William Henry “Bill” Gates (b.1955) is an American computer entrepreneur and philanthropist. He founded Microsoft, Corbis, and Cascade Investments. He became the youngest multibillionaire in American history and was the wealthiest person in the world until 2017. Gates was CEO of Microsoft until 2000, then chief software architect until 2006. He stepped down as Microsoft’s chairperson in 2014.
Born in Seattle, Washington, attended Harvard, but dropped out at the age of twenty-one to start Microsoft. From another company, he purchased a software system and adapted it to create an MS-DOS operating system, which IBM licensed for their personal computers. The brisk adoption of IBM-type personal computers generated considerable royalties for Microsoft, which Gates shrewdly used to fund the development of such market-dominating software like Windows and Office that made Microsoft the world’s leading software producer.
Gates married Melinda French in 1994. Their philanthropic undertaking, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is the wealthiest charitable foundation in the world. It focuses on education and global health, including initiatives to combat HIV/AIDS, infectious diseases, and malnutrition. In 2006, the Gates’ friend and mentor, investor Warren Buffett, announced that he would donate over 95% of his fortune to the Gates Foundation.
Bill Gates is the author of The Future (1994,) The Road Ahead (1996,) and Business @ the Speed of Thought (1999.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Bill Gates
Leaders need to provide strategy and direction and to give employees tools that enable them to gather information and insight from around the world. Leaders shouldn’t try to make every decision.
—Bill Gates
Topics: Leadership
Smart is an elusive concept. There’s a certain sharpness, an ability to absorb new facts. To ask an insightful question. To relate to domains that may not seem connected at first. A certain creativity that allows people to be effective.
—Bill Gates
Topics: Creativity
I’m a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they’re interested in.
—Bill Gates
Topics: Communication
Often you have to rely on intuition.
—Bill Gates
Topics: Intuition
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
—Bill Gates
Topics: Entrepreneurs, Unhappiness, Customers, Adversity, Business
Our success has really been based on partnerships from the very beginning.
—Bill Gates
Topics: Entrepreneurs
Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.
—Bill Gates
Topics: Chance
The vision is really about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.
—Bill Gates
Topics: Vision, Power, Giving, Work
In terms of fast food and deep understanding of the culture of fast food, I’m your man.
—Bill Gates
Topics: Food
There’s a basic philosophy here that by empowering…workers you’ll make their jobs far more interesting, and they’ll be able to work at a higher level than they would have without all that information just a few clicks away.
—Bill Gates
If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1000 MPG.
—Bill Gates
Topics: Technology
If you give people tools, [and they use] their natural ability and their curiosity, they will develop things in ways that will surprise you very much beyond what you might have expected.
—Bill Gates
Topics: Ability
The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
—Bill Gates
Topics: Will, Sin, Business
This is a very exciting time in the world of information. It’s not just that the personal computer has come along as a great tool. The whole pace of business is moving faster. Globalization is forcing companies to do things in new ways.
—Bill Gates
You need to know about customer feedback that says things should be better.
—Bill Gates
Topics: Feedback, Customers
In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone.
—Bill Gates
Topics: Business
The frontiers were sort of wide open. It was that sense of excitement that we really wanted to spark in everybody else wherever we went.
—Bill Gates
Topics: Excitement
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.
—Bill Gates
My success, part of it certainly, is that I have focused in on a few things.
—Bill Gates
Topics: Focus
This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50
—Bill Gates
Topics: Miscellaneous, Forgiveness, Business
I find golf very relaxing. It’s a way to get away from work and get outside. It’s a lot of fun, and once you get going it’s almost kind of addictive.
—Bill Gates
Topics: Golf
I don’t think there’s anything unique about human intellience. All the nuerons in the brain that make up perceptions and emotions operate in a binary fashion.
—Bill Gates
Topics: Intelligence, Computers
Often you just have to rely on your intuition.
—Bill Gates
Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.
—Bill Gates
Topics: Religion
If you get health, then you have opportunity for literacy. Health first, then literacy. Once you have literacy, then you have a chance to bring in the new tools of communication. Let people reach out and have access to the latest advances.
—Bill Gates
Topics: Health
I really had a lot of dreams when I was 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
Topics: Dreams
I don’t think there’s anything unique about human intelligence. All the neurons in the brain that make up perceptions and emotions operate in a binary fashion. We can someday replicate that on a machine. Earthly life is carbon based and computers are
—Bill Gates
Topics: Intelligence, Computers
We all learn best in our own ways. Some people do better studying one subject at a time, while some do better studying three things at once. Some people do best studying in structured, linear way, while others do best jumping around, “surrounding” a subject rather than traversing it. Some people prefer to learn by manipulating models, and others by reading.
—Bill Gates
Topics: Learning
My job is about the most fun thing I do, but I have a broad set of interests, going places, reading things, doing things.
—Bill Gates
Topics: Jobs
Humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries—but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity.
—Bill Gates
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Sheryl Sandberg American Executive, Author
David Packard American Businessperson
W. Clement Stone American Self-help Guru
Michael Dell American Businessperson
Michael Bloomberg American Businessperson
Ted Turner American Businessperson
Jack Welch American Businessperson
Steve Jobs American Entrepreneur
Warren Buffett American Investor
David Rockefeller American Businessman, Philanthropist