[rudiger]

Mary Gates, Bill Gates' mother, was on the same board as John Opel, the president, chairman and CEO of I.B.M. They discussed her son's company and Mr. Opel mentioned Mrs. Gates to other I.B.M. executives. A few weeks later, I.B.M. took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software company, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer.

So a discussion Mary Gates had with John Opel while they were both serving on the board of United Way of America resulted in an IBM contract being placed with her son Bill's company Microsoft to create an operating system for IBM's first personal computer.

[confluence]

So that's a no then :D.

Reminds me how ludicrous the development of intelligent life was (evolution is the Bill Gates of science theories - mostly luck, lots of time, and a bit of skill haha!).

You need the right planet, with the right sun, lots of water, an atmosphere, a moon, a stable surface, an iron core, plate tectonics, snow ball earth -> oxygen/ozone, organic molecules from the oort cloud, and that meteor that killed the dinosaurs (with no subsequent extinction events since).

Sounds like the beginning of a bad sci-fi series!

I'm sure I missed things out, but it was a series of ridiculously unlikely events. Reminds me of a Simpson's episode on time travel - kill a mosquito, end the world :D.

Que sera, sera!

[kamaal]

Other way to look at it is, He had to build a company first.

How would Mary Gates be of any help to him if he hadn't built the company?

Her influence was a multiplier and not the only reason for his success.

[confluence]

Correct.

But it was the main reason you or I even discuss him right now, which implies that it was one hell of a multiplier.

My problem is that the ratios are very distorted: 1% work vs. 99% luck. Work is necessary but not sufficient is all I'm saying.

Hence how would one optimise the multiplier (whilst obviously working on being just plain good), if that is at all possible.

[kamaal]

I don't deny this at all. There might be a lot of people who are as hardworking and ready with something to give them a multiplier. But they might have somebody like Mary Gates as their mother.

My problem is people taking that as a reason to not do the base work at the first place.

I know of people who hunt 'luck' stories whole day to prove why they being lazy is OK. And not just that, now they expect to get equally 'lucky'. And when they don't they call it 'injustice', 'unfair' and things like that.

[rudiger]

Here's what Paul Graham has to say in How to Make Wealth: Millions, Not Billions (http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html):

> If $3 million a year seems high to some people, it will seem low to others. Three million? How do I get to be a billionaire, like Bill Gates?

> So let's get Bill Gates out of the way right now. It's not a good idea to use famous rich people as examples, because the press only write about the very richest, and these tend to be outliers. Bill Gates is a smart, determined, and hardworking man, but you need more than that to make as much money as he has. You also need to be very lucky.

> There is a large random factor in the success of any company. So the guys you end up reading about in the papers are the ones who are very smart, totally dedicated, and win the lottery. Certainly Bill is smart and dedicated, but Microsoft also happens to have been the beneficiary of one of the most spectacular blunders in the history of business: the licensing deal for DOS. No doubt Bill did everything he could to steer IBM into making that blunder, and he has done an excellent job of exploiting it, but if there had been one person with a brain on IBM's side, Microsoft's future would have been very different. Microsoft at that stage had little leverage over IBM. They were effectively a component supplier. If IBM had required an exclusive license, as they should have, Microsoft would still have signed the deal. It would still have meant a lot of money for them, and IBM could easily have gotten an operating system elsewhere.

> Instead IBM ended up using all its power in the market to give Microsoft control of the PC standard. From that point, all Microsoft had to do was execute. They never had to bet the company on a bold decision. All they had to do was play hardball with licensees and copy more innovative products reasonably promptly.

> If IBM hadn't made this mistake, Microsoft would still have been a successful company, but it could not have grown so big so fast. Bill Gates would be rich, but he'd be somewhere near the bottom of the Forbes 400 with the other guys his age.

So "luck" largely took Bill Gates from millions to billions, a 100x to 1000x multiplier.

[kamaal]

>>So "luck" largely took Bill Gates from millions to billions, a 100x to 1000x multiplier.

I never denied that. I am just saying you have to first make to those millions.

And making millions is not easy.