Do You Really Know Bill Gates? The Myth of Entrepreneur as Risk-Taker

This is something a lot of people don't always see. For example, I spent 20 hours building a website and doing all the SEO, link generation,etc and then just let it sit. It had a bunch of fake products and now 2 or 3 months later people are now trying to place orders.<p>Now I can start devoting time to it and build out the infrastructure to support the website and business. I didn't jump and quit my job to see if it will work.<p>At the end of the day, when the money runs out you have to get a real job. The goal should be to take small-risk big-reward plays and lots of them until something catches.

<i>"The thought of Gates and Allen as the godfathers of a hacking subculture that has cost Microsoft and the world overall hundreds of billions of dollars does indeed boggle the mind."</i><p>Lulwat? Talk about somebody not knowing their history.

The Gates story reads like it was mostly cribbed from the Wikipedia entry and dates from[2009]. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_gates#Early_life" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_gates#Early_life</a>

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a similar article in the New Yorker:<p><a href="http://www.gladwell.com/2010/2010_01_18_a_surething.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.gladwell.com/2010/2010_01_18_a_surething.html</a>

Ambition is the overriding characteristic that Gates has in such abundance and most people lack. Gates was lucky to have had so much support but probably would have taken more risk if he had been forced to.

I believe the PC-DOS deal (without which Microsoft would be a footnote) stems from Microsoft's role in the BASIC interpreter built into the PC's ROM rather than an indirect intervention from Mary Gates. The BASIC deal, however, is somewhat attributed to her.