Whenever I personally think about someone founding a new
company one name comes to my mind: Bill Gates. He showed everyone how rich you
can get by starting something new out of nothing. As he was leading ‘Forbes list
of the world’s wealthiest people’ for almost 15 years he is commonly seen as
one of the most successful entrepreneurs ever.
To be fair, he was actually the co-founder Microsoft,
nowadays the biggest personal-computer software producer worldwide. Born in
1955, William Henry ‘Bill’ Gates III, discovered his interest for computers
together with some friends during his early years at high school. Working for several computer companies he was
able to extend his knowledge rapidly. A few years later, Gates was studying at
Harvard University at this time, he and his former classmate Paul Allen started
working for an electronic company called MITS. Therefore they moved to
Albuquerque and finally founded Microsoft as cooperation of Gates and Allen.
While Gates was responsible for the business and his handful of employees he
also continued writing codes for Microsoft’s software. Developing their original
operating-system, and working in a partnership with IBM at the same time, they
created what now has a market share of more than 90%. In 1985 the first version
of Microsoft Windows was launched.
Bill Gate’s aggressiveness and involvement as executive of
Microsoft followed a broad dominance of the company on the computer market. In
2006 he finally announced his retirement from the daily business. His job was
henceforth done by two people, one for the day-to-day management and one for
the product strategy. Until February 2014 Gates had been the chairman of the
Microsoft Corporation and is now still Technology Advisor.
His position as chairman of one of the biggest companies of
the world and his activities as an investor earned him a fortune of 76 billion
U.S. dollars.
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