle company for $50,000, developed it into MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System), then licensed it to IBM. The genius of the IBM deal, masterminded by Gates, was that while IBM got MS-DOS, Microsoft retained the right to license it to other computer makers.
It was at Microsoft in 1987 he met product manager named Melinda French whom he fell and love with and married. In 1994, Bill and Melinda Gates established the William H. Gates Foundation, dedicated to supporting education, world health, and investment in low-income communities. Melinda Gates suggested that people should emulate the philanthropic efforts of the Salwen family, which had sold its home and given away half of its value, as detailed in The Power of Half In 2010Bill and Melinda Gates, and investor Warren Buffett signed a commitment they called the “Giving Pledge.” The pledge is a commitment by all three to donate at least half of their wealth over the course of time to charity.
In 2006, Gates announced he was transitioning himself from full-time work at Microsoft to devote more quality time to the foundation. In 2015, he gave $1 billion to a clean energy project, as he sees supporting new ‘greener’ technologies as a way to help deal with global warming. Asked about the motivation of his giving, Gates replied
““It doesn’t relate to any particular religion; it’s about human dignity and equality,” he says. “The golden rule that all lives have equal value and we should treat people as we would like to be treated.”
SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA, BIOGRAPHY, BUSINESS INSIDER, ENTREPRENEUR
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