Few entrepreneurs survive the transition from start-up to
conglomerate. Of those, only a fraction go on to lead their company
past the billion-dollar mark.
And of those, only one man has directed a company to publicly
traded worth of about half a trillion dollars-when compared to
nations, his company boasts the ninth largest economy in the world.
At 44, he may be the richest man in history, worth approximately
$77 billion. He's also created more millionaires than anyone in
the history of business, both directly through stock options
($10,000 invested in his company's IPO is worth $4.8 million
today, the most successful stock of the century) and indirectly by
making computers part of daily life.
When it came time for us to pick the "Entrepreneur of the
Millennium," no one else even came close to William Henry
Gates III, founder, chairman and CEO of Redmond, Washington-based
Microsoft Corp.
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Although he arouses as much animosity as admiration for his
hardball tactics (there's even a book about his mortal enemies:
Gary Rivlin's The Plot to Get Bill Gates, Times Books),
everyone, friend or foe recognizes Gates as the rightful
Usher-in-Chief of the Information Age. It all started when, at age
25, Gates persuaded IBM to let him keep the rights to the DOS
operating system they had him develop for something called the
personal computer (he actually bought the program from another
company and adapted it, with considerable retailoring for the PC).
Thinking the program would be quickly replaced anyway, IBM agreed
to pay for a license to use it rather than purchase it outright.
Now Microsoft software operates 90 percent of the world's
desktop computers.
Since then, Microsoft has increased its net profits at a rate of
40 percent per year, all while sticking its fingers in an
astonishing array of pies, from an online entertainment magazine to
cars (1 percent of all U.S. auto sales are now made through its
CarPoint Web site).
"Gates and his partner, Paul Allen, were the first to
realize that software was not just an adjunct of hardware, and that
it would, indeed, ultimately prove more valuable," says Paul
Andrews, author of a Gates biography and the book How the Web
Was Won (Broadway Books). "This simple principle ushered
in the Information Age faster than all the hardware advances put
together. Gates was also a major force in standardizing the
technology, with DOS spurring the PC boom."
Despite its vast tentacles, Microsoft is perhaps the only major
corporation still run like a start-up, with simple lines of
authority and its 31,396 employees organized into small teams with
frugal budgets. Everyone pretty much has offices of the same size,
no one has secretaries and the work schedule is whatever employees
decide it needs to be to get their projects done. This
entrepreneurial approach to leadership is Gates' hallmark.
"We cannot think like a big company or we are dead," he
has said.
Where will Gates go from here? In the next millennium, he may
again redefine himself as a renaissance entrepreneur. "People
have only begun to see the impact of his wealth on education
medicine, poverty and social causes, a legacy that may overshadow
his technological contributions," says Andrews.
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