#174 Bill Gates (Overdrive)

**David Senra** (0:00)
A few years earlier, there might have been great concern among Microsoft senior managers about the condition of Bill Gates when he showed up the next morning.
After a restless night before the launch of Microsoft Excel in New York City in May 1985, Gates had shown up for the big event without sleep, without a shave, and without a shower.
He looked as bad as he smelled.
There was no need to worry this time. Gates had been 29 years old that day in New York City. Now, he was a couple months shy of his 40th birthday. The computer geek once ridiculed for his personal appearance had cleaned up, literally. The personal changes in Gates had been as dramatic as the increase in his wealth, which was now approaching a staggering $20 billion.
Forbes had recently named him the world's richest individual. He was also one of the world's most powerful. He was so well known internationally that he conducted his own foreign policy, calling on China's president and other world leaders during business trips.
He socialized with Warren Buffett. He played golf with the president. He wanted to be taken seriously as a visionary, as a statesman and as an adult.
But for all the changes, he was still very much that intense young college dropout who had founded Microsoft at age 19
Neither marriage nor fame nor fortune had diminished the white-hot competitive fire that consumed him.
That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Overdrive, Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace by James Wallace. As you can probably tell from that subtitle, this was a very old book. This book was published all the way back in 1997 And the way I found this book is because James Wallace was also one of the authors that wrote the book that I talked to you about all the way back on Founders number 140 And that book is called Hard Drive, Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire. It is one of my favorite books that I've read for the podcast so far. If you haven't listened to it, I highly recommend listening to that episode, but also reading the book. It's fantastic. It covers the first 35 years of Bill Gates' life all the way up until Microsoft's IPO. So he wrote, James Wallace wrote, this is a sequel of sorts, and this is gonna cover the next five years of Bill Gates' life as he continues to build Microsoft after the IPO. That excerpt that I just read to you, the note I left myself was different but the same. So his fortunes have grown, the company's way larger, he's got a lot more pressure now, but he still has that white hot competitive fire. I think in the podcast on Hard Drive, the way I would describe the intensity that a young Bill Gates had, which even says, if you listen to him, if you listen to modern day Bill Gates talk, he's like, the younger version of me would be disgusted with who I am now, because he's obviously calmed down a lot. He's not nearly as intense as what he said, or I guess the word he would use is hardcore. And I think the way I described him on Founders No. 140 was if Genghis Khan wore a Mr. Rogers costume.
Okay, so there's two main things that are happening in Bill Gates' life at this time. And you have one, one is a mistake. The first thing is that he completely missed the internet, which is surprising given how pivotal the internet was, or is, and how smart Bill Gates is, right? And the second thing is that he's being investigated, he and Microsoft are being investigated for monopolistic and anti-competitive behaviors by both the Justice Department and the FTC. Most of the highlights that I have, what I found most interesting and what I think we can learn the most from is this, how he recovers from this mistake and the competition that he's going to have with, there's a bunch of other companies, but primarily it's from Netscape, which is the company that Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen founded that grew out of Marc Andreessen's invention of the Mosaic browser, which is the first modern, you can think of it as the first modern web browser. So the author is going to talk about the surprising area where Microsoft's facing the most intense competitor or competition because they're focused on the large known competitors. And really the way to think about this is that the benefit that startups have because they can focus on one product. They are not burdened with legacy. And I'm going to read this quote from Overdrive, but then I want to read a quote from Becoming Steve Jobs, that book I did, I think all the way back on Founders Number 19 So it says, Microsoft faced a new and even greater enemy, a bunch of wise ass kids from an art upstart company called Netscape, a company that did not even exist two years earlier had been keeping Bill Gates up at night. And we're going to see a lot of parallels between the early days, it's between Microsoft and Netscape, and then what was taking place, let's say 15, maybe 20 years earlier between IBM and Microsoft. So this is just something that's going to repeat throughout history. And the quote I want to read you that comes from Becoming Steve Jobs is the benefit that startups have because they can focus on one product and they're not burdened by legacy. It says, Most great Silicon Valley startups start out lean and simple. The advantage they have over established companies is the focus they can bring to a single product or idea. Unencumbered by bureaucracy or a heritage of products to protect, a small group of talented folks is free to attack a concept with speed and smarts.