Hey friends. Today I will tell you about the life story of Bill Gates. How he became so rich. And, nowadays what he is doing. All of this will be covered in this post. Moreover, I will tell you exactly how to become rich like Bill Gates.
A little background of Bill Gates
William Henry Gates, aka Bill Gates, was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, USA. He completed his primary school from a posh school and went to Harvard University for higher education. We can notice that his parents could afford Harvard fees, so he was not poor. His father was a lawyer. On 14th of September, 2020 his father died.
What Bill did right during his childhood?
His early fascination with computers made him what he is today. During his time in school, when he was 14 years old, he wrote code to hack school's computer. He could write simple game codes during those days.
Watching Bill's capabilities towards the computer, his teachers asked him to write a code to schedule school classes. Ironically Bill would schedule his own classes with the classes in which there were more girls. Certainly, a trick expected from a schoolboy.
Later Bill Gates also built a program to calculate traffic in his city. And, sold this program to the government for 20,000$.
Bill Gates journey from a Harvard dropout to becoming the richest man on the planet
After his school, his father asked him to enroll for Harvard University for higher studies. So Bill went there. While attending Harvard, one day Gates saw an opportunity in a magazine. A company named Altiar MITS was looking for a software developer.
MITS already had mini-computers with them. Now they were looking someone to develop software. Bill Gates volunteered. He called MITS people and told them that he had the exact software that MITS was looking for. Bill thought that they would hang up listening to this but they were positive about it and asked Gates to show up at MITS after a month.
Bill Gates patched up with Paul Allen, his school friend, later going to be his business partner. This was 1975. Both boys built a software language called BASIC within a month. They went to MITS to sell it. Their software worked perfectly with MITS computers.
Later they were appointed by the company. So, the duo dropped out of their colleges and went to work for MITS full-time.
Bill Gates later realised that their software was used by every employee in the company without paying a price to the creator. So he wrote a letter to the company employees and computer hobbyists saying that it was like stealing, and they should better pay for the software.
In 1977, MITS was sold to another company and Bill Gates managed to copy his software and continued licencing it. By 1979, Bill Gates and the team were on their own. Bill Gates came back to his hometown in Seattle and built an office there.
This was a time in 1980 when IBM, the computer giant, was looking for software for their computers. IBM approached Bill Gates to make software. What Bill Gates did was he himself did not have the software ready. So he purchased software from another company, which later was named as MS-DOS, and resold it to IBM while keeping the licence with himself.
In 1981, Steve Jobs asked Bill Gates to build software for Apple. Gates went to develop software. But then he saw the user interface of Apple was so smooth. Moreover, Apple had graphics on their computers and they operated with a mouse. Gates saw a huge opportunity there and immediately decided to make a graphic user interface like that of Apple. Until this time MS-DOS operated by a type pad and not by a mouse.
In 1985, Bill Gates did what he had decided. He launched an operating system, Microsoft Windows 85, with a graphic user interface like that of Apple. Later in 1989 Bill Gates launched Microsoft office. And in 1995, windows 95. Then there was no looking back. His share price went up by 60,000%. His daily sales were an all-time high. He could even sell 100,000 software copies within 2 weeks.
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| Credit: Wannapik |
What can I learn from Bill Gates' journey to becoming the richest man?
- Start early
Bill Gates started to find interest in computers from a very young age. Therefore you should also find your passion early and start working on it.
- Hard work
Bill Gates would work 16 hours a day while building his company. He used to personally check every computer code during the initial years of Microsoft
- Hiring the smartest
Bill's policy to hire was as follows,
- Hire college graduates and train them on job
- Hire smart and energetic people who would want to build easy to use computers
- Reading a lot
Bill Gates used to read a lot and still continuing with the same habit.
Bill Gates strategy for reading is as follows:
- Start reading a book that you can finish. And, finish it for sure
- Take out at least an hour or two every day to read
- Make notes to ensure that you are concentrated while reading
Mistakes that Bill Gates did
The biggest mistake that Bill committed was not to make a mobile phone software, which was well into their calling. And they let Android win. We can now realise what could be possible if Microsoft could enter into the mobile phone business.
What Bill and Melinda Gates are doing now?
Bill Gates is now managing the Gates foundation, which helps in eradicating diseases all over the world. Bill is now concerned about burning problems like climate change, health and education and donating a hefty amount in solving these problems.
It doesn't matter what you have. But what matters a lot is how you are using it to reduce inequity in the society
On May 3rd, 2021, Bill Gates got divorced from Melinda Gates.
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