Transcript
Introduction
"As I walk toward Harvard Square on a December weekend afternoon in 1974, I had no inkling that my life was about to change. I was 21 years old and at loose ends. My girlfriend had left a few weeks earlier to return to her hometown of Seattle, 3,000 miles away. I had a dead-end job at Honeywell and a crummy apartment. The one constant in my life those days was a Harvard undergraduate named Bill Gates. My partner in crime since we met at Lakeside school when he was an eighth grade, and I was in 10th. Bill and I learned how to dissect computer code together. We started one failed business and worked side-by-side on professional programming jobs while still in our teens.
It was Bill who had coaxed me to move to Massachusetts with a plan to quit school and join him at a tech firm. Then he reversed field to return to college. Like me, he seemed restless and ready to try something new. Bill and I kept casting about for a commercial project. We figured that we'd eventually write some software where we knew we had some talent. We fantasized about our entrepreneurial future. One time I asked Bill, 'if everything went right, how big do you think our company could be?' He said, 'I think we could get it up to 35 programmers.' That sounded really ambitious to me."