Bill Gates and I
He wasn’t paying me to be stupid
The world’s richest man sat five feet away from me. And he was losing it.
“Learned something? Learned something? What are you telling me? That you were stupid a year ago? And now you’re smart?” He yelled, turning red. You could imagine steam streaming out of his ears.
“I don’t pay people to be stupid! Not now. Not a year ago. Not ever.”
It was my first meeting with Billlg and Steveb (as they were known at Microsoft in the 90’s). Our young business was in for its annual review. There were four of us representing our business and Billg and Steveb on the other side of the table. An intimate setup that I would never experience again during my time at Microsoft.
I had flown away from my family holiday for this meeting. An odyssey of its own that involved driving 3 hours to Reno, NV to catch a plane to Seattle the evening before. After the meeting I was set to do it again, in reverse. I had been excited to do it.
Now I wondered if I was going to return without a job. I didn’t have the faintest idea how I was going to explain this to my family. Bad enough to leave them mid-vacation. Returning disgraced and jobless hadn’t even entered my mind.
We started the meeting more or less on time. We were there, ready to go. Billg and Steveb were slightly late (a few minutes), which I was told to expect. One aspect of corporate life that I don’t miss was the impossible scheduling. Meetings on the hour, every hour. No time to transition from one location to the next. No time for a bathroom break.
No time to take a breath
Things started inauspicously. Billg sat down with a print out of our deck and rapidly leafed through the entire thing, including the detailed spreadsheets appended to the end.
Our finance guy began by going over a summary of those spreadsheets. The state of the business at a high level.
Bill interrupted him almost immediately.
“The gross profit line here doesn’t sync with your detailed breakdown. Which is it?”
We panic-flipped through the deck, switching back and forth from the detailed P&L to our summary. They were close, but not a match. We’d updated the detailed breakdown at the last minute and somehow failed to update the summary.
We explained the gaffe and Bill grunted and waved us on. Not a good start. We had undermined our credibility already. Were we bad at math or just careless? Or both?
We went on, detailing a litany of failed and cancelled projects we had inherited from our predecessors. It was an embarassingly long list that clearly had cost the company substantial money.
We had been warned not to try and hide or obfuscate our mistakes. Billg would already know or would sniff them out. Better to own your shit up front.
That’s true, as far as it goes. But it’s also true that you need to have a good story to go along with that confession. And we did not.
Billg listened, grim, but silent. Then we presented our new plan. And Bill looked up and asked a very reasonable question.
“A year ago you told me your plan and shared all these great projects. Now they’re dead. And you want me to believe this year’s plan is great.”
“Why should I believe you?”
This was not actually true. None of us had been there a year ago. We came in, surveyed the wreckage and set about cleaning it up and starting fresh. But we also knew that trying to sweep everything under the rug as not being our fault was not going to fly. It was our business and our responsibility.
My boss jumped in.
“You’re absolutely right. But we’ve learned a lot since then and we won’t make those mistakes again.”
On the surface, innocuous enough. But wrong. Oh so wrong.
Bill exploded.
“Learned something? Learned something?”
“You mean you were stupid a year ago and now you’re smart? Was I paying you to be stupid?”
“We hire smart people. We don’t hire stupid people. Are you saying you were stupid a year ago?”
“We don’t pay people to be stupid here!”
He continued to rant, fully in rhythm.
“I remember signing a paycheck with your name on it a year ago. Are you going to pay me back because you were actually stupid?”
A bead of sweat trickled down my forehead and into my eyes, burning fiercely. I blinked, paralyzed. Afraid to brush it away for fear all of that rage would be laser focused on me alone.
It seemed to go on for an eternity, but was probably just a few minutes. Bill wound down eventually and we continued.
At the end, Billg and Steveb approved our plan and we made our escape.
I wasn’t fired.
It took me a long time to really process the entire thing. But eventually I came to understand Bill’s ire.
How, in a way, we deserved it. What we had failed to do.
And the opportunity Bill missed as well.
And that deserves its own post.
ohhhh this is intense!!! i appreciate you sharing this part of your life with us! going to read again now! oh the part w the sweat in your eye... i have been in that emo-cognitive place too... so glad you are not in that space and place now :)
This is the rare peek behind the curtain — how the sausage actually gets made and by whom.
For years I watched Bill and Melinda at horse shows: him with a book in his lap always, her taking charge of everything around them, and beside her daughter who was competing. In that world, Bill was an object of open ridicule— the joke. The bragging rights of how another horse trainer screwed the Gates over on a commission for an overpriced horse was the buzz at every party or in the barn.
I was selling horses at the time. Dealing with the circus wasn’t worth it. Selling a horse to them meant dealing with a mafia of the worst kind.
The Gates wanted to win so badly that they entrusted their horses to a trainer the sport itself had sanctioned for horrible abuse and doping — the one man everyone else of means knew to keep far away from.
The Gates never seemed to weigh what it cost the animals. He wanted the ribbon, and he was willing to look past cruelty to get it. He never got it anyway. That’s the part that still is remarkable over ten years later. They looked past all the evidence to win— but still lost.
Eventually, they moved on to another set of riders and trainers. They ‘learned’ something, that was obvious to everyone else. If not out of a billionaires concern for the pure optics of the guilty by association or because of their love an appreciation for their horses. In any regard, the Gates learned something of which remains unknown and I cannot say.
Looking forward to reading more! Thanks