Sometimes I like to drop the comment socially that “I knew Bill Gates back when he was a regular guy.” I know that dates me a good bit, but it also shows that I have been hanging around startups for a long time. The honest truth is that I worked directly with him in the early days of Microsoft from my “safe” perch in big IBM, during the startup of the IBM PC.
At that time I couldn’t imagine a startup succeeding that was first called Traf-O-Data to process raw traffic data into reports, later changed to Microsoft to sell Basic Interpreters to microcomputer manufacturers. In retrospect, however, Bill Gates did a lot of things right as a startup that I still look for today in aspiring entrepreneurs and their companies:
Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com
