Bill Gates took the stage at CHM Live on February 11, 2025, for an engaging discussion with Stripe Cofounder and CEO Patrick Collison in front of a sold-out crowd. Gates covered a wide range of topics from his new memoir, Source Code: My Beginnings, which was provided with every ticket. The proceeds to go to the United Way.
As early as the eighth grade, Gates used his programming talent to get jobs finding bugs and doing a payroll program. His first real profit came at age 16, when his high school hired him to write a scheduling program and paid him $10,000 for his labor and $5,000 for the time-shared computer he used.
In the early ‘70s, the idea of starting a company was “strange,” according to Gates, but a friend introduced him to Fortune magazine, and he began to understand how companies worked. He most admired DEC because the computer company was bringing down the cost of computing from the expensive mainframes of the time.
Gates cofounded Microsoft with his high school computing buddy Paul Allen when he was 19. By 21, he was telling Intel that he didn’t like the memory architecture of their 286 and didn’t want to write software for the inferior 432. Smiling, Gates admitted that he had a tough relationship with Intel CEO Andy Grove, who called him “brash.”
One of Gates’ favorite nights was when he went to see Charles Simonyi at Xerox PARC and the two spent five hours creating a typeset document on the innovative Alto computer that essentially became the agenda for Microsoft.
Bill Gates describes meeting the Xerox Alto.
The first kit computer, the Altair, which appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics in 1974, inspired Gates to drop out of Harvard, where his professors were tired of his “futuristic ideas.” He was convinced that this meant computing would go from super scarce to free, and he wanted to be part of the change, along with the people in groups like the Homebrew Computer Club, who saw the personal computer as a seismic shift from the company and government dominated mainframes of the ‘50s and ‘60s. The Microsoft slogan was: “A computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software.”
Gates enjoyed a lot of freedom to explore his interests when he was young, and despite the death of his best friend in a climbing accident when they were teenagers, he described his childhood as idyllic. His parents were both strong influences on him in different ways.
Bill Gates talks about his parents.
Gates notes that he was almost certainly on the austism spectrum, developing social skills late, fidgeting constantly, and having the ability to concentrate hard and really dig into something when fascinated. He believes that it would have been detrimental to lose all that. And, he poured his energies into computers.
Fueled by 10 to 12 Diet Cokes a day and Tang powder to get calories quickly into his body, Gates was “monomaniacal” about Microsoft’s success in the 1970s and ‘80s, when the company doubled every 2 years for 18 years. At the time, Japan was a powerhouse that everyone worried about, just as we worry about China today. For a time, Microsoft did more business in Japan than in the U.S., and Gates learned valuable lessons for doing business globally.
Gates’ vision was to be a “software factory” that could move faster than any competition. His concept of “incremental compilation”—writing code and debugging it minutes later—was an idea that he didn’t want his competitors to duplicate. That was one of the reasons the company moved from Albuquerque to Seattle rather than Silicon Valley. Focused on creating popular products and adjusting to developments like the internet, Microsoft was also good at controlling costs and learning from their customers, leading to long term success.
When he resigned as CEO from Microsoft in his 40s, Gates began to read broadly and consider where he might focus his time and energy. Eradicating malaria was a huge global problem that hadn’t been touched by other philanthropists, and he became the biggest donor to that cause.
Today, Gates thinks about “scary things” that should concern everyone. In addition to nuclear war, he includes climate change, bioterrorism/pandemics, and keeping control of AI, an area in which he believes there’s a need for fair arbiters with a not-for-profit, long-term view. But the potential of AI, he says, has made the Gates Foundation’s ambitions much more aggressive and exciting.
Bill Gates shares his thoughts about AI in philanthropy.
Another area of interest for Gates is energy, and he predicts that in the 2030s nuclear fission (and fusion a bit later) will be cheaper than solar energy and less weather dependent. He admits he may be biased, and that predictions about nuclear energy are notoriously wrong, but to combat climate change nuclear paths have to work well or, he says, we’ll need a miracle of storage for clean energy.
On average, Gates believes people are much better off today than they were when he was growing up in the 1960s, particularly in healthcare and the availability of information that makes it easy to learn about anything. He cautions that young people should be concerned about his list of “scary things” as well as polarization. But, there is hope for finding solutions because, “The pace of innovation is greater today than ever.”
Bill Gates and Patrick Collison | CHM Live, Feb. 11, 2025
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