🏀 This week, the NBA’s next big sensation landed in San Antonio.

Victor Wembanyama, a 7-foot-5, 19-year-old phenom from France, was drafted No. 1 by the Spurs, a patient franchise that has also developed all-time greats like David Robinson and Tim Duncan.

Could “Wemby” be next in line?

In last Sunday’s newsletter, we highlighted Amazon origin stories featuring Jeff Bezos. Today, we feature another tech giant and innovator: Microsoft and Bill Gates.

All this, and more, in just 5 minutes to read.

— Matthew

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"I really had a lot of dreams as a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot."

— Bill Gates

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MICROSOFT ORIGIN STORIES

Dumpster diving

As young adults, computer geeks Bill Gates and Paul Allen would dive into dumpsters to find old computers. Their mission centered on studying the operating systems to figure out how they worked.

It was often just two young computer hobbyists trying to understand how to build something meaningful in the booming computer industry.

“You lifted me into one of those huge garbage bins,” Gates told Allen in a 60 Minutes interview.

The dumpster-diving exemplified their love for computers and propelled them to start Microsoft in the mid-1970s. Years after the dumpster diving, on the Today Show in 1984, Gates was just 28. He was asked about his decision to drop out of Harvard Law School.

“Things move very quickly in the industry, and it was really the urgency to get out there and be the first one to put a basic on the microcomputer that caused me to drop out,” he recalled.

“I enjoy working with the people, talking about what we’re gonna get done, getting real excited, making sure that the structure, that the ideas get executed, and really leading the company. That’s exciting,” he added.

Three years later, at 31, he became the youngest billionaire in the world.

Computer lab pals

Gates and Allen, Microsoft co-founders, met at Lakeside School, a private prep school in Seattle. Gates had been fascinated with computers since before grade school.

When Gates was 13, the school invested in a computer terminal, which was exceedingly rare in the late 1960s. Gates began toying with it, hanging out in the computer lab for hours, awash in the art of early technology. He was intrigued by the opportunities.

At 13, Gates wrote his first computer program, a tic-tac-toe game.

10,000 hours

In Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, he writes that Gates’ passion for programming drove him to practice hour after hour. As he grew older, he hung around the computer lab at the University of Washington, thanks to a connection through a friend.

“It was my passion,” Gates has said. “I skipped athletics. I went up there at night. We were programming on weekends. It would be a rare week that we didn’t get 20 to 30 hours in.”

Gates ran up to 1,575 hours of computer time, roughly eight hours per day. So while Gates cultivated his natural ability, he capitalized on his good luck in having special access to computers before almost anyone his age.

“Extraordinary achievement is less about talent and more about special opportunity,” Gladwell writes.

A magazine idea

In 1975, Allen, a 22-year-old programmer, noticed the January cover of Popular Electronics magazine. The cover featured an image of the “World’s First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models,” the Altair 8800 microcomputer.

Allen was working at Honeywell in Boston, so he visited Gates, at nearby Harvard, with the cover in hand. Then Allen persuaded Gates to leave Harvard to pursue the idea of launching a programming company.

In 1975, they registered the company name, then known as “Micro-Soft,” a hyphenated term meaning “microcomputer” and “software.” It was an immediate hit, with Allen’s instincts from that magazine cover on point.

Micro-Soft started with an 8800 interpreter, its first software, that drew wide interest among programming enthusiasts and computer hobbyists. By the end of the year, Microsoft exceeded $16,000 in revenue (nearly $100,000 today), and by 1978, they’d exceeded $1 million in annual revenue.

Said Gates in 1977: “There are a lot of people forecasting that there will be software stores just like there will be record stores today. And that they’ll be thousands and thousands of those. And I think I’d have to agree.”

A series of breakthroughs

Microsoft’s breakthrough into the PC market came in 1980 when IBM approached Microsoft to develop the operating system for its upcoming IBM PCs. Microsoft was among the few companies that IBM approached, and eventually, IBM gave the contract to Microsoft to develop a CP/M operating system for the IBM PC.

Then came windows. Then came video gaming like XBox. Then came a shift to the cloud with Azure.

What Gates and Allen built has become a roughly $2.5 trillion tech giant. It’s widely recognized worldwide and still growing rapidly in many areas like gaming and cloud services.

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years,” Gates has said. “If you give people tools, and they use their natural abilities and their curiosity, they will develop things in ways that will surprise you very much beyond what you might have expected.”

Dive deeper

The national bestseller, Hard Drive, explores the making of Gates’ Microsoft in extraordinary detail.

See you next time!

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