bill gates business plan

Gates' 12 step business plan

In excerpts taken from his upcoming book, "Business @ The Speed of Thought," and published in TIME magazine, Gates writes that e-mail is a "key component of our digital nervous system."

"There's no doubt that e-mail flattens the hierarchical structure of an organization. It encourages people to speak up. It encourages managers to listen," he says.

"I read all the e-mail that employees send me, and I pass items on to people for action. I find unsolicited mail an incredibly good way to stay aware of the attitudes and issues affecting the many people who work at Microsoft."

Gates says companies need to have a "nervous system" that enables them to run smoothly and efficiently, respond to emergencies and opportunities, interact quickly with customers, and make speedy decisions.

12 step plan Gates also outlines 12 steps he says companies should take if they want to reinvent the way they work and succeed in the coming digital decade. Here are Gates' 12 steps:

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The 5 Strategy Rules of Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs

If there were a Mount Rushmore for technological innovation, Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs would be the faces looking outward. The longtime CEOs of Microsoft, Intel, and Apple have done more than anyone to popularize the modern-day personal computer, and in doing so, also created three of the most highly valued companies in the world.

But how were they able to steer their companies through the volatile ups and downs of decades of changing technologies? What did they have in common? And what can we learn from them about successful strategy?

“The notion that you could brand a product that no one had ever seen and that no one understood what it did was brilliant”

Those are the questions David B. Yoffie and Michael A. Cusumano address in their new book, Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs . "I have known all three of these individuals," says Yoffie, the Max and Doris Starr Professor of International Business Administration at Harvard Business School. "By looking at what they had in common, I thought there was a great opportunity to understand what distinguishes a really great strategist from your average CEO."

Yoffie has had access to all three men—having served on Intel's board since 1989 and written numerous business cases on Apple and Microsoft. He first started talking about the idea for the book more than six years ago with Cusumano, the Sloan Management Review Distinguished Professor of Management at MIT Sloan School of Management. But, Yoffie says, they wanted to wait until all three had finished their tenures. "The idea was to wait until Steve's departure, which unfortunately came with his death. Literally a week after Steve's death, we had lunch and agreed we would do the book."

The result is a look into the minds of three tech pioneers who, to outside appearances, don't share much in common.

"When I mention I wrote the book, the first response I get is, 'I can't imagine three more different people,'" says Yoffie. Besides their contrasting personalities—Gates the pragmatic technocrat; Grove the disciplined engineer; and Jobs the visionary perfectionist—their companies had unique business models and filled very different niches in the technology value chain.

5 Key Strategies

As they examined what the three CEOs had in common, however, Yoffie and Cusumano homed in on five key strategies that any manager, entrepreneur, or CEO can learn. Each of the lessons reads like a paradox or Zen koan that takes intelligence and practice to unpack. "Look Forward, Reason Back," for example, takes its lead from game theory, in which a great chess master will simultaneously be able to see the eventual path to checkmate and the best next move to get there.

Gates, Grove, and Jobs's Keys to Success

• Look Forward, Reason Back
• Make Big Bets, Without Betting the Company
• Build Platforms and Ecosystems—Not Just Products
• Exploit Leverage and Power—Play Judo and Sumo
• Shape the Organization around Your Personal Anchor

"Where many CEOs fail is they can espouse these great ideas about what the world is going to look like in five years, but they aren't able to look at what they need to do today to achieve that result," says Yoffie.

Bill Gates was able to envision a world in which there was a computer on every desk at a time when personal computers didn't exist. But he also realized that the way to capitalize on that future was to focus his energies on controlling software, not hardware.

Andy Grove foresaw the eventual break up of the vertically integrated computer industry, and was able to specialize in creating the core component of computing—the microprocessor. And then he championed that silicon part with the famous "Intel Inside" marketing campaign. "The notion that you could brand a product that no one had ever seen and that no one understood what it did was brilliant," says Yoffie. "That changed the entire structure of the semiconductor industry forever."

“They were all in many ways highly imperfect leaders. We didn't want to idealize them or sugarcoat them”

Steve Jobs saw a future in which consumers would move beyond the computer to use a range of electronic devices for entertainment and communication and then systematically rolled them out one step at a time—the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

Building an Ecosystem

Gates was the first of the three to demonstrate another of Yoffie and Cusumano's lessons: "Build Platforms and Ecosystems—Not Just Products." Early on Gates realized that no one product could provide a lasting competitive advantage, but if consumers became hooked on a particular platform, such as the Microsoft operating system, then you could roll out new products that they would adopt, such as Word, Internet Explorer, and Windows Media Player. Even more importantly, such platforms would allow creative developers outside your organization to add their unique value.

Grove faced a crucial decision regarding Intel's own platform when in the late 1980s his engineers figured out a way to make a more efficient processor that nevertheless wouldn't be compatible with Intel's previous architecture. After agonizing about the decision for a year, Grove chose to stick to the platform Intel had already developed, even if it meant jettisoning a potentially better product. "That was the moment of truth whether he was going to be a product company or a platform company," says Yoffie. "In the end, the opportunity to build an ecosystem was more important."

Interestingly, Jobs stubbornly held out the longest in his vision of the product as supreme—pushing the proprietary Mac as the central hub of Apple's product line despite falling market share. Eventually he was persuaded to shift focus and allow the iTunes music platform to be used on PCs as well as on Apple iPods and iPhones. That decision, of course, was a game-changer, establishing Apple as the dominant player in mobile computing. "If iTunes had been available for the Mac only, it would have always remained a niche product and nothing more," says Yoffie.

As that example illustrates, even brilliant CEOs make mistakes sometimes. But Gates, Grove, and Jobs recognized their own strengths and weaknesses and had the ability to cut bait, as Jobs did, and change course when it mattered.

Yoffie and Cusumano express this in their last lesson, "Shape the Organization around Your Personal Anchor," using the image of the "anchor" in a double-sense, both what grounds you and what can weigh you down. "These guys were not supermen," says Yoffie. "They were all in many ways highly imperfect leaders. We didn't want to idealize them or sugarcoat them."

All three CEO-strategists, however, were self-aware enough to surround themselves with executives who helped compensate for their own weaknesses. Gates, for example, knew his strength was not in operations, so he brought in an outside COO to run the day-to-day operations. In the same vein, Jobs nearly destroyed Apple in the early 1980s by trying to do too much himself. When he returned in 1997, Tim Cook was one of his first hires to run operations, which allowed Jobs to focus on overall strategy and design.

"These guys each had very different skills they brought to the table," says Yoffie, "but they also became successful in part because they were able to figure out what they were not good at, and they were able to fill those gaps by recruiting individuals and forming teams to do the things they couldn't do or wouldn't do or shouldn't do."

That kind of self-aware recognition of weakness is not something you often see listed in the traits of a great strategic leader. Based on the example of these three men's success, it may be the most important lesson of all.

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Squeeze Growth

Entrepreneurship, Productivity & Marketing

15 Powerful Business Lessons from Bill Gates

Written By Aakanksha on November 4, 2023

Bill Gates has been a name synonymous with being the richest man in the world for the longest time.

Since childhood, his keen interest in computers led him to build Microsoft in 1975.

Within a decade, he became a billionaire and among the most celebrated entrepreneurs.

Under his leadership and beyond, almost 50 years later, Microsoft is still among the topmost companies in the world.

It’s a no-brainer that we could learn a few things (I mean, a lot) about business from Bill Gates!

Without wasting any more words, let’s dive into 15 powerful business lessons from him.

1. Start as early as you can

While there is no age bar for starting a business, the sooner you start the better. At least, this is the case with Bill Gates.

His fascination with computers led him to start programming as early as 13 years with his friend Paul Allen.

The machine was huge and slow, and it didn’t even have a screen. But I was hooked.

He even formed a group of programmers at his school, who digitized the school’s payroll system.

Moreover, he also built Traf-O-Data, a software that analyzed traffic volumes.

Soon after, he got into Harvard University and dropped out to start Micro-Soft (now Microsoft). He saw his fair share of challenges, too.

The point is, starting early helped Bill learn a lot about and thus, build a business that would eventually find tremendous success.

Not to mention, Microsoft reaped the benefits of being the first in the business.

2. Think ahead of the curve

One of the things that distinguishes Bill Gates from everyone else is his ability to think way ahead of time.

His farfetched vision of  ‘a computer on every desktop and in every home’ was unthinkable, if not crazy, at the time when he started Micro-Soft (It had a – before it was removed to finalize the current name, Microsoft).

But, he believed that the personal computer was the future.

The PC and the Internet are going to be fundamental. They’re not there yet, but we’re certainly on a course to do that, and it will be just like the automobile. – Windows 98 Launch, 1998

He could visualize how having a computer in every home could change the way we live forever.

He was right, wasn’t he?

Thinking ahead of the curve may take you further than you could ever imagine.

3. Empower your team

A business can seldom be successful in a silo.

You may have a great vision, but if the people you’re working with are not onboard with it, it’s a sure path to failure.

The vision is really about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.

Bill not only focused on getting the right people on board but allowed them the freedom to take charge and creatively contribute to their company.

In an interview with CNN , he shared that he initially would micromanage his team but eventually learned to resist it.

Microsoft is an exemplary organization when it comes to taking care of employees and building an excellent work culture.

4. Show that you are solving a problem

If you observe successful businesses, at the core of it, you’ll find they are solving a problem.

Bill Gates backs this not only in his ventures but also while advising entrepreneurs .

If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions, they will be moved to act.

While Microsoft’s vision was far from the imagination of customers, its marketing changed the game.

They showed their customers the problems they were facing and how Microsoft products could solve them.

Firstly, your business needs to solve a problem. It’s possible your customer may not even be aware of it.

Hence, you need to show the problem and the solution you’re offering.

And voila! You’re off to a great start.

5. Start low, keep improving your products

One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is not launching until a product/service is perfect or going all in too early.

Bill Gates is of a different view. He believes you can always start with less than a “perfect” product and keep on improving it.

Microsoft has had its success by doing low-cost products and constantly improving those products and we’ve really redefined the IT industry to be something that’s about a tool for individuals.

Microsoft was no perfect product. Neither was it high-end. The affordability of the products made them lucrative and accessible to customers, playing a major role in Microsoft’s success.

Even today, MS products are not perfect, but they keep on improvising each day. Every release of every single product has some improvement.

The point is, take whatever you have to your potential customers. They will help you learn what else to improve.

6. Always listen to your unhappy customers

Even if you have a great idea or you’re solving the most pressing problem, not every customer may be happy with your solution.

Sounds bad, right?

Not really.

In fact, Bill Gates says it is better to have unhappy customers.

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

Your dissatisfied customers are telling you something no one else can and, therefore, are the key to improving your products or services.

If you don’t pay attention to them, it can not only cost you a lot of money but also put you much behind in the race.

You would lose customers to the competition who would be willing to listen to them.

7. Prioritize customer service

While learning from unhappy customers is essential, prioritizing customer service is beyond just essential for a business.

Bill Gates has always emphasized the importance of customers and advises new entrepreneurs to prioritize customer service.

He believes staying in touch with customers is the key to success. Nothing can make or break your business like your customers’ experience.

Only a few businesses will succeed by having the lowest price, so most will need a strategy that includes customer service.

In 1989, when Microsoft had become huge, Bill once handled customer calls himself.

He often likes to recollect his experience from this incident and the insights it gave him.

8. Keep innovating

Microsoft and innovation are two sides of the same coin. Of course, because of Bill Gates’ passion for innovation.

He advocates innovation to be the critical factor in fighting the problems at hand today – be it innovation in products, processes, economies, or leadership.

Innovation is the reason our lives have improved over the last century. From electricity and cars to medicine and planes, innovation has made the world better.

The birth of software licensing and Windows are the most remarkable examples of Bill’s innovative thinking.

Out-of-the-box thinking will not only help you solve business problems but solve problems for the world at large – however small the problem may be.

9. Don’t be afraid to take big risks

The ability to take risks is one of the most common traits among successful entrepreneurs.

Bill Gates is no different. Right from the start, he took some big risks that paved the way for incredible success.

To win big, you sometimes have to take big risks.

The first was definitely dropping out of Harvard to start Microsoft. Another notable one is leaving Microsoft to start Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Over the years at Microsoft, he took some big risks that turned into big opportunities, whether it was developing new products or dealing with competitors.

However, to make sure his risks pay off in rewards, he bases it on proper mental models.

You might want to check out the Netflix documentary Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates to learn about how he takes risks.

10. Celebrate success but learn from failures

Success and failure are part and parcel of any business, but how you deal with it makes all the difference.

Despite revolutionizing the tech industry and finding early successes, Bill Gates hasn’t been immune to failures.

His first business with his friend Paul Allen, Traf-O-Data, failed. They suffered net losses of $3,494.

It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

Moreover, Microsoft launched Bing with the aim of becoming a leading search engine. But, Google completely crushed it.

Microsoft further saw some big setbacks with its lawsuits. However, learning from each failure helped Bill strengthen his business.

Where Microsoft stands today is proof of its strength.

11. Work hand in hand with competition

In a world where businesses continuously strive to eliminate competitors, collaborating with competitors may not seem like the best idea.

But, Bill Gates and Microsoft are an exception.

At a time when Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy, Bill joined hands with Steve Jobs to save it’s one of its toughest competitors after years of sour relationship.

Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people.

Microsoft invested in Apple and built Office for Mac, which turned out to gain a lot of popularity.

Since then, Microsoft and Apple have collaborated to build many products together, even when Apple outranked Microsoft in valuation.

Because Bill’s vision has been to shape the computing industry together.

In fact, Microsoft also collaborated with another competitor, IBM, and continues to do so even today.

12. To compete, be prepared for the unplanned

For a business, staying in the competition is as crucial as beating the competition.

But, how do you know if your business has what it takes to compete?

A company’s ability to respond to an unplanned event, good or bad, is a prime indicator of its ability to compete.

Bill Gates thinks the biggest indicator of a company’s ability to compete is its ability to deal with unexpected or unplanned things.

Unless you’re promptly responding well to changes – be it evolving technology, market fluctuations, consumer behavior, or changes within your organization – your business ought to fall short at some point.

13. Build effective ecosystems

The impact Bill Gates has been able to make in the world through his business or other ventures is because of creating systems bigger than himself.

Microsoft has been able to maintain its strong foothold in the tech industry because it has created a solid and expansive ecosystem of innovation, products, solutions, people, and partnerships.

If you want to stay in business, solving one-off problems won’t do the job. Building systems at the micro and macro-level and leveraging them is the way to stay ahead in the game.

Step back, build a better system, make sure that the government money gets to the people who deserve it.

Moreover, he also believes better systems are key to solving most problems in the world.

14. Don’t automate inefficiency

Automation is increasingly becoming the bedrock of business operations.

However, Bill Gates warns businesses against automating inefficiency.

Meaning you need to make sure you’re using technology in a way that makes your business efficient and not the other way around.

In addition, the operation you’re automating should be efficient in itself so that technology magnifies it. If you automate an inefficient process, technology will further multiply the inefficiency.

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

For example, if you’re automating email marketing but your process to identify your target audience is ineffective, you will definitely not get the results from email campaigns.

Moreover, it would have cost you time, money, and resources.

15. Use your power to improve the world

Besides being celebrated for his multi-billion dollar worth and business acumen, Bill Gates is also known for his philanthropic work.

He believes businesses have a pivotal role to play in improving the lives of the underprivileged.

Once you’ve found a solution that works, catalytic philanthropy can harness political and market forces to get those innovations to the people who need them most.

Through Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he has committed billions of dollars towards eradicating diseases, improving education, and the overall quality of life of millions of people worldwide.

He also actively works on projects aimed at tackling climate change.

Even though you cannot pledge huge amounts of money, you can undoubtedly make a positive impact through innovation and influence.

Parting words

Bill Gates is not only a business pioneer but a dreamer who envisioned a world and worked to realize it.

I hope these business lessons from him inspire you to take your business to new heights and make a positive impact.

Here’s the link to his personal blog if you’d like to learn more from him.

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Bill Gates Biography The digital demagogue earned billions by anticipating the market's needs. Now, his philanthropic foundation is helping countless others across the globe.

Bill Gates is perhaps the most well-known computer businessman in history. Not only did he start the most popular computing company of all time, Microsoft , but he also changed the way computers were made and marketed forever.

His entrepreneurial spirit and business acumen are worth studying. So let's take a closer look at Bill Gates , his history, how he started his famous company and his current philanthropic endeavors.

Who is Bill Gates?

William Henry Gates III is best known as the founder and leader of Microsoft . He created the company in 1975 with his business partner Paul Allen. Though Paul Allen left the company some years later, William H. Gates remained with Microsoft for decades, heading it as the CEO until he left the position in 2000.

Gates remained with Microsoft until 2008, then retired to take a position on the board of advisors. Since then, he has primarily acted as a business investor and charity leader, driving positive developments worldwide as the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and his involvement in other organizations.

Related: The 5-Hour Rule Used by Bill Gates , Jack Ma and Elon Musk

How did Bill Gates start Microsoft ?

Although many don't know it, Bill Gates didn't start Microsoft alone. His pursuit began when he attended Lakeside High School in Seattle. There, he met a fellow student named Paul Allen; together, they worked in the school's computer room for hours on end.

By the time the duo was 16, Bill Gates and Paul Allen went into business together, securing investment funds to develop the "Traf-O-Data" software program to measure traffic flow throughout the Seattle Metro area. This was the first business partnership that the two collaborated on, but it wouldn't be the last.

Harvard and the Altair 8800

Though Bill Gates attended Harvard University , he didn't focus much on his studies. After reading a magazine article in December 1974 about the world's first microcomputer, the Altair 8800, Gates and Allen decided to pursue a business opportunity only they could see.

They contacted the manufacturer of the Altair 880, MITS, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

They told the president they had written a version of the computer language BASIC specifically for the microcomputer. Though this was a fabrication, the pair wanted to see if there was any interest in their "design."

To the pair's surprise, the president of MITS said that he'd like to see the language. Scrambling, Gates and Allen started working 24/7 to create the promised language.

They simulated the Altair 8800's capabilities on other computers since they had no microcomputer to work on or test.

Still, Gates knew the opportunity was too good to pass up. When the pair showed the language to MITS, it was a resounding success. Inspired, Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard in November 1975, taking a job offer to work at MITS full-time.

The formation of Microsoft

More importantly, Bill Gates and Paul Allen entered an official business partnership named "Micro-Soft." The two got the name for the company by combining the words microcomputer and software .

However, by November 26, 1976, they'd changed the name to the more commonly recognized "Microsoft" version. Microsoft's first product was the Altair BASIC language, but Gates and Paul Allen continued to work on new products. Gates never returned to Harvard University, as his business was already massively successful.

In the years to come, MITS would collapse, but Microsoft endured. July 1980 saw IBM approach Microsoft to write software for the upcoming personal computer, the IBM PC.

Although Microsoft was initially contracted to write a BASIC interpreter for the IBM PC, the company was instead eventually hired to write the operating system for the upcoming computer when negotiations with Digital Research, another company, fell through.

Pivot to operating systems and corporate dominance

This was the start of Microsoft's long-term success as a software company. Microsoft invented the MS-DOS operating system, which was eventually used for many other PCs created by different manufacturers.

The company's growth skyrocketed ; Microsoft expanded into developing applications software, eventually building a GUI-based operating system called Microsoft Windows to compete with the newly released Macintosh Apple Computer.

Windows was a huge success, and each successive operating system version was based on its original version (MS-DOS) until Windows XP.

By 1986, Microsoft went public to create more capital for expansion. It was a huge success; the company took in $61 million, and Bill Gates became one of the wealthiest people in the United States in a single night.

Related: Bill Gates ' Solution to Income Inequality

What did Bill Gates invent?

Technically, Bill Gates didn't invent anything genuinely new. Instead, he and Paul Allen created two high-quality products that computer companies could use: the BASIC programming language for the Altair 8800 and the MS-DOS operating system for the IBM PC.

Bill Gates "invented" these things because he physically wrote the code for many of them. As the years progressed and Microsoft became more popular and successful, however, Gates transitioned from more of a front-line role into an executive role.

That's where he is today, heading Microsoft from afar rather than writing code as he did in his youth. In this sense, Bill Gates is less of an inventor and more of a savvy businessman .

He was especially successful because he showed enough innovation and tenacity in the early computer market to dominate competitors as they grew alongside his company.

How old is Bill Gates ?

As of 2023, Bill Gates is 67 years old . He was born on October 28, 1955. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, he often spoke about the benefits of masks for older individuals.

What is Bill Gates ' net worth ?

At the time of this writing in spring of 2023,, Bill Gates' net worth is $107.9 billion . This combines his assets, stock options, portfolio values and estates.

He is currently the fourth richest person in the world, behind Bernard Arnault, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

Related: Bill Gates : Bitcoin is 'Better Than Currency'

What are Bill Gates ' primary investments?

Many entrepreneurs and future business owners may wish to grow their wealth by copying some of the primary stock investments Bill Gates has made over the years. Though he is no longer the CEO of Microsoft, Gates has continued to grow much of his wealth through savvy stock market movements.

Bill Gates' current primary stock market investments include:

• Microsoft Corporation (MSFT). Bill Gates maintains a sizable ownership percentage of the company he helped to found. He owns about 1.3% of the company, reflecting that he isn't nearly as hands-on as in previous decades.
• Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. (BRK.A, BRK.B). This is the holding company of Bill Gates' friend and fellow billionaire, Warren Buffett. It's the second-largest stockholding used by the Gates Foundation Trust. Microsoft and Berkshire make up about 47% of the Trust's portfolio, and there's no doubt that Gates himself also maintains a sizable holding.
• Canadian National Railway Co. (CNI). This is the stock for the fourth-largest North American railroad overall. Gates, the Gates Foundation and Cascade collectively hold over 64 million shares of CNI stock, worth approximately $7.5 billion.
• Deere & Co. (DE). As the world's largest producer of farm equipment, Deere is a surefire stock purchase for many, including Bill Gates. Over the years, he gifted over 3 million shares of Deere to the Foundation. In conjunction with Cascade and his Foundation, he still holds 23,700,000 shares of Deere stock, worth more than $10 billion, as of July 2022.
• Waste Management, Inc. (WM). Waste Management offers waste management and environmental services to various customers and locations. The Gates Foundation invested heavily in this company in the third quarter of 2002, which was wise, as the stock has generated returns of almost 1000% since that year. Currently, the Gates Foundation holds nearly 5.2 million WM stock shares worth approximately $5.52 billion.
• Republic Services, Inc. (RSG). This is another waste disposal services company and one of the most significant Gates holdings. As of February 2022, Cascade revealed that Bill Gates had added over 360,000 shares to his stake. This brings up Cascade's total holdings of RSG to approximately 109 million shares, collectively worth $14 billion.
• Ecolab, Inc. (ECL). ECL offers energy, hygiene and water technologies end-services for many markets, like the hospitality and healthcare industries. Gates has purchased millions of shares in this organization over the years. Today, the Gates Foundation holds 5.2 million shares of this stock, collectively worth nearly $760 million.
• EarthNow. EarthNow is a Seattle-based startup company. Its mission is to cover the planet with live satellite video, and Gates is a substantial financial backer.

As you can see, Bill Gates has built up his portfolio of investments by focusing on technology companies and clean energy firms. These are smart investments, as they are likely only to increase in value soon as these companies become more valuable.

Related: Why What Bill Gates Said About the Internet in 1996 is Truer Than Ever Today

Where did Bill Gates receive his education?

Although Bill Gates has been massively successful and attended Harvard, he doesn't have the most extensive or robust educational record.

Gates' real educational history begins at 13 when he was enrolled in a private Lakeside prep school. That's where he wrote the first software program and developed his interest in computer science.

By the eighth grade, he purchased blocks of computer time using a General Electric computer reserved for students. His first computer program was a version of tic-tac-toe that let students play the game against the machine.

Gates later attended Lakeside High School, where he met his longtime friend, Paul Allen. Then he enrolled in Harvard University after being inspired by his father, William Henry Gates II.

He dropped out of Harvard to focus on Microsoft full-time and never completed his bachelor's degree. Nevertheless, Harvard later awarded Gates an honorary doctorate.

Related: How Bill Gates Become a Leadership Legend

Who is in Bill Gates ' family?

Bill Gates has a large family that he is still in contact with. He has two sisters, one of which is older than him (Kristianne) and one of which is younger (Libby). Gates' father was a lawyer, and his mother was a successful American entrepreneur.

The most crucial member of Gates' family is his former wife, Melinda French Gates . The couple met in 1987 when Melinda first started working at Microsoft. The marriage lasted for 27 years, producing three children: Jennifer, Rory and Phoebe.

Although the couple managed to do a lot of good with their combined wealth and philanthropic spirit, they divorced in August 2021.

What kind of donations, charity and philanthropic efforts has Bill Gates pursued?

Bill Gates is well known for founding Microsoft and being a shrewd, relentless businessman. But he's also known for his philanthropic efforts.

The most well-known is undoubtedly the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation , a charitable organization created in 2000 by combining three previously existing family foundations and donated stock. The new Foundation started with assets of over $84.6 billion.

Over the years, the Foundation has donated billions of dollars to charity, relief and human development resources and organizations. By 2007, Bill and Melinda Gates were the second most generous philanthropists in the United States, having donated over $28 billion. Both have gone on record stating that they plan to donate 95% of their wealth to charity.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is currently organized into five primary program areas:

• Global development division.
• Global health division.
• United States division.
• Global policy division.
• Advocacy division.

Many of these divisions fund or spearhead projects such as Alzheimer's research, breakthrough energy tech to avoid a climate disaster and means to reduce carbon emissions. With Microsoft co-founder and friend Paul Allen and fellow billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Gates continues to make a difference with non-profits and the next generation.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation supports many programs and efforts, particularly public health projects. Over the years, it has provided financial and other aid to fight transmissible diseases like AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. It has also contributed to vaccine distribution programs to eliminate polio worldwide.

Furthermore, the Foundation's agricultural division supports the International Rice Research Institute in developing Golden Rice, a new genetically modified rice species that can help combat vitamin A deficiency. The Foundation also focuses on providing over 120 million women and girls with high-quality contraceptive services, resources and education.

Other charitable organizations and efforts

Aside from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, both titular founders have made substantial personal donations for other philanthropic effects. For example, Bill Gates provided personal donations to many educational institutions over the years, including his old Lakeside school. In 1999, he donated $20 million to MIT and $50 million to the Dementia Discovery Fund in November 2017.

In June 2018, Bill Gates offered various free e-books to new graduates of US universities and colleges and free e-books to all college and university students worldwide. Bill Gates has previously cited the philanthropic efforts of David Rockefeller as one of his significant inspirations.

In terms of wealth inheritance, Bill and Melinda Gates stated that they intend to leave each of their children only $10 million each. By the time of their deaths, they will have donated approximately 99.96% of their wealth to charity.

Related: Bill Gates Says Unhappy Customers Are Good for Your Business. Here's Why

Is Bill Gates a robber baron?

A robber baron is a businessman who becomes rich using business practices broadly perceived as ruthless, exploitative or manipulative. Because Bill Gates rose to such massive success so quickly, many have likened him to a modern-day robber baron .

However, it's essential to know that Gates never did anything illegal. Though, as Microsoft rose in the computer science industry, he engaged in ruthless business practices.

For example, he would purchase up-and-coming companies, then dissolve them thoroughly to prevent them from competing with Microsoft in any way. But this isn't illegal; it's a business practice that constantly occurs across every industry.

Whether or not Bill Gates is a robber baron is largely up to the individual. Although Microsoft may have ruined the business dreams of other entrepreneurs, it was only ever through those individuals' choices.

Furthermore, Bill Gates has contributed much of his money to charity and needful organizations throughout his career, even signing the Giving Pledge in 2010. It's easy to imagine that these positive contributions far outweigh any minor damage he may have done while accumulating his wealth.

Related: 'Will All Americans Become Vegetarians?' Bill Gates Weighs in on Method for Fighting Climate Change

What are the best Bill Gates quotes?

Bill Gates is one of the richest people in the world — not solely due to his net worth but also because of his insights and wisdom. Here are a few of Gates' most impactful quotes:

• "We all need people who will give us feedback. That's how we improve."
• "Everyone needs a coach. It doesn't matter whether you're a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player."
• "Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning."
• "It's fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure."
• "Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one."
• "Don't compare yourself with anyone in this world. If you do so, you are insulting yourself."

What can you learn from Bill Gates ' story?

Bill Gates isn't the only successful tech businessman. Still, he's one of the most successful overall. Everyone can gain something by learning about the history and investments of the Microsoft founder.

Check out Entrepreneur's other articles for more information about business leaders and other financial topics.

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Bill Gates is giving his foundation a fresh $20 billion to address global challenges

Bill Gates said Wednesday he would donate $20 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to address "huge global setbacks" facing the world.

Gates said in a statement that the foundation, which he created with his ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, in 2000, now seeks to spend $9 billion a year to fund innovations and causes that prevent pandemics, reduce childhood deaths, eradicate diseases, tackle climate change and achieve gender equality.

"These innovations will not come in time to avoid the problems altogether, but the faster we move, the less people will suffer," Gates said. "For many people including myself this is the most concrete way of contributing, even when it seems modest compared to the scale of the problems. Focusing on being part of the solution is better than giving up in despair."

Until Wednesday, the foundation's largest donor had been Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett, whose combined contributions have totaled $35.7 billion.

The Gateses announced their divorce last year. As part of the dissolution, each pledged to donate $15 billion to the foundation. Melinda French Gates now oversees her own investment and business incubation company, Pivotal Ventures.

“Bill and Melinda are fully committed to continuing to work constructively together at the Foundation to advance its program and policy objectives,” a spokesperson said in a statement first reported by Bloomberg.

Gates has been the subject of several unfounded claims surrounding the pandemic and, more recently, the national baby formula shortage.

With a net worth of $114 billion, he ranks as the fourth-wealthiest person in the world, according to Bloomberg . Gates said Wednesday that he plans to move off the world's richest list one day.

"My giving this money is not a sacrifice at all," he said. "I feel privileged to be involved in tackling these great challenges, I enjoy the work, and I believe I have an obligation to return my resources to society in ways that have the greatest impact for improving lives. I hope others in positions of great wealth and privilege will step up in this moment too."

Rob Wile is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist covering breaking business stories for NBCNews.com.

Bono’s new book, Surrender , is packed with funny, poignant moments.

Treasure Grove

It’s not what you know, it’s what you can accomplish.

In the early days of Microsoft, I felt pretty confident about my coding skills, but I had a lot to learn about project management. This became abundantly clear after an incident in 1978, when I told Intel—a really important customer—that we would deliver them a version of Microsoft BASIC in four weeks. They thought I was crazy to promise it that fast, and it turned out that they were right. We were two weeks late.

As it happens, Intel employed someone who would end up helping me improve my management skills: Andy Grove. A precise, hard-driving guy, Andy oversaw their strategy and operations, and he championed the idea of management by objective. Andy and I became friendly over the years, I studied several of the business books he wrote early on, and Microsoft adopted some of the methods that Intel used. I consider Andy one of the great business leaders of the 20 th century.

Andy’s ideas are a basis for the management system called OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) developed by John Doerr, a venture capitalist and a frequent business partner of mine. In his new book, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs , John explains how OKRs work and shows how you can apply them in all sorts of situations.

I’d recommend John’s book for anyone interested in becoming a better manager (and I’d say that even if I hadn’t been interviewed for a super-nice chapter about the Gates Foundation). In the excerpt below, John tells the inside story of how Andy inspired the idea of OKRs.

Excerpt from Measure What Matters By John Doerr

Intel was Grove’s laboratory for management innovation. He loved to teach, and the company reaped the benefits. A few days after getting hired, I received a coveted invitation to Intel’s Organization, Philosophy, and Economics course, known as iOPEC, a seminar on Intel strategy and operations. Resident professor: Dr. Andy Grove.

In the space of an hour, Grove traced the company’s history, year by year. He summarized Intel’s core pursuits: a profit margin twice the industry norm, market leadership in any product line it entered, the creation of “challenging jobs” and “growth opportunities” for employees. Fair enough, I thought, though I’d heard similar things at business school.

Then he said something that left a lasting impression on me. He referenced his previous company, Fairchild, where he’d first met Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore and went on to blaze a trail in silicon wafer research. Fairchild was the industry’s gold standard, but it had one great flaw: a lack of “achievement orientation.”

“Expertise was very much valued there,” Andy explained. “That is why people got hired. That’s why people got promoted. Their effectiveness at translating that knowledge into actual results was kind of shrugged off.” At Intel, he went on, “we tend to be exactly the opposite. It almost doesn’t matter what you know. It’s what you can do with whatever you know or can acquire and actually accomplish [that] tends to be valued here.” Hence the company’s slogan: “Intel delivers.”

It almost doesn’t matter what you know … To claim that knowledge was secondary and execution all-important—well, I wouldn’t learn that at Harvard. I found the proposition thrilling, a real-world affirmation of accomplishment over credentials. But Grove wasn’t finished, and he had saved the best for last. Over a few closing minutes, he outlined a system he’d begun to install in 1971, when Intel was three years old. It was my first exposure to the art of formal goal setting. I was mesmerized.

A few unvarnished excerpts, straight from the father of OKRs:

Now, the two key phrases…are objectives and the key result. And they match the two purposes. The objective is the direction: “We want to dominate the mid-range microcomputer component business.” That’s an objective. That’s where we’re going to go. Key results for this quarter: “Win ten new designs for the 8085” is one key result. It’s a milestone. The two are not the same…

The key result has to be measurable. But at the end you can look, and without any arguments: Did I do that or did I not do it? Yes? No? Simple. No judgments in it.

Now, did we dominate the mid-range microcomputer business? That’s for us to argue in the years to come, but over the next quarter we’ll know whether we’ve won ten new designs or not.

It was a “very, very simple system,” Grove said, knowing simplicity was catnip to an audience of engineers. On its face, the conception seemed logical, commonsensical—and inspiring. Against the stale management orthodoxy of the period, Grove had created something fresh and original. Strictly speaking, however, his “objectives and key results” did not spring from the void. The process had a precursor. In finding his way, Grove had followed the trail of a legendary, Vienna-born gadfly, the first great “modern” business management thinker: Peter Drucker.

Excerpted from  Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono and the Gates Foundation Rock the Work with OKRs  by John Doerr, in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2018 by Bennet Group LLC.

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The Next Pandemic

Bill gates: ‘i worry we’re making the same mistakes again’.

By Bill Gates

Mr. Gates, a co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is the author of “How to Prevent the Next Pandemic.”

Imagine there’s a small fire in your kitchen. Your fire alarm goes off, warning everyone nearby about the danger. Someone calls 911. You try to put the fire out yourself — maybe you even have a fire extinguisher under the sink. If that doesn’t work, you know how to safely evacuate. By the time you get outside, a fire truck is already pulling up. Firefighters use the hydrant in front of your house to extinguish the flames before any of your neighbors’ homes are ever at risk of catching fire.

‌We need to prepare to fight disease outbreaks just as we prepare to fight fires. If a fire is left to burn out of control, it poses a threat not only to one home but to an entire community. The same is true for infectious diseases, except on a much bigger scale. As we know all too well from Covid, an outbreak in one town can quickly spread across an entire country and then around the world.

When the World Health Organization first described Covid-19 as a pandemic just over three years ago, it marked the culmination of a collective failure to prepare for pandemics, despite many warnings. And I worry that we’re making ‌‌the same mistakes again. The world hasn’t done as much to get ready for the next pandemic as I’d hoped. But ‌‌it’s not too late to stop history from repeating itself. The world needs a well-funded system that is ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice when danger emerges. ‌We need a fire department for pandemics.

I’m optimistic about a network that the W.H.O. and its partners are building called the Global Health Emergency Corps. This network of the world’s top health emergency leaders will work together to get ready for the next ‌‌pandemic. Just as firefighters run drills to practice responding to a fire, the Emergency Corps plans to run drills to practice for outbreaks. The exercises will make sure that everyone — governments, health care providers, emergency health workers — knows what to do when a potential outbreak emerges.

One of the most important jobs of the corps will be to ‌‌take quick action to stop the spread of a pathogen. The speed of action requires countries to have large-scale testing capabilities that identify potential threats early. Environmental surveillance like sewage testing is key, since many pathogens show up in human waste. If a sewage sample comes back positive, a rapid response team would deploy to the affected area to find people who might be infected, carry out a response plan‌‌ and kick off the necessary community education about what to look for and how to stay protected.

As Covid-19 demonstrated, a pandemic is a trillion-dollar problem, and mitigating this challenge should not depend on volunteers. We need a corps of professionals from every country and region, and the world needs to find a way to compensate them for the time they spend preparing for and responding to transnational threats. They must be able to deploy teams of professionals on standby to help control outbreaks where they start.

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Exclusive: Bill Gates Reveals The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Aims To Run For Just 25 More Years

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Bill Gates.

In a wide-ranging discussion at the 2022 Forbes 400 Philanthropy Summit, Gates spoke about his plans to give billions of dollars to the foundation in the coming years and how he’s optimistic on global efforts to eradicate disease and reduce carbon emissions.

Bill Gates is putting a timeline on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which he co-chairs with his ex-wife, fellow billionaire Melinda French Gates. Speaking at the 2022 Forbes 400 Philanthropy Summit, the Microsoft founder-turned-philanthropist announced the foundation plans to wrap up in 25 years.

"The goal for the foundation is to run for another 25 years,” Gates said in the keynote conversation with Forbes’ Chief Content Officer Randall Lane. The aim over the next quarter-century? “Try and bring infectious disease, or all of the diseases that make the world inequitable, to bring those largely to an end, either through eradication or getting them down to very low levels."

The announcement came just two months after Gates made a record-setting $20 billion gift to the foundation—one of the largest donations in the history of philanthropy, which Forbes covered in an exclusive interview in July. He also committed to giving another $20 billion “at some point a few years from now” and continue giving until he’s dropped off the billionaires list.

In 25 years’ time, Gates will be 91, while Melinda—if she’s still involved in the foundation by then—will be 83. That means it will be up to the next generation of philanthropic billionaires to build on the foundation’s work.

"That's probably the period of time where Melinda and I will be around to help make sure it stays on track,” Gates said. “We think spending all the money in that timeframe makes sense. So we'll be shifting money over more and more, we committed to raise the spend level up."

Gates, who predicted a pandemic back in 2015 and became famous around the world for his views on Covid-19, said he still doesn’t have a solution for misinformation and conspiracy theories. He’s even had people approach him on the street to yell at him, accusing him of tracking people with microchips.

"The polarization and lack of trust is a problem,” he said. “One of the best-selling books last year was a book by Robert Kennedy, saying that I like to make money and kill millions of people with vaccines. It's wild that [that] sells well.”

Covid-related conspiracy theories appear to be dying down with the receding pandemic: “I have a group that tracks what's on the web that's talking about things that connect to me,” he said. “Overwhelmingly during the pandemic, 95% was all the conspiracy theory stuff. It is calming down now.”

Bill Gates speaks with Randall Lane at the 2022 Forbes 400 Philanthropy Summit.

But Gates is still worried about domestic polarization in the U.S., which he sees little hope for in the short-term. "I admit that political polarization may bring it all to an end, we're going to have a hung election and a civil war,” he said. “I have no expertise in that, I'm not going to divert my money to that because I wouldn't know how to spend it."

Still, he’s open to ideas: “People seek simple solutions [and] the truth is kind of boring sometimes. Anybody who's got good innovations on reducing polarization, getting the truth to be as interesting as the crazy stuff, that would be well worth investing in."

Gates expects the foundation will remain squarely focused on healthcare and eradicating disease, even if he’s been asked to move into other areas of philanthropy. "We have a great team of people and we're not really adding new causes,” he said. “People thought, 'Oh, well now you should do all these other things.' No, we're just going to do what we do with more depth, more malaria, HIV, measles, polio eradication."

Polio has seen a resurgence in several countries this year through detection in wastewater , with one case of paralysis in upstate New York prompting Governor Kathy Hochul to declare a state of emergency earlier this month. Despite these setbacks, Gates hopes the disease can be eliminated within the next three or four years.

He also spoke about the foundation’s work on a gene therapy to cure sickle cell disease— which afflicts roughly 100,000 Americans —through a single, $2,000 shot. With the same technology, the foundation is planning on a similar cure for HIV, which Gates expects will take up to a decade to develop. Altogether, the foundation has committed about $600 million to those efforts.

One question lingering over the foundation’s future is the relationship between Gates and his ex-wife, Melinda, who co-chairs the foundation. At the moment, Gates thinks there’s no reason to worry: “We were totally transparent to the world that there's a small chance we won't be able to work together,” he said. “I think that's not going to happen."

There is a contingency plan in place in case things go south. "We talked about what would happen if that was the case. As we went through the last few years, there was never any disagreement and tension about the foundation,” Gates said. “We created a new set of trustees that we brought in. The governance has gone through a transition and it looks very, very smooth.”

Despite the U.S. failure in facing Covid-19 and slow progress in tackling the global climate crisis—plus the likelihood of another pandemic emerging in the next two decades—Gates still has an optimistic outlook on the world. “Being pessimistic shows a lack of perspective,” he said, rattling off a list of advancements ranging from work to reduce malnutrition and obesity to HIV vaccines and a push for "green cement" to reduce industrial carbon emissions.

For Gates, more attention focused on the crises the world is facing means that more people care about them and are trying to solve them. He concluded by asking the audience a simple question: “Would you rather be alive 20 years from now than 100 years ago?"

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Bill Gates has a plan to save the world. Will the world listen?

In his new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster , Bill Gates argues that there are really only two data points that matter when it comes to tackling humankind’s existential challenge: 51 billion and zero. The first is the number of tonnes of greenhouse gases that are typically added to the atmosphere every year. The second is the number we need to arrive at to avoid catastrophe.

While acknowledging that the challenge is daunting, and how we make things, grow things, move around, keep cool and stay warm will all need to fundamentally change, Gates argues that wholesale transformation is possible while maintaining lifestyles in high income countries and continuing to lift billions out of poverty. And he has a plan.

He employs the concept of the “green premium”. Carbon remains cheaper as a source of energy because its negative impacts – or “externalities” – aren’t priced in. Governments subsidise fossil fuels because they are reliable and proven. The green premium is the additional cost of using a green alternative. In some instances – such as producing electricity using wind turbines or solar energy – it can be zero, depending on the country. In other sectors, such as concrete, fertiliser or steel production, it’s enough to deter the use of clean alternatives. While wealthy countries might be able to pay a premium for these zero carbon options, that isn’t currently possible for some fast-growing nations in Asia, Africa and South America. The green premium needs to be so low as to make sense to switch.

Sat at a large conference table wearing a blue pullover, Gates spoke with WIRED in December 2020 from his office overlooking Lake Washington in Seattle. He outlined how a number of different technological breakthroughs, large-scale investment in infrastructure, patient capital, government policy and individual action can have an impact, and provides a roadmap to getting to zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Zero is important: just reducing the carbon we’re putting into the atmosphere, simply extends the extremely limited amount of time humankind has until we hit planetary boundaries. Currently, the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere is around 414.68 parts per million (ppm) – there is consensus that, once the level reaches 450ppm it will raise the global temperature above 2 degrees Celsius, triggering extreme weather events and irreversible, catastrophic change. While some advocates of change suggest that the target should be 2030, Gates believes that’s unrealistic – carbon is too deeply woven into the fabric of everything we do – and could provide a distraction to the more significant goal of zero emissions by 2050.

WIRED: Why this book and why now?

Bill Gates: I did a TED Talk in 2010 on climate and five years later there was the Paris climate talks, and I’d been saying: ‘Hey, how come when they have these meetings, they never talk about R&D?’ They never talked about innovation, and if you looked at the energy R&D budgets of the rich countries they hadn’t increased at all.

So everybody's getting together and talking about the short-term reductions, but the only areas you can make short-term reductions are electric cars and using solar and wind for electricity generation. That's less than 30 per cent of the game – 70 per cent is steel, cement, aviation, land use... People aren’t doing anything about those. If you want to get to a goal, you should start working on the hard things, not just on the easy things. I'm not saying the easy things are easy, they're just relatively easy.

These nationally determined metrics – the short-term reductions – don't really tell the story. I'm not saying they should go away, those are good things, but what is the true metric of by 2050 can you get to zero?

The resonance of the topic [climate change] is very high now, despite the pandemic, which is impressive. But if we don't have a plan to go with that positive energy it's going to be very sad. You're going to get attenuation: people will almost be cynical that we didn't really get going on the 70 per cent that's the hardest.

So that's why I wrote the book, to suggest that the green premium is a metric that – when you call up India in 2050 and say, ‘Hey, when you're building new buildings, use this cement, use this steel’ – will determine whether they tell you ‘get lost’, or ‘OK, we'll pay a slight premium’. If you’ve innovated enough and the green premium is zero, they'll say, ‘Of course.’

Some green premiums – for electricity, for instance – are within reach. Others will involve huge amounts of R&D and investment. How do you think about that?

The brute force way to solve climate change is to figure out how to do direct air capture, get the cost per tonne down and then just write the cheque. Unfortunately, if you call up Climeworks [the Swiss company that filters CO2 from the air], its list price is $600 (£435) a tonne, and they have some government subsidies. So, even if you dream that you can get to $100 (£72) a tonne, you’ve got 51 billion tonnes of emissions, so that's a $5 trillion (£3.6 trillion) a year price tag to brute force climate change.

Only by going into the individual areas and changing the way that, say, you make cement, or the way you power cars to be electric, do you get something that's under $100 a tonne. Electric cars are the magic one – as battery volumes go up, charging stations get out there and battery energy density increases to the point that range and charging speed isn't that much worse [than combustion engines]. Eventually you can say the green premium for passenger cars ten years from now will be about zero.

Vaccines typically take a decade or more to produce – Covid-19 proved we can accelerate that process, but it took a pandemic to show us what’s possible. How can we communicate the urgency of the climate emergency?

There is an analogy to the pandemic which is that citizens depend on their governments to understand natural disasters, meteors, climate change and respiratory viruses. These problems are way too complex – individuals aren't going to study climate models. For the pandemic, the risk was there and the idea of how you orchestrate a testing capacity and make a vaccine should have been there.

After Ebola in 2015 there were a few things done such as the creation of CEPI [The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations] along with Wellcome in the UK, ourselves [the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation] and 12 governments. And we've been funding mRNA stuff (mRNA medicines instruct cells in the body to make proteins to fight diseases) for a long time. But, governments have to take complex problems and essentially think through what you have to do. Unfortunately, when it comes to the climate, it's not like there's any vaccine-like thing, where there’s a solution and six months from now things are going to feel utterly different.

With climate, when you have to replace every steel plant, every cement plant, take the electric grid and make it two and a half times bigger with intermittent sources – this is the entire physical economy. The physical economy is a miracle. It’s taken us since the Industrial Revolution to figure out how to make this stuff so cheap and so reliable that we all just take it for granted. Most people flip that light switch and the miracle of innovation that allows their lights to turn on 99.99 per cent of the time, they have no idea. It's so cost-optimised, but now that we have this constraint on it: how quickly can you switch all that around?

So climate is like a pandemic in that governments need to work on behalf of their citizens and anticipate what will happen in the future, but it's way harder than making a vaccine. If the pandemic had come 20 years ago, we wouldn't have been able to make that vaccine. If it came 10 years from now, with mRNA we'll be able to make it faster, we'll be able to scale up more of those vaccines at a cost of $1 (72p) each. We caught mRNA halfway in its maturity cycle, we hadn’t made a single vaccine. CureVac is developing mRNA-based vaccines designed to prevent malaria infection. Moderna is focused on HIV and other diseases.

In order to get to net zero by 2050, we have to innovate at an unprecedented pace. How do we best address that challenge?

We need to up the supply side of innovation and the demand side for innovation. The supply side has got many components, it's got your basic energy R&D budget where you just have a bunch of professors or national labs messing around with different ideas, and that's pre-commercial research. In the US, more than half the federal money spent on biomedical research comes from the $43 billion (£31 billion) a year National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget. Weirdly these energy R&D budgets haven't had the examination they deserve when it comes to climate events.

Then venture capital has to be willing to take huge risks, and be very patient and orchestrate way more capital than you need for software, microchips or for medicine. That’s because these are big plants and you have to replace a lot, you have to scale these things up so you need to work on the supply side and innovation.

On the demand side, you could put on a big carbon tax but politically it’s difficult – such as when they increased the price of diesel in France – even though economists say that it would be good. In most countries we’ll probably end up with a sector-by-sector approach where we say that, for instance, every building has to have five per cent clean cement, or maybe the highly profitable tech or finance companies pay a premium for buildings.

Everybody mistakenly thinks the learning curve means that you make something, and then it gets cheaper than you expected. That is true for wind, solar and lithium ion batteries, the learning curves have been phenomenal. But how do you bootstrap the clean aviation fuel learning curve, or clean steel?

There's a lot of talk that the recovery funds in Europe will get focused on things such as clean hydrogen. But we really need a mechanism to find who in the world has the best ideas about clean steel or clean cement. And the green premium is the metric.

You had an ambitious aim when you started Microsoft – a computer in every home. What lessons did building and scaling a company with that impact have that can be applied to getting to net zero?

I'm amazed at what a nice business software is – you get feedback from your customers and you add features. And I was optimistic: I would invest in things that would take ten years to get done. I tried multiple approaches, so we often had teams that might develop a database in two different ways to see which would succeed. I had to anticipate advances in hardware [that would impact] our software. We spent a lot of R&D money, but we had enough products that were always fairly profitable.

I had a broader view that we were going to develop many types of software – most of our competitors were single-product companies, and we saw ourselves as a software factory independent of word processing or spreadsheets or operating systems. We had a more crazy view that we were going to do every type of software in one company and we had this vision of personal empowerment through software.

We were able to create this research group – Google is the only other company to put money into fundamental research. Because, at first, we all just benefited from what the universities or even Xerox PARC had done that they failed to exploit. We hired specific people from Xerox PARC that helped us with graphics interface, networking and other things, and we almost felt guilty that we needed to get back to this pool of intellect.

Some policymakers and leaders are aiming at 2030, but you’re fully focussed on 2050. Why that time frame?

In 2050 I'll be 95 years old and I will be super happy if I live to see the day that we're anywhere near zero. This is very, very hard, as it requires all countries to get involved. And so the 2050 date was picked as the best case because a lot of things have to work. But if you innovate for ten years, deploy for 20 years, and you create the right incentives through government policy, you can get to zero by 2050. You have to get going now on the hard stuff and you have to admit: do we have even a clue how we're going to do the hard stuff and find the craziest thinkers?

I'm not smart enough to know all the different ways you might replace cement or steel. You better be searching the entire IQ of humanity globally to find that person or find ten of them and hope that, even if nine are wrong, one will get you there.

I don't know if that will happen by 2050. If we take the idealism and energy the younger generation has created around this and we make it a priority – Biden has it right up there with the pandemic, European recovery funds have it very high – then, yes it's doable.

Getting to net zero by 2050 is not going to be easy. So anybody who says, ‘Oh, let's just get it done in 10 years’, I want them to go tour all the Chinese steel and cement plants and tell me what I'm going to see there ten years from now.

The digital economy has fooled us in terms of how quickly things can change, because you don't need the reliability and scale, and therefore the capital and the regulations. With software, if it has mistakes it’s not good, but it evolves quickly.”

Institutions deploying capital – banks and pension funds – are going to be crucial in this process. There's a lot of rhetoric at the moment with businesses claiming to be purpose-driven. How can we best measure the actions large investment funds are making, and keep big organisations honest about their actions?

Most of that’s all bullshit. The return on a bond for a wind farm is no different than the return on a bond from a natural gas plant, so it's nonsense. The people who put money into Breakthrough Energy Ventures [the venture arm of Gates’ organisation Breakthrough Energy that’s working towards net zero], that's real. The governments that raise their energy R&D budget and manage to spend it well, the near-billion dollars put into TerraPower [Gates’ nuclear company] to see if this fourth-generation fission reactor can be part of the solution... Those things are real.

All this other stuff like, we're gonna make companies report their emissions. The idea that some financial metric reporting thing or some degree of divestment – how many tonnes? You’ve got 51 billion tonnes [of CO2 that needs to be removed]: when you divested, how many of those 51 billion tonnes went away?

You’ve got to invest not divest. And the notion that you just happen to own equities or bonds related to the easy things that are already economic, such as solar farms or wind farms... Whenever somebody says there's something called green finance, I say let's be numeric here: is the risk premium for clean investing lower than the risk premium for non-green investing? The answer is: just look at the numbers.

The idea that banks are going to solve this problem or that these metrics are going to solve this problem, I don't get that. Are they going to make the electricity network reliable? Are they gonna come up with sustainable aviation fuel? It's just disconnected from the problem and allows people to go off and blather as though something's happening.

The last couple of weeks have seen the Covid-19 vaccine roll-out begin. Do you think that will increase trust in science, which will impact the urgency to act on the climate crisis?

Whenever you do innovation like social networks, at first you're not sure what phenomenon will emerge out of that. I do think the pandemic has helped social networks realise that the First Amendment is nice, but allowing lots of vaccine misinformation is not good for society.

Drawing the line between the crazy ‘all vaccines are bad, everybody will get autism’ versus legitimate [commentary] on people who have allergic reactions is very hard. At first the [social networks] thought we will just let the craziness flow, but the fact that the wrong stuff is so titillating draws people in.

We hope that this process has accelerated some maturing of the social networks so that the things that get a lot of attention and are really wrong, that these are greatly reduced or put alongside the truth. I don't know if that will happen, but I have seen it – including conspiracy theories that relate to me – they're doing a better job of saying, ‘OK, we don't want ten million people to see that today because it doesn't serve their interests or society's interests’.

People are more educated today than ever and somehow we've gotten to this point where climate change has become political, mask wearing has become political.

For some types of innovation this has been a period where the normal rules don't apply. The idea of 100 companies all working on one disease is insane, because five or six of these vaccines at most, will end up getting used. So you've got 94 companies’ efforts that are completely redundant, particularly now.

We still need Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and Novavax, because those [vaccines] are more scalable, cheaper and more thermally stable. But, once we get those five [including Pfizer and Moderna] then we probably don't need any more, because fortunately it turned out it was easier to make a vaccine for this disease than we might have guessed: the first that are proven are working very well.

Science has become politicised in the past few years. We're seeing a transition between administrations in the US, do you think that's going to impact policy as relates to getting to net zero?

In the Democratic primaries people were talking about trillions of dollars being spent against climate. Well there's two problems with that: a) that money will never be allocated and b) spending that scale of money doesn't really connect to the problem, it’s more about creating jobs [by doing things such as] insulating homes. But those homes should use electric heat pumps, and you should get electricity to zero. You must have people who are in the centre and saying, yes, this is a good goal, but how do you realistically achieve that, and at the minimal price for doing so? You want debate about that, and market-based pricing actually allows a lot of resource choices to be made in a very efficient way. That's why, if you could have a properly done carbon tax, it would be a nice thing, but that's not going to happen in most countries.

So, yes the Biden election is fantastic. He's got climate as one of his top priorities along with the pandemic, he's picked people that know this topic and he's put them not just in specific roles like the Department of Energy, but even people such as Brian Deese to head the National Economic Council. He was the [Obama] White House climate person, and I got to know him when we were doing the Paris climate stuff.

You acknowledge early in the book that you’re an imperfect messenger – a rich, white guy some people will accuse of having a god complex. How do you communicate the idea that – forget Bill Gates in all this – it’s a problem that all of us have to fix?

The fact that we need better metrics in this field surprises me. It's a field with a lot of positive energy but without a plan. And so you have to work backwards from zero. If there was some book that had already explained all this, I wouldn't have written it. I can write books about malaria and HIV and diarrhoea. Now, maybe not as many people would read those, but that global health work we do is truly neglected. You can save millions of lives. And it's hard stuff – we don't have an HIV cure yet, but we're trying to use gene therapy and make that super cheap – so there's plenty of interesting work for the Gates Foundation, such as improving agriculture with new types of seeds, and even improving photosynthesis.

This field [climate] as I learned about it, the framing wasn't quite right. I actually resisted the idea that I should choose to speak out. Instead I thought, ‘I'll just do a little bit, like that 2010 TED Talk that I did’. And then this field, because people care so much about it, would then mature in terms of its metrics and working on the hard things. When we were talking about the 2015 Paris talks, it makes no sense – why am I at it, saying there should be an R&D section?

So, I'd say it's strange that the background I have – of systems thinking to drive innovation – brings a slightly richer perspective. OK, not everybody reads Vaclav Smil, not everybody is that numeric. People read articles saying, ‘this is the equivalent of 20,000 houses’ or, you know, ‘50,000 cars’, and they don't call up the publications involved and say, ‘why are you spewing these completely confusing metrics?’

I have this effort to create an open-source model of electricity demand generation that includes weather models, so the countries that have made really aggressive commitments about renewable use can see that their grid is going to start being reliable. Now that the utilities are being told, ‘Oh, you have to sign up to these things’, you need an open-source model that really shows, do you have enough transmission, storage or non-intermittent sources like nuclear fission or fusion?

The fact that I’m running an open-source model to test whether these aggressive goals are achievable, it blows the mind – why am I funding this model for these electric grids, which is the most obvious thing to do when you look at climate change?

If you had to bet on a single breakthrough happening in the next decade that really was a game changer, what do you think it would be?

Well, part of the point of the book is that [we can’t rely on a] single breakthrough, we need artificial meat, we need lithium... But I would say, if you can get super-cheap green hydrogen, it sits in terms of the industrial economy at the peak. So, if you pencil in ridiculously low-cost hydrogen, then I can tell you how to make clean fertiliser and clean steel, and even clean aviation fuel.

We have to be careful: some scientific miracles like a storage one may never occur. Some people are now talking about super-clean hydrogen. They don't get how hard it is, and there's a good chance it will never be possible to make cheap, green hydrogen.

In this space we need about ten breakthroughs before you can really see a path to 2050, but clean hydrogen is higher than most people would expect. And storage miracles, and either fission or fusion. The book is supposed to make you think it's not like the pandemic vaccine, though.

Are you optimistic that we can get to net zero by 2050?

Absolutely. But that’s just my personal bias – I'm an optimistic person. I lived through the digital revolution, where every dream we ever had about computing came true. So, I don't have proof, but yes I am optimistic.

Greg Williams is the Editor of WIRED. This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates is published by Allen Lane on February 16.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK