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How Bill Gates Changed The World

• Categories: Bill Gates Philanthropy

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Published: Mar 25, 2024

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Table of contents

Introduction, revolutionizing the personal computer industry.

• Philanthropy and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Criticism and Controversy

Philanthropy and the bill & melinda gates foundation.

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University News | 7.7.2007

Harvard 2007 Commencement Address

Listen to Gates' speech

[video: http://harvardmagazine.com/sites/default/files/media/gates2007.mp3 ]

President Bok, former President Rudenstine, incoming President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, parents, and especially, the graduates:

I've been waiting more than 30 years to say this: "Dad, I always told you I'd come back and get my degree."

I want to thank Harvard for this honor. I'll be changing my job next year ... and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my résumé.

I applaud the graduates for taking a much more direct route to your degrees. For my part, I'm just happy that the Crimson called me "Harvard's most successful dropout." I guess that makes me valedictorian of my own special class ... I did the best of everyone who failed.

But I also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school. I'm a bad influence. That's why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I'd spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today.

Harvard was a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life was fascinating. I used to sit in on lots of classes that I hadn't even signed up for. And dorm life was terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe, in Currier House. There were always a lot of people in my dorm room late at night discussing things, because everyone knew that I didn't worry about getting up in the morning. That's how I came to be the leader of the anti-social group. We clung to each other as a way of validating our rejection of all those social people.

Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there, and most of the guys were math-science types. The combination offered me the best odds, if you know what I mean. That's where I learned the sad lesson that improving your odds doesn't guarantee success.

One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975, when I made a call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that had begun making the world's first personal computer. I offered to sell them software.

I worried they would realize I was just a student in a dorm and hang up on me. Instead they said: "We're not quite ready, come see us in a month," which was a good thing, because we hadn't written the software yet. From that moment, I worked day and night on the extra-credit project that marked the end of my college education and the beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft.

What I remember above all about Harvard was being in the midst of so much energy and intelligence. It could be exhilarating, intimidating, sometimes even discouraging, but always challenging. It was an amazing privilege - and though I left early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made, and the ideas I worked on.

But taking a serious look back ... I do have one big regret.

I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world -- the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.

I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.

But humanity's greatest advances are not in its discoveries - but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity - reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.

I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries.

It took me decades to find out.

You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the world's inequities than the classes that came before. In your years here, I hope you've had a chance to think about how - in this age of accelerating technology - we can finally take on these inequities, and we can solve them.

Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause - and you wanted to spend that time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it?

For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have.

During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease that I had never even heard of, rotavirus, was killing half a million children each year - none of them in the United States.

We were shocked. We had assumed that if millions of children were dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there were interventions that could save lives that just weren't being delivered.

If you believe that every life has equal value, it's revolting to learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: "This can't be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving."

So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: "How could the world let these children die?"

The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system.

But you and I have both.

We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism - if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least earn a living, serving people who are suffering from the greatest inequities. We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes.

If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world.

Now, this task is open-ended. It can never be finished. But a conscious effort to answer this challenge can change the world.

I am optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there is no hope. They say: "Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be with us till the end - because people just ... don't ... care."

I completely disagree.

I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with.

All of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human tragedies that broke our heart, and yet we did nothing -- not because we didn't care, but because we didn't know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have acted.

The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.

To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.

Even with the advent of the Internet and 24-hour news, it is still a complex enterprise to get people to truly see the problems. When an airplane crashes, officials immediately call a press conference. They promise to investigate, determine the cause, and prevent similar crashes in the future.

But if the officials were brutally honest, they would say: "Of all the people in the world who died today from preventable causes, one half of one percent of them were on this plane. We're determined to do everything possible to solve the problem that took the lives of the one half of one percent."

The bigger problem is not the plane crash, but the millions of preventable deaths.

We don't read much about these deaths. The media covers what's new - and millions of people dying is nothing new. So it stays in the background, where it's easy to ignore. But even when we do see it or read about it, it's difficult to keep our eyes on the problem. It's difficult to look at suffering if the situation is so complex that we don't know how to help. And so we look away.

If we can really see a problem, which is the first step, we come to the second step: cutting through the complexity to find a solution.

Finding solutions is essential if we want to make the most of our caring. If we have clear and proven answers anytime an organization or individual asks, "How can I help?" then we can get action - and we can make sure that none of the caring in the world is wasted. But complexity makes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone who cares - and that makes it hard for their caring to matter.

Cutting through complexity to find solutions runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-impact approach, discover the technology ideal for that approach, and in the meantime, use the best application of the technology that you already have - whether it's something sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bednet.

The AIDS epidemic offers an example. The broad goal, of course, is to end the disease. The highest-leverage approach is prevention. The ideal technology would be a vaccine that gives lifelong immunity with a single dose. So governments, drug companies, and foundations are funding vaccine research. But their work is likely to take more than a decade, so in the meantime, we have to work with what we have in hand - and the best prevention approach we have now is getting people to avoid risky behavior.

Pursuing that goal starts the four-step cycle again. This is the pattern. The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working - and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the twentieth century - which is to surrender to complexity and quit.

The final step — after seeing the problem and finding an approach — is to measure the impact of the work and to share that success or failure so that others learn from your efforts.

You have to have the statistics, of course. You have to be able to show, for example, that a program is vaccinating millions more children. You have to be able to show a decline in the number of children dying from the diseases. This is essential not just to improve the program, but also to help draw more investment from business and government.

But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more than numbers; you have to convey the human impact of the work - so people can feel what saving a life means to the families affected.

I remember going to the World Economic Forum [in Davos] some years back and sitting on a global health panel that was discussing ways to save millions of lives. Millions! Think of the thrill if you can save just one person's life - then multiply that by millions. ... Yet this was the most boring panel I've ever been on - ever. So boring that even I couldn't stand it.

What made that experience especially striking was that I had just come from an event where we were introducing version 13 of some piece of software, and we had people jumping and shouting with excitement. I love getting people excited about software - but why can't we generate even more excitement for saving lives?

You can't get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the impact. The way to do that - is a complex question.

Still, I'm optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, but the new tools we have to cut through complexity have not been with us forever. They are new - they can help us make the most of our caring - and that's why the future can be different from the past.

The defining and ongoing innovations of this age - biotechnology, the personal computer, and the Internet - give us a chance we've never had before to end extreme poverty and end death from preventable disease.

Sixty years ago, George Marshall came to this commencement and he announced a plan to assist the nations of postwar Europe. He said: "I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. It is virtually impossible at this distance to grasp at all the real significance of the situation."

Thirty years after Marshall made his address, as my class graduated without me, technology was emerging that would make the world smaller, more open, more visible, less distant.

The emergence of low-cost personal computers gave rise to a powerful network that has transformed opportunities for learning and communicating.

The magical thing about this network is not just that it collapses distance and makes everyone your neighbor. It also dramatically increases the number of brilliant minds we can bring in to work together on the same problem - and that scales up the rate of innovation to a staggering degree.

At the same time, for every person in the world who has access to this technology, five people don't. That means many creative minds are left out of this discussion -- smart people with practical intelligence and relevant experience who don't have the technology to hone their talents or contribute their ideas to the world.

We need as many people as possible to gain access to this technology, because these advances are triggering a revolution in what human beings can do for one another. They are making it possible not just for national governments, but for universities, corporations, small organizations, and even individuals to see problems, see approaches, and measure the impact of their efforts to address the hunger, poverty, and desperation George Marshall spoke of 60 years ago.

Members of the Harvard Family: Here in the Yard is one of the great collections of intellectual talent in the world.

For what purpose?

There is no question that the faculty, the alumni, the students, and the benefactors of Harvard have used their power to improve the lives of people here and around the world. But can we do more? Can Harvard dedicate its intellect to improving the lives of people who will never even hear its name?

Let me make a request of the deans and the professors - the intellectual leaders here at Harvard: As you hire new faculty, award tenure, review curriculum, and determine degree requirements, please ask yourselves:

Should our best minds be more dedicated to solving our biggest problems?

Should Harvard encourage its faculty to take on the world's worst inequities? Should Harvard students know about the depth of global poverty ... the prevalence of world hunger ... the scarcity of clean water ...the girls kept out of school ... the children who die from diseases we can cure?

Should the world's most privileged learn about the lives of the world's least privileged?

These are not rhetorical questions - you will answer with your policies.

My mother, who was filled with pride the day I was admitted here - never stopped pressing me to do more for others. A few days before I was married, she hosted a bridal event, at which she read aloud a letter about marriage that she had written to Melinda. My mother was very ill with cancer at the time, but she saw one more opportunity to deliver her message, and at the close of the letter she said: "From those to whom much is given, much is expected."

When you consider what those of us here in this Yard have been given - in talent, privilege, and opportunity - there is almost no limit to what the world has a right to expect from us.

In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue - a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus of your career, that would be phenomenal. But you don't have to do that to make an impact. For a few hours every week, you can use the growing power of the Internet to get informed, find others with the same interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them.

Don't let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on big inequities. I feel sure it will be one of the great experiences of your lives.

You graduates are coming of age in an amazing time. As you leave Harvard, you have technology that members of my class never had. You have awareness of global inequity, which we did not have. And with that awareness, you likely also have an informed conscience that will torment you if you abandon these people whose lives you could change with modest effort.

You have more than we had; you must start sooner, and carry on longer.

And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect on what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world's deepest inequities ... on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.

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Backing Schools: A Photo Essay about a Gates Foundation Grant to the Change Leadership Group

• Posted September 8, 2000
• By News editor

Giving many cause to celebrate the first day back to school in Boston, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced two grants to HGSE and the nonprofit group Center for Collaborative Education (CCE) on Wednesday, September 6, at the Mission Hill School.  Dean Jerome T. Murphy  gathered with GSE's Tony Wagner, Mission Hill School founder Debbie Meier, and CCE's Dan French to thank the Foundation's Executive Director of Education, Tom Vander Ark.

The Foundation's $3.6 million grant to HGSE will fund the Change Leadership Group, a national educator leadership training program housed under the Programs in Professional Education . The Change Leadership Group will be the first-in-the-nation program to recruit, train, and supervise a network of education experts to deliver on-site training and support to school districts around the country.

After acknowledging the generous support of the Foundation, Wagner, who with Robert Kegan  will co-direct the Group, shared his vision of how they would work with school districts.

"Unlike conventional corporate consulting, where experts create a plan for change but are rarely involved in the implementation process," Wagner explained, "the Change Leadership Group will support the growth and development of school leaders by drawing on their knowledge and working with them on the process of improvement over time."

Dean Murphy noted that "while individual schools have boosted student performance and teacher capacity, no community has been able to take their strategies to scale across a whole system." HGSE's Change Leadership Group will help schools and districts take good programs to scale.

Mission Hill School students gave testimonials on how their lives have changed since attending a small school where faculty take time to collaborate, listen, and problem-solve with their students. In addition to providing funding for GSE's Change Leadership Group, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated $4.9 million to the Center for Collaborative Education to support the work of small schools.

Also in attendance at the celebration were Coalition of Essential Schools founder Ted Sizer, students and teachers from the Mission Hill School and the New Mission High School.

For More Information:

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is dedicated to improving people's lives by sharing advances in health and learning with the global community. Led by Bill Gates' father, William H. Gates, Sr., and Patty Stonesifer, the Seattle-based Foundation has an asset base of $21.8 billion. Preventing deadly diseases among poor children by expanding access to vaccines, and developing vaccines against malaria, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis, are central priorities. Other major efforts include extending unprecedented opportunities for learning by bringing computers with Internet access to every eligible library in the U.S. and Canada, and providing scholarships to academically talented minority students in the U.S. with severe financial need through the Gates Millennium Scholars Program . For complete information and grant guidelines, visit www.gatesfoundation.org .

The latest research, perspectives, and highlights from the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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Bill Gates: Best Investment Made

In an essay in the Wall Street Journal, “ The Best Investment I Ever Made ,” Bill Gates reports that his and Melinda’s investments in Gavi, the Global Fund, and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative had a far greater return than would be expected if the funds were invested elsewhere. The $10 billion they invested to provide vaccines, drugs, bed nets and other supplies in developing countries created an estimated $200 billion in social and economic benefits. The supporting analysis was conducted by the Copenhagen Consensus Center , relying on research conducted by CHDS faculty Lisa A. Robinson and James K. Hammitt and research assistant Lucy O’Keeffe. Several CHDS affiliates were involved in reviewing the study, including doctoral student Allison Portnoy and Deputy Director Stephen Resch .

The role of CHDS’ work was further emphasized in a related essay, “ Measuring the Value of Health ,” written by Gates Foundation Deputy Director of Data and Analytics, Global Development, and Strategy Planning, Damian Walker. Dr. Walker notes the importance of CHDS’ work on best practices for conducting benefit-cost analysis. That work includes recommendations for valuing mortality risk reductions that were central to the estimates featured in Gates’ Wall Street Journal essay. The basis for these recommendations is described in a recent Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis special issue ; the recommendations themselves are provided in the recently completed “ Reference Case Guidelines for Benefit-Cost Analysis in Global Health and Development .”

Learn more: Read about the EPIC/Immunization project. Learn more: Read about the Benefit-Cost Analysis Guidelines project.

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• Philanthropy News Digest

Bill Gates Delivers 2007 Harvard Commencement Address

Bill Gates, Harvard 's most famous dropout, returned to its storied Cambridge campus last week to receive an honorary doctorate and to urge the class of 2007 to work to find solutions to the world's most pressing problems.

"When you consider what those of us here in this Yard have been given — in talent, privilege, and opportunity — there is almost no limit to what the world has a right to expect from us," said Gates, who will relinquish many of his administrative duties at Microsoft in July 2008 to focus more of his time on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation . "Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives."

The reality of those inequities — "the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair" — was not something Gates, who left Harvard during his junior year, was exposed to during his time at the school, though he called his college experience transformative. But while the challenges of disease, poverty, and environmental degradation may seem intractable, Gates said, advances in technology and the resources at the disposal of today's graduates put solutions to those problems within reach as never before.

Introducing Gates, interim Harvard president Derek Bok noted that while universities play increasingly important roles in today's information age, the enormous opportunities in the sciences must be balanced with encouragement of the humanities because of the societal and cultural changes and ethical dilemmas that scientific advances create. "Universities must look for ways to encourage humanists to address such questions in ways we can all understand," said Bok, "so they can help us build a world where our scientific advances don't overwhelm us, but are made to serve humane purposes."

To read the complete version of Gates's remarks, visit the Gates Foundation Web site .

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Walter Isaacson ’74

When Bill Gates was at Harvard, he wrote software code that helped to launch the personal computer era

Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who attended Harvard, returns to campus this weekend for a question-and-answer session as part of the launch of The Harvard Campaign . Below, author Walter Isaacson, who is writing a book about the great inventors of the digital age, recalls Gates’ formative years at Harvard.

It may have been the most momentous purchase of a magazine in the history of the Out of Town News stand in Harvard Square. Paul Allen, a college dropout from Seattle, wandered into the cluttered kiosk one snowy day in December 1974 and saw that the new issue of Popular Electronics featured a home computer for hobbyists, called the Altair, that was just coming on the market. He was both exhilarated and dismayed. Although thrilled that the era of the “personal” computer seemed to have arrived, he was afraid that he was going to miss the party. Slapping down 75 cents, he grabbed the issue and trotted through the slush to the Currier House room of Bill Gates, a Harvard sophomore and fellow computer fanatic from Lakeside High School in Seattle, who had convinced Allen to drop out of college and move to Cambridge. “Hey, this thing is happening without us,” Allen declared. Gates began to rock back and forth, as he often did during moments of intensity. When he finished the article, he realized that Allen was right. For the next eight weeks, the two of them embarked on a frenzy of code writing that would change the nature of the computer business.

What Gates and Allen set out to do, during the Christmas break of 1974 and the subsequent January reading period when Gates was supposed to be studying for exams, was to create the software for personal computers. “When Paul showed me that magazine, there was no such thing as a software industry,” Gates recalled. “We had the insight that you could create one. And we did.” Years later, reflecting on his innovations, he said, “That was the most important idea that I ever had.”

In high school, Gates had formed the Lakeside Programming Group, which made money writing computer code for companies in the Pacific Northwest. As a senior, he applied only to three colleges — Harvard, Yale, and Princeton — and he took different approaches to each. “I was born to apply for college,” he said, fully aware of his ability to ace meritocratic processes. For Yale he cast himself as an aspiring political type and emphasized the month he had spent in Washington as a congressional page. For Princeton, he focused only on his desire to be a computer engineer. And for Harvard, he said his passion was math. He had also considered MIT, but at the last moment blew off the interview to play pinball. He was accepted to all three, and chose Harvard. “There are going to be some guys at Harvard who are smarter than you,” Allen warned him. Gates replied, “ ‘No way! No way!’ ”

When he was asked to describe the types of roommates he preferred, Gates asked for an African American and an international student. He was assigned to Wigglesworth Hall with Sam Znaimer, a science geek from a family of poor Jewish refugees in Montreal, and Jim Jenkins, a black student from Chattanooga, Tenn. Znaimer, who had never known a privileged WASP before, found Gates friendly but weirdly fascinating. He marveled as Gates spent several nights filling out various federal and state tax forms for the revenues of his high school programming firm, and was astounded by the intensity of his study schedule. “His habit was to do 36 hours or more at a stretch, collapse for 10 hours, then go out, get a pizza, and go back at it,” he recalled. “And if that meant he was starting again at 3 in the morning, so be it.” When working hard, Gates would rock back and forth. Then he would grab Znaimer for a frenzy of playing Pong, the Atari video game, in the dorm lounge, or Spacewar!, a legendary game invented at MIT, on one of the mainframes in Harvard’s computer lab.

The lab was named after Harvard’s computer science pioneer Howard Aiken, who had invented an electromechanical computer known as the Mark I, which now sits in the lobby of the Science Center. The Aiken Lab housed one of Gates’s favorite machines: a PDP-10 from Digital Equipment Co. It had been destined for use in Vietnam but was reassigned to Harvard to assist military-funded research there. To avoid sparking an antiwar protest, it was smuggled into the lab early one Sunday morning in 1969. There were also a slew of PDP-1 computers on which to play Spacewar! For his freshman computer project, Gates linked the PDP-10 and a PDP-1 to create a video baseball game. “The logic was on the PDP-10, but I sent it down to the PDP-1 because I used the same display as Spacewar!, a line-drawing display which you don’t see anymore,” said Gates.

Allen’s warning to Gates that he would not always be the smartest kid in class turned out to be true. There was a freshman who lived upstairs from him in Wigglesworth who was better at math, Andy Braiterman from Baltimore. They would wrestle with Math 55 problem sets all night in Braiterman’s room, eating pizza. “Bill was intense,” Braiterman remembered, both about math and poker. He was also “a good arguer.” Gates was particularly forceful in asserting that soon everyone would have a home computer that could be used for calling up books and other information. He and Braiterman decided to room together, and they were assigned to Currier House, which Gates loved.

Gates decided to major in applied math rather than pure math. “I met several people in the math department who were quite a bit better than I was in math,” he said. “It changed my mind about going into math.” He was able to make a small mark on the field of applied math. In a class taught by computer scientist Harry Lewis, he was introduced to a classic problem:

The chef in our place is sloppy, and when he prepares a stack of pancakes they come out all different sizes. Therefore, when I deliver them to a customer, on the way to the table I rearrange them (so that the smallest winds up on top, and so on, down to the largest at the bottom) by grabbing several from the top and flipping them over, repeating this (varying the number I flip) as many times as necessary. If there are n pancakes, what is the maximum number of flips (as a function f(n) of n) that I will ever have to use to rearrange them?

The answer required coming up with a good algorithm, just as any computer program did. “I posed it in class, and then I went on,” Lewis recalled. “And a day or two later, this smart sophomore comes into my office and explains that he’s got a five-thirds N algorithm.” In other words, Gates had figured out a way to do it with five-thirds flips per the number of pancakes in the stack. “It involved a complicated case analysis of what exactly the configuration of the top few pancakes might look like,” Lewis recalled. “It was quite clever.” A teaching assistant in the class, Christos Papadimitriou, later published the solution in a scholarly paper co-authored with Gates.

Gates developed a rebellious academic pattern: He would not go to the lectures for any course in which he was enrolled, but he would audit classes that he was not taking. He followed this rule carefully. “By my sophomore year, I was auditing classes that met at the same time as my actual classes just to make sure I’d never make a mistake,” he recalled. “So I was this complete rejectionist.”

He also took up poker with a vengeance. The games would last all night in one of the common rooms of Currier House, which became known as the Poker Room. His game of choice was Seven Card Stud, high low. A thousand dollars or more could be won or lost per night. Gates was better at assessing the cards than in reading the thoughts of his fellow players. “Bill had a monomaniacal quality,” Braiterman said. “He would focus on something and really stick with it.” At one point he gave Paul Allen his checkbook to try to stop himself from squandering more money, but he soon demanded it back. “He was getting some costly lessons in bluffing,” said Allen. “He’d win $300 one night and lose $600 the next. As Bill dropped thousands that fall, he kept telling me, ‘I’m getting better.’ ”

In a graduate-level Economics 2010 class taught by Michael Spence, Gates met a student who lived down the hall from him at Currier House. Steve Ballmer was very different from Gates on the surface. He was big, boisterous, and gregarious, the type of campus enthusiast who seemed to join or lead every organization. He was in the Hasty Pudding Club, the manager of the football team, the publisher of the Advocate, and the advertising manager of the Crimson. What bound the two was their shared super-intensity. They would talk and argue and study together at high volume, each of them rocking back and forth. Then they would go see movies together. “We went and saw ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ and ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ which are only connected by the use of a common song,” said Gates. “And then we got to be super-good friends.”

Such was Gates’s life at Harvard when it was suddenly changed, halfway through his sophomore year, by Allen’s arrival at his Currier House room with his newly purchased copy of Popular Electronics featuring the Altair on the cover. Allen’s rallying cry — “Hey, this thing is happening without us” — jolted Gates into action.

Gates and Allen set out to write some software that would make it possible for hobbyists to create their own programs on the Altair. Specifically, they decided to write an interpreter for the programming language known as BASIC that would run on the Altair’s Intel 8080 microprocessor. It would become the first commercial native high-level programming language for a microprocessor. In other words, it would launch the personal computer software industry.

They wrote a letter to MITS, the fledgling Albuquerque company that made the Altair, claiming that they had created a BASIC language interpreter that could run on the 8080. “We are interested in selling copies of this software to hobbyists through you.” In reality, they did not yet have any software. But they knew they could scramble and write it if MITS expressed interest.

When they did not hear back, they decided to call. Gates suggested that Allen place the call, because he was older. “No, you should do it; you’re better at this kind of thing,” Allen argued. They came up with a compromise: Gates would call, disguising his squeaky voice, but he would use the name Paul Allen, because they knew it would be Allen who would fly out to Albuquerque if they got lucky. “I had my beard going and at least looked like an adult, while Bill still could pass for a high school sophomore,” recalled Allen.

When the founder of MITS, Ed Roberts, answered the phone, Gates put on a deep voice and said, “This is Paul Allen in Boston. We’ve got a BASIC for the Altair that’s just about finished, and we’d like to come out and show it to you.” Roberts replied that he had gotten many such calls. The first person to walk through his door in Albuquerque with a working BASIC would get the contract. Gates turned to Allen and exulted, “God, we gotta get going on this!’”

Because they did not have an Altair to work on, Allen had to emulate one on the PDP-10 mainframe at the Aiken Lab. So they bought a manual for the 8080 microprocessor and within weeks Allen had the simulator and other development tools ready.

Meanwhile, Gates was furiously writing the BASIC interpreter code on yellow legal pads. “I can still see him alternately pacing and rocking for long periods before jotting on a yellow legal pad, his fingers stained from a rainbow of felt-tip pens,” Allen recalled. “Once my simulator was in place and he was able to use the PDP-10, Bill moved to a terminal and peered at his legal pad as he rocked. Then he’d type a flurry of code with those strange hand positions of his, and repeat. He could go like that for hours at a stretch.”

One night they were having dinner at Currier House, sitting at the table with the other math geeks, and they began complaining about facing the tedious task of writing the floating-point math routines, which would give the program the ability to deal with both very small and very large numbers in scientific notation. A curly-haired kid from Milwaukee named Monte Davidoff piped up, “I’ve written those types of routines.” It was the benefit of being at Harvard. Gates and Allen began peppering him with questions about his capacity to handle floating-point code. Satisfied they knew what he was talking about, they brought him to Gates’s room and negotiated a fee of $400 for his work. He became the third member of the team, and would eventually earn a lot more.

Gates ignored the exam cramming he was supposed to be doing and even stopped playing poker. For eight weeks, he, Allen, and Davidoff holed up day and night at the Aiken lab making history. Occasionally they would break for dinner at Harvard House of Pizza or at Aku Aku, an ersatz Polynesian restaurant. In the wee hours of the morning, Gates would sometimes fall asleep at the terminal. “He’d be in the middle of a line of code when he’d gradually tilt forward until his nose touched the keyboard,” Allen said. “After dozing an hour or two, he’d open his eyes, squint at the screen, blink twice, and resume precisely where he’d left off — a prodigious feat of concentration.”

They would scribble away at their notepads, competing to see who could execute a subroutine in the fewest lines. “I can do it in nine,” one would shout. Another would shoot back, “Well, I can do it in five!” As Allen noted, “We knew that each byte saved would leave that much more room for users to add to their applications.” The goal was to get the program into less than the 4K of memory that an enhanced Altair would have, so there would be a little room left over for the consumer to use. (A 16GB smartphone has four million times that memory.) At night they would fan out the printouts onto the floor and search for ways to make it more elegant and compact. By late February 1975, after eight weeks of intense coding, they got it down, brilliantly, into 3.2K. “It wasn’t a question of whether I could write the program, but rather a question of whether I could squeeze it into under 4K and make it super fast,” said Gates. “It was the coolest program I ever wrote.” Gates checked it for errors one last time, then commanded the Aiken lab’s PDP-10 to spew out a punch-tape of it so Allen could take it down to Albuquerque.

When Allen arrived at MITS, he toggled the switches on the Altair and then waited 10 minutes for the tape reader to load in the code. Ed Roberts and his colleagues exchanged amused glances, already suspecting that the show would be a fiasco. But then the Teletype clacked to life. “MEMORY SIZE?” it asked. “Hey, it typed something!” shouted one of the MITS team. Allen was happily flabbergasted. He typed in the answer: 7168. The Altair responded: “OK.” Allen typed in: “PRINT 2+2”. It was the simplest of all questions, but it would test not only Gates’s coding but also Davidoff’s floating-point math routines. The Altair responded: “4.”

Up until then, Roberts had been watching quietly. He had taken his failing company further into debt on the wild surmise that he could create a computer that a home hobbyist could use and afford. Now he was watching as history was made. For the first time, a software program had run on a commercially viable home computer. “Oh my God,” he shouted. “It printed ‘4’!”

Rogers invited Allen into his office and agreed to license the BASIC interpreter for inclusion on all Altair machines. “I couldn’t stop grinning,” Allen recalled. As soon as he got back to his hotel, Allen called Gates at Harvard. They were officially in business. When Allen arrived back in Cambridge, bringing with him a working Altair to install in Gates’s Currier House room, they went out to celebrate. Gates had his usual, a Shirley Temple: ginger ale with maraschino cherry juice.

A month later, Roberts offered Allen a fulltime job at MITS as director of software. Gates decided to stay at Harvard, at least for the time being. There he endured what has become a rite of passage, amusing only in retrospect, for many of Harvard’s most successful students: being hauled before the dreaded and then-secretive Administrative Board for a disciplinary process, known as being “Ad Boarded.” Gates’s case arose when auditors from the Defense Department decided to check the use of the PDP-10 that it was funding in Harvard’s Aiken lab. They discovered that one sophomore — W.H. Gates — was using most of the time. After much fretting, Gates prepared a paper defending himself and describing how he had created a version of BASIC using the PDP-10 as a simulator. He ended up being exonerated for his use of the machine, but he was “admonished” for allowing a non-student, Allen, to log on with his password. He accepted that minor reprimand and agreed to put his early version of the BASIC interpreter (but not the refined one he and Allen were by then working on) into the public domain.

By that time, Gates was focusing more on his software partnership with Allen than his coursework at Harvard. He finished his sophomore year that spring of 1975, but then flew down to Albuquerque for the summer and decided to stay there rather than returning for the first semester of his junior year that fall. He went back to Harvard for two more semesters, in the spring and fall of 1976, but then left Harvard for good, two semesters shy of graduating. In June 2007, when he returned to Harvard to get an honorary degree, he began his speech by directing a comment to his father in the audience. “I’ve been waiting more than 30 years to say this: Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree.”

Walter Isaacson has written biographies of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin. He is a Harvard Overseer.

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Where conspiracy theories flourish: A study of YouTube comments and Bill Gates conspiracy theories

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We studied YouTube comments posted to Covid-19 news videos featuring Bill Gates and found they were dominated by conspiracy theories. Our results suggest the platform’s comments feature operates as a relatively unmoderated social media space where conspiracy theories circulate unchecked. We outline steps that YouTube can take now to improve its approach to moderating misinformation.

School of Communication, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Department of Media and Communication, University of Sydney, Australia

Research Questions

• RQ1a: What are the dominant conspiratorial themes discussed among YouTube commenters on news videos about Bill Gates and Covid-19? 
• RQ1b: Which conspiratorial topics on these news videos attract the most user engagement?
• RQ2: What discursive strategies are YouTube commenters using to formulate and share conspiracy theories about Bill Gates and Covid-19? 

Essay Summary

• During the Covid-19 pandemic, YouTube introduced new policies and guidelines aimed at limiting the spread of medical misinformation on the platform, but the comments feature remains relatively unmoderated and has low barriers to entry for posting publicly.
• We studied a dataset of 38,564 YouTube comments, drawn from three Covid-19-related videos posted by news media organisations Fox News, Vox, and China Global Television Network. Each video featured Bill Gates and, at the time of data extraction, had between 13,000–14,500 comments posted between April 5, 2020, and March 2, 2021. 
• Through topic modelling and qualitative content analysis, we found the comments for each video to be heavily dominated by conspiratorial statements, covering topics such as Bill Gates’s hidden agenda, his role in vaccine development and distribution, his body language, his connection to Jeffrey Epstein, 5G network harms, and human microchipping. 
• Results suggest that during the Covid-19 pandemic, YouTube’s comments feature may have played an underrated role in participatory cultures of conspiracy theory knowledge production and circulation. The platform should consider design and policy changes that respond to discursive strategies used by conspiracy theorists to prevent similar outcomes for future high-stakes public interest matters. 

Implications

YouTube has been a popular source of information among diverse populations throughout the Covid-19 pandemic (Khatri et al., 2020). In 2020, in response to criticisms that it was amplifying misinformation about the virus (Bruns et al., 2020; Shahsavari et al., 2020), the platform introduced a range of policies and design changes aimed at limiting the spread of Covid-19 medical misinformation. These included a system for amplifying authoritative content in automated video recommendations (Matamoros-Fernandez et al., 2021) and amendments to the Community Guidelines to prohibit content “about COVID-19 that poses a serious risk of egregious harm” (YouTube Help, 2022a, para. 2). The revised guidelines specify that Covid-19 medical misinformation includes any content that contradicts health authorities’ guidance on Covid-19 treatments, prevention, diagnosis, physical distancing, and the existence of Covid-19. Claims about vaccines that “contradict expert consensus,” including claims that vaccines cause death or infertility, or contain devices used to track or identify individuals, and false claims about the effectiveness of vaccines are all explicitly in violation of YouTube’s Covid-19 medical misinformation guidelines (YouTube Help, 2022a, para. 3). 

YouTube states that its Covid-19 medical misinformation rules apply to all content posted to the platform, including video comments. In our study, however, we found comments made against three news videos to be dominated by conspiratorial statements about Covid-19 vaccines in violation of these rules. A significant portion of comments appeared in obvious violation of YouTube’s rules, for example, comments that proposed vaccines are used for mass sterilisation or to insert microchips into recipients. Other comments could be considered “borderline content,” which YouTube defines as content that “brushes up against” but does not cross the lines set by its rules (The YouTube Team, 2019, para. 7). In our data, examples of borderline content include comments that raise doubts about Bill Gates’s motives in vaccine development and distribution and those that suggest that he is seeking to take control in a “new world order.” These comments implied or linked to theories about using vaccines as a means for controlling or tracking large populations of people. Overall, the prevalence of conspiratorial statements about Covid-19 vaccines in our dataset indicates that YouTube’s rules were not well-enforced in the platform’s comments feature at the time of data collection. 

Following Marwick and Partin (2022), we suggest that conspiracy theory discussions in YouTube comments have all the characteristic traits of participatory culture, meaning that it is a site of intense collective sense-making and knowledge production. Our results suggest that YouTube’s comments feature can, like anonymous message boards such as 4chan and 8kun, function as an under-regulated epistemic space in which conspiracy theories flourish. Research on Reddit has established the important role of user comments to social processes of knowledge production on platforms, particularly for judgments on information value and credibility (Graham & Rodriguez, 2021). Sundar’s (2008) study of technology effects on credibility found that “when users were attributed as the source of online news, study participants liked the stories more and perceived them to be of higher quality than when news editors or receivers themselves were identified as sources” (p. 83). Sundar and others (see Liao & Mak, 2019; Xu, 2013) have argued this can be explained by the “bandwagon heuristic” in which users’ collective endorsement of content has “powerful influences on publics’ credibility judgments” (Liao & Mak, 2019, p. 3).

The affordances of YouTube’s comments section likely play a significant role in activating the bandwagon heuristic. On YouTube, comments are ranked and displayed according to levels of engagement—that is, according to the number of likes—thus, the comment with the most total likes ranks first. Users can opt to sort and display comments according to date, with the most recent comments at the top; however, the default setting is to rank according to engagement, thereby creating a “voting” function that can signal value and credibility to other users. As Rosenblum and Muirhead (2020) have argued, this may mean that a given YouTube comment appears credible simply because “a lot of people are saying” (p. ix) that it is. This raises important questions about the role of YouTube’s comment liking feature and other algorithmic procedures for sorting content, as they may be exacerbating the kind of “new conspiracism” set out by Rosenblum and Muirhead (2020).

YouTube has acknowledged that the “quality of comments” is frequently raised as a problem by YouTube creators (Wright, 2020). In 2020, the platform introduced a comments filter aimed at automatically identifying and preventing the publication of “inappropriate or hurtful” comments (Wright, 2020). The machine learning classifier that underpins this feature is designed to learn iteratively over time so that it becomes more effective at identifying undesirable comments. Creators can also add specific terms to the list of blocked words (YouTube, 2022b). Our study suggests that it is not working for conspiratorial commentary about Covid-19. To limit the spread of Covid-19 conspiracy theories, this classifier could be trained to identify and exclude from publication comments engaging in Covid-19 medical misinformation. 

Automated systems can only go so far, however. Because we found a high prevalence of conspiratorial themes in videos about Bill Gates and Covid-19 (RQ1a), we suggest future policy responses to YouTube’s rampant problem of misinformation in comment sections need to consider how conspiracy theorising functions within the discursive space. We found conspiratorial commenting fits into three top-level functional groups: strengthening a conspiracy theory, discrediting an authority, and defending a conspiracy theory. This is not a wholly novel observation—the same could be said for other platforms that afford conversational interaction through reply threads, notably Reddit. What is different for YouTube is that it almost completely lacks the community-led moderation features that help to mitigate and curb the production and spread of conspiracy theorising and misinformation on Reddit. 

Because we found that YouTube commenters use discursive strategies that automated systems are likely to miss (RQ2), our findings suggest that algorithmic approaches to Covid-19 misinformation, such as automated filtering, will not be sufficient to capture the nuance of conspiratorial discourse and the discursive tactics used by conspiracy theorists. For instance, a comment from a new YouTube user that undermines the authority of the U.S. Government National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is unlikely to be automatically flagged as breaching YouTube’s community guidelines on Covid-19 misinformation, even though it might be clearly part of a conversation thread about Covid denialism. Similarly, we found short conspiratorial statements receive the most engagement (RQ1b), and machine learning text classifiers typically perform poorly on short, ambiguous text inputs (Huang et al., 2013). On Reddit, such a comment might be recognised for the discursive tactic that it is and thereby moderated in a variety of ways, for example: downvoted by other users until it is hidden automatically from view (Graham & Rodriguez, 2021); flagged as “controversial” and de-ranked in terms of visibility; removed by volunteer subreddit moderators; or simply not allowed because the user does not have the minimum credibility (“karma” score) to post comments in that particular subreddit. In severe cases where community-led moderation fails, Reddit may “quarantine” or even ban entire subreddits that become overrun with misinformation.

Our findings support previous studies that argue for understanding disinformation as a collective, socially produced phenomenon. The conspiratorial YouTube comments in our study evoke the notion of “evidence collages” (Krafft & Donovan, 2020), where positive “evidence” filters algorithmically to the top of the thread and is presented to users in a way that affords visibility and participation directly beneath the video. This participatory commenting trades “up the chain” (Marwick & Lewis, 2017, p. 38) through voting practices that increase the visibility of false and misleading narratives to directly under the news publisher’s video. For example, comments that draw attention to Bill Gates’s body language form a multimodal evidence collage beneath the video, inviting others to theorise particular time points in the video and add their own interpretation directly beneath the video in the top comment thread. As Marwick and Clyde (2022) argue, we need to take seriously these tools and interpretive practices of conspiracy theorising. YouTube comment threads afford a participatory mode of knowledge production that actively cultivates an epistemic authority grounded in populist expertise (Marwick & Partin, 2022) and is arguably an important part of the platform’s layer of “disinformation infrastructure” (Pasquetto et al., 2022, Table 3, p. 22). 

YouTube critically lacks the social moderation infrastructure that has helped other platforms to deal with misinformation and conspiracy theories that would otherwise spread largely unchecked within the millions of conversations occurring each day. Other platforms have had more success in part because they recognise that the misinformation problem is coextensive with participatory culture, and therefore the design features have evolved to afford community-led moderation that is geared towards the cultures and identity groups that co-exist within the platform. In short, for YouTube to adequately address this problem, it must attend to both the discursive strategies that evade automated detection systems and to redesigning the space to provide users with the tools they need to self-moderate effectively. 

For news publishers on YouTube, the platform might look to develop best practice content moderation guidelines for news organisations engaged in publishing content relating to matters of public interest. These guidelines should explain the need for and how to properly moderate comments to ensure their videos do not have the effect of exacerbating conspiracy theory production and circulation. Critically, best practices should be attentive to common discursive strategies conspiracy theorists use and how to look out for them when moderating comment sections. In addition to automated filtering, when posting videos that cover high-stakes public interest matters, news organisations should consider disabling the comments feature unless they are able to commit substantial resources towards manually moderating comments. Ideally, YouTube would provide news content creators with functionality to assess which topics and/or keywords tend to receive high engagement in the comments section. For example, our study shows a common strategy whereby commenters strengthen conspiracy theories by connecting disparate information (“connecting the dots”). This discursive strategy, whilst largely invisible to automated detection systems, would likely stand out to content creators who pore over engagement metrics for the most upvoted (and therefore visible) comments on their videos. However, we also warn against placing too much onus on content creators to bear the responsibility of increasing the “quality” of commentary. To be sure, while empowering creators is useful, it should not displace responsibility solely onto creators. A major implication of our study is that YouTube needs much more effort to redesign the space to provide social moderation infrastructure. Otherwise, the discursive strategies of conspiracy theorists will continue to evade detection systems, pose insurmountable challenges for content creators, and play into the hands of content producers who benefit from and/or encourage such activity. 

In early 2022, YouTube announced that it was testing features that would allow YouTube creators to set channel-specific guidelines for comments so that creators can “better shape the tone of conversations on their channel” (Mohan, 2022). At the same time, however, YouTube stated it was also trialing a feature that allows users to sort and view comments timed to relevant points in the video to give “valuable context to comments as they read them” (YouTube, 2020a). If this feature is applied to comments that are not moderated to enforce YouTube’s Covid-19 medical misinformation policies, it could increase the chance of triggering the bandwagon heuristic among YouTube users, further amplifying Covid-19 medical misinformation. Any changes to the comments feature that increase the visibility of or engagement with YouTube comments should be carefully calibrated against both YouTube creator and public interest objectives, and transparently outlined to policymakers and the public. 

Finding 1a: Conspiratorial statements dominate in video comments, with three closely related but distinct thematic clusters.

Topic modelling analysis of the full dataset of comments showed 22 main topics. A manual analysis of a random sample of 50 comments from each of the 22 topics ( n  = 1,100) revealed that conspiracy theories or conspiratorial statements were present in all 22 topics (Figure 1). These included a range of conspiratorial ideas and narratives about Bill Gates specifically, as well as elements from conspiracy theories not directly related to Bill Gates and information about real-world events. 

An analysis of the topics through an intertopic distance map, which represents the spread of topics according to the number of comments in each topic and connections between topics, showed three distinct topic clusters (Figure 2). Each cluster is related to conspiracy theories but with slightly divergent themes: Bill Gates as an individual, his role in vaccine development and distribution, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. 

A thematic analysis of the first cluster found it to be dominated by comments alleging that Bill Gates is an evil person with a hidden agenda. Comments proposed that Gates’s body language indicates his malevolent intent (Topic 20) and shared well-known conspiracy sources such as videos about Gates from the  Corbett Report  (Topic 2). Comments also connected Gates to seemingly unrelated conspiracy theories, such as the theory that Covid-19 is caused by the rollout of 5G networks (Topic 20). Within this cluster, comments also posited a connection between Gates and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein (Topic 19) and proposed Gates is seeking to microchip people through vaccinations (Topic 19). Cryptocurrency mining patent W02020060606 (Topic 2), ID2020 1 See  https://id2020.org/overview (Topic 2), and a pandemic simulation exercise 2 See  https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/scenario.html (Topic 21) were all connected to the microchipping theory.

The second cluster was dominated by comments about Bill Gates’s motives for vaccine promotion. A common theme was that Gates is motivated by a “depopulation agenda” and comments referred to the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda 3 See  https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda  (Topic 5), Gates’s TED Talk about pandemic preparedness (Topic 10), ID2020 (Topic 8), and sources by Dr. Rashit A. Buttar and Judy Mikovits (Topic 7). The population control theory was interwoven with ideas about Gates’s controlling individuals through microchipping and the “Mark of the Beast” (a physical mark left by the smallpox vaccines) (Topics 1, 15, and 18). Distrust of mainstream media was a sub-theme within this cluster. Comments displayed an anti-institution and anti-elite sentiment in discussions about the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines (Topic 6) and in relation to conspiracies about Jeffrey Epstein, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger (Topic 17), and Chief Medical Advisor to the President of the United States, Anthony Fauci (Topic 7). 

Theories about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation dominated the third cluster. For example, commenters hypothesised that Gates created the Zika virus for population control in developing countries (Topic 4) and that the foundation seeks to sterilise African women (Topic 14) and paralyse Indian children (Topic 9). 

Finding 1b: Comments with the most user engagement tended to be short, general conspiratorial statements.  

The number of likes and replies to comments was used to measure public engagement with the ideas put forth in comments. Comments with the highest engagement tended to be general in their assertions and short in length (Figure 3). There was the highest engagement with comments that expressed a general distrust of Bill Gates (Topic 21) and pointed to his body language (Topic 20), and>> as well as previous remarks about pandemic preparation (Topic 19). 

Finding 2: Commenters engaged in discursive practices common to conspiracy theory knowledge production and circulation.  

A manual content analysis of the top 3 comments (based on posterior topic probability) from 20 topics ( n  = 60) was undertaken to identify the discursive strategies used by commenters when sharing conspiratorial statements. We adopted Kou et al.’s (2017) categories of discursive practices to code the sample. These include three top-level functional groups: strengthening a conspiracy theory, discrediting an authority, and defending a conspiracy theory. In our data, as Figure 4 shows, 23% of comments sampled sought to strengthen conspiracy theories by connecting disparate information (“connecting the dots”), 25% made comments that discredited Bill Gates (“casting doubts”), 19% referenced authoritative information selectively, and 35% consisted of a range of strategies that each occurred infrequently (between 2% and 8% of total comments).

As outlined at the outset of this paper, our research was driven by two questions:

• RQ1a: What are the dominant conspiratorial themes discussed among YouTube commenters for news videos about Bill Gates and Covid-19? 
• RQ1b: Which conspiratorial topics for these news videos attract the most user engagement?

To collect the data required to answer all the research questions, YouTube videos were chosen from Fox News, China Global Television Network (CGTN), and Vox to ensure comments were captured from diverse news media outlets. Each video featured Bill Gates prominently, highlighting his views on vaccines and pandemic preparedness. We purposively sampled for videos featuring Bill Gates, given that he is a mainstay of online conspiracy movements (Smith & Graham, 2017; Thomas & Zhang, 2020) and, therefore, of special analytical interest to the field. To extract the comments from the three videos, we employed the open-source tool  VosonSML  and made use of YouTube’s API. It should be noted that due to the specifications of the API,  VosonSML  collects a maximum of 100 reply comments for each top-level comment.

The sample size of comments across all three videos (Table 1) far exceeded our ability to manually code each comment, so we used the topic model approach to assist with summarising and thematically organising the large-scale text corpus used to answer the research questions. We applied a latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic model to the corpus of YouTube comments using the STM package in R. Topic modelling helps to summarise large text collections by categorising the documents into a small set of themes or topics. Documents are a mix of topics defined by a probability distribution (e.g., document 1 is generated by topic  k  with probability  p ). Likewise, topics are a mix of words defined by a probability distribution (e.g., topic 1 generates the word “apple” with probability  p ). Topics need to be qualitatively interpreted and labelled by the researcher and topic models require several text processing decisions to be made, depending on the research design and dataset. We processed the YouTube comments data by removing non-English words, special characters, numbers, emojis, and duplicates before converting it into lowercase and representing the data using a bag-of-words model (a matrix with documents as rows, columns as words, and cell values representing the frequency of a given word in each document). We derived the number of topics statistically: the number of topics (the  k  parameter) was examined stepwise with different values  k  ∈{8,10,12,14,16,18,20,22,24} and validated through “searchK” function in the STM package. 

We selected 22 topics based on the exclusivity of words to topics and semantic coherence representing the co-occurrence of most probable words in a given topic. Topics 12 and 22 were excluded from the analysis as they included spam comments and had low affiliation probability (i.e., these are “junk” topics). We identified the two junk topics through our analysis for RQ1 and subsequently omitted these from analysis in RQ2. For RQ1, the first author applied a qualitative coding procedure to label the topics, and the research team discussed the coding schema in regular meetings to ensure reliability. Comments were grouped into topics based on the highest posterior topic probability output by the model for engagement analysis. For RQ2, two coders conducted a manual analysis of  n  = 60 comments, and inter-rater reliability was calculated at κ = 0.815. 

Finally, a limitation of LDA topic modelling is that it is a probabilistic method and, therefore, comments might be misclassified into topics if there is not an “ideal” thematic fit (e.g., comments are an equal mix of topics). While there is invariably an error term in the classifications of documents into topics, we aimed to address validity and reliability issues for RQ2 by qualitatively coding topics via two independent coders and calculating inter-rater reliability. While the method is by no means perfect, we invite other researchers to apply similar approaches in order to test and expand the generalisability of our findings, as well as examine related case studies.

• Conspiracy Theories
• / Mainstream Media
• / Social Media

Cite this Essay

Ha, L., Graham, T., & Gray, J. E. (2022). Where conspiracy theories flourish: A study of YouTube comments and Bill Gates conspiracy theories. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review . https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-107

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Graham, T., & Rodriguez, A. (2021). The sociomateriality of rating and ranking devices on social media: A case study of Reddit’s voting practices. Social Media + Society , 7 (3), 20563051211047668. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211047667

Huang, S., Peng, W., Li, J., & Lee, D. (2013). Sentiment and topic analysis on social media: A multi-task multi-label classification approach. In Proceedings of the 5th annual ACM web science conference (pp. 172–181). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2464464.2464512

Khatri, P., Singh, S. R., Belani, N. K., Yeong, Y. L., Lohan, R., Lim, Y. W., & Teo, W. Z. (2020). YouTube as source of information on 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak: A cross sectional study of English and Mandarin content. Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease , 35 , 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tmaid.2020.101636

Kou, Y., Gui, X., Chen, Y., & Pine, K. (2017). Conspiracy talk on social media: Collective sensemaking during a public health crisis. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 61, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1145/3134696

Krafft, P. M., & Donovan, J. (2020). Disinformation by design: The use of evidence collages and platform filtering in a media manipulation campaign. Political Communication , 37 (2), 194–214. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2019.1686094

Liao, M., & Mak, A. (2019). “Comments are disabled for this video”: A technological affordances approach to understanding source credibility assessment of CSR information on YouTube. Public Relations Review , 45 (5), 101840. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2019.101840

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Matamoros-Fernandez, A., Gray, J. E., Bartolo, L., Burgess, J., & Suzor, N. (2021). What’s “up next”? Investigating algorithmic recommendations on YouTube across issues and over time. Media and Communicatio n, 9 (4), 234–249. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v9i4.4184

Pasquetto, I. V., Olivieri, A. F., Tacchetti, L., Riotta, G., & Spada, A. (2022). Disinformation as Infrastructure: Making and maintaining the QAnon conspiracy on Italian digital media. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction , 6 (CSCW1), 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1145/3512931

Rosenblum, N. L., & Muirhead, R. (2020). A lot of people are saying: The new conspiracism and the assault on democracy . Princeton University Press.

Shahsavari, S., Holur, P., Wang, T., Tangherlini, T. R., & Roychowdhury, V. (2020). Conspiracy in the time of corona: Automatic detection of emerging COVID-19 conspiracy theories in social media and the news. Journal of Computational Social Science , 3 (2), 279–317. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42001-020-00086-5

Smith, N., & Graham, T. (2019). Mapping the anti-vaccination movement on Facebook.  Information, Communication & Society ,  22 (9), 1310–1327. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1418406

Sundar, S. (2008). The MAIN model: A heuristic approach to understanding technology effects on credibility. In M. J. Metzger & A. J. Flanagin (Eds.), Digital media, youth, and credibility (pp.73–100). MIT Press.

The YouTube Team. (December 3, 2019). The four Rs of responsibility, part 2: Raising authoritative content and reducing borderline content and harmful misinformation . YouTube. https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/the-four-rs-of-responsibility-raise-and-reduce/

Thomas, E., & Zhang, A. (2020). ID2020, Bill Gates and the mark of the beast: How Covid-19 catalyses existing online conspiracy movements . Australian Strategic Policy Institute. http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep25082

Wright, J. (December 3, 2020). Updates on our efforts to make YouTube a more inclusive platform . YouTube. https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/make-youtube-more-inclusive-platform/

Xu, Q. (2013). Social recommendation, source credibility, and recency: Effects of news cues in a social bookmarking website. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly , 90 (4), 757–775. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699013503158

Mohan, N. (February 10, 2022). A look at 2022: Community, collaboration, and commerce . https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/innovations-for-2022-at-youtube/

YouTube Help. (2022a). COVID-19 medical misinformation policy . YouTube. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9891785?hl=en&ref_topic=10833358

YouTube Help. (2022b). Learn about comment settings . YouTube. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9483359?hl=en

The authors disclose receipt of the following financial support: Graham is the recipient of an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship (project number DE220101435). YouTube data provided courtesy of Google’s YouTube Data API.

Competing Interests

The authors declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

The research protocol employed in this research project was approved by the Queensland University of Technology’s ethics committee for human or animal experiments (approval number 200000475). Human subjects did not provide informed consent.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ,  which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original author and source are properly credited.

Data Availability

All materials needed to replicate this study are available via the Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/WF2BFB

Acknowledgements

All authors acknowledge continued support from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) through the Digital Media Research Centre.

Essay on Bill Gates

Students are often asked to write an essay on Bill Gates in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Bill Gates

Bill Gates was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington. He developed an interest in computer programming at a young age.

In 1975, Gates co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen. They developed software for personal computers, transforming the tech industry.

Philanthropy

After retiring from Microsoft, Gates focused on philanthropy. He and his wife, Melinda, established the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which works on global issues.

Gates’ impact on technology and philanthropy is significant. His work continues to inspire many around the world.

250 Words Essay on Bill Gates

Early life and education.

Born on October 28, 1955, Bill Gates is a renowned American business magnate, software developer, and philanthropist. His interest in computer programming started at Lakeside School, leading him to Harvard College, where he met Steve Ballmer. However, he left Harvard to pursue a dream that would revolutionize the world of technology.

Microsoft: The Technology Giant

In 1975, Gates and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft, aiming to develop and sell BASIC interpreters. Gates’ vision of “a computer on every desk and in every home” was pioneering at a time when computers were bulky and expensive. Under his leadership, Microsoft introduced Windows, which became the dominant OS worldwide, solidifying Gates’ position as a titan of the tech industry.

Philanthropy: A Life Beyond Microsoft

In 2000, Gates stepped down as Microsoft CEO to focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world’s wealthiest charitable foundations. The foundation’s work in healthcare, education, and poverty alleviation has had global impacts, demonstrating Gates’ commitment to using his wealth for societal good.

Legacy and Influence

Gates’ influence extends beyond technology and philanthropy. He is a thought leader, advising on issues like climate change and public health. His book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” provides insightful solutions to one of the most pressing problems of our time.

In conclusion, Bill Gates’ journey from a computer enthusiast to a globally influential figure is a testament to his vision, leadership, and philanthropic spirit. His life offers invaluable lessons about innovation, resilience, and the power of technology to transform societies.

500 Words Essay on Bill Gates

Introduction.

Bill Gates, born William Henry Gates III, is a name that resonates profoundly within the realm of technology, philanthropy, and global health. As the co-founder of Microsoft Corporation, he revolutionized the world of personal computing, creating a legacy that continues to influence the technological landscape.

Born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington, Gates was an intellectually curious child. His parents nurtured his interest in computing, enrolling him at Lakeside School, where he first encountered a computer. His fascination with the machine led to a partnership with his school friend, Paul Allen, a collaboration that would later birth Microsoft.

The Birth of Microsoft

In 1975, Gates and Allen established Microsoft, a blend of “microcomputer” and “software.” Their first significant breakthrough came with the development of the MS-DOS operating system for IBM in 1981. This marked the beginning of Microsoft’s dominance in the personal computer operating system market.

Leadership and Innovation at Microsoft

As CEO, Gates led Microsoft through a series of innovations, including the launch of Windows in 1985, a graphical operating system shell that became a household name. Gates’ leadership style was characterized by his relentless pursuit of new ideas and his ability to inspire his team to turn visions into reality.

Philanthropic Endeavors

Gates stepped down as Microsoft’s CEO in 2000, shifting his focus towards philanthropy. He established the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has since become one of the world’s largest and most influential charitable organizations. The foundation focuses on global health, education, and poverty, among other issues.

Global Health Advocacy

Gates has been a vocal advocate for global health, investing billions in research and treatment for diseases like malaria and HIV. His foundation’s efforts have significantly contributed to the eradication of polio. Recently, Gates has been at the forefront of the fight against COVID-19, funding research, and vaccine distribution.

Gates’ influence extends beyond Microsoft and his philanthropic endeavors. His thoughts on technology, global health, and climate change shape public discourse and policy. His book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” offers practical solutions to the climate crisis, demonstrating his commitment to a sustainable future.

Bill Gates’ journey from a computer enthusiast to a technology magnate and global health advocate is a testament to his vision, perseverance, and commitment to improving the world. His legacy serves as a beacon of inspiration for aspiring entrepreneurs and innovators. Gates’ story underscores the transformative power of technology and the profound impact of philanthropy, offering valuable lessons for future generations.

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As I’ve written about before, the world lacks an effective system to detect, respond to, or prevent the next outbreak.

1955— Born Seattle, WA.

1973 entered harvard university., 1967 enrolled at lakeside school. first used computer., 1968 began programming with paul allen in the computer center..

This is the story of my life in four sentences:

I grew up in Seattle, Washington, with an amazing and supportive family. I dropped out of college to start a business with a childhood friend. I married Melinda and we started a family of our own. Now we’re working together to give our wealth back to society.

If you want to know more than that, the next few pages go into more detail. As you can tell from my picture here, there have been a few surprises along the way.

Bill Gates is a technologist, business leader, and philanthropist. He grew up in Seattle, Washington, with an amazing and supportive family who encouraged his interest in computers at an early age. He dropped out of college to start Microsoft with his childhood friend Paul Allen. He married Melinda French in 1994 and they have three children. Today, Bill and Melinda Gates co-chair the charitable foundation bearing their names and are working together to give their wealth back to society.

Bill grew up in Seattle with his two sisters. His dad, William H. Gates II, is a Seattle attorney and one of the co-chairs of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. His late mother, Mary Gates, was a schoolteacher, University of Washington regent, and chairwoman of United Way International.

Bill Gates is a technologist, business leader, and philanthropist. He grew up in Seattle, Washington, with an amazing and supportive family who encouraged his interest in computers at an early age. He dropped out of college to start Microsoft with his childhood friend Paul Allen. Today, Bill co-chairs the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with Melinda French Gates, where he works to give his wealth back to society.

Bill grew up in Seattle with his two sisters. His late father, William H. Gates Sr., was a Seattle attorney and one of the co-chairs of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. His late mother, Mary Gates, was a schoolteacher, University of Washington regent, and chairwoman of United Way International. Bill has three children.

1976 Changed company name to Microsoft.

1975–.

My time at Microsoft was amazing. When Paul Allen and I started the business, the idea of a personal computer was new and strange. We accomplished some things that people said could never be done, and we got to be part of a revolution in the way people live.

I’m passionate about Microsoft’s work and will always be involved with the company, including my role as a member of the board.

When Bill and Paul Allen started Microsoft, their vision of “a computer on every desktop and in every home” seemed farfetched to most people. Today, thanks to Microsoft and many other companies, that vision is a reality in many parts of the world, and personal technology is an integral part of society.

Bill is passionate about Microsoft’s work and will always be involved with the company, including his present role as a member of the board and technology advisor.

1975 Started Micro-Soft with Paul Allen in Albuquerque, NM.

1979 microsoft moved to washington state., 1980 sold dos for ibm pc and retained the copyright., 1985 windows 1.0 launched., 1994 married melinda french., 1995 windows 95 launched., 2000 assumed role of chief software architect, as steve ballmer assumed role of microsoft ceo., 2001 the original xbox released., 2008 left his daily job at microsoft., 2014 stepped down as chairman. remained on the board and began serving as technology advisor., 2000 bill and melinda officially established the foundation. they also announced the first round of gates millennium scholars, part of a $1 billion effort to help 20,000 young people afford college over the next two decades., 2002 the foundation completed efforts to help install 47,000 computers in 11,000 libraries in all 50 states. ninety-five percent of libraries have computers with internet access, up from 27 percent in 1996., 2006 warren buffett pledged the bulk of his wealth to the foundation., 2010 bill and melinda challenged the global health community to declare this the decade of vaccines. they pledged $10 billion over the next 10 years to help research, develop, and deliver vaccines for the world’s poorest countries., 2009 ted talk bill gates: mosquitos, malaria and education, 2013 bill helped launch a $5.5 billion effort to eradicate polio by 2018. india was certified polio-free by the world health organization, leaving only three countries that have never been free of the disease., 2015 bill announced the formation of the child health and mortality prevention surveillance network (champs), a network of disease surveillance sites in developing countries, to help prevent childhood deaths., 2017 the bill & melinda gates foundation committed $300 million to helping farmers in africa and asia cope with climate change., 2018 bill shared the stage with a beaker of poop at the reinvented toilet expo in beijing. his “co-star” helped draw attention to a serious problem that kills more than 500,000 people every year: poor sanitation., bill & melinda gates foundation, 2000–.

These days I’m focused full-time on the work Melinda and I are doing through our foundation. People are often surprised to hear me say that this work has a lot in common with my work at Microsoft. In both cases, I get to bring together smart people and collaborate with them to solve big, tough problems.

It’s quite gratifying to know that the foundation and its many partners are helping people all over the world live healthier, more productive lives.

These days Bill focuses most of his time on the work he and Melinda are doing through their foundation. People are often surprised to hear him say that this work has a lot in common with his work at Microsoft. In both cases, he gets to bring together smart people and collaborate with them to solve big, tough problems.

Bill is gratified to know that the foundation and its many partners are helping people all over the world live healthier, more productive lives.

These days Bill focuses most of his time on the work he is doing through his foundation. People are often surprised to hear him say that this work has a lot in common with his work at Microsoft. In both cases, he gets to bring together smart people and collaborate with them to solve big, tough problems.

Other Interests

“ ...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.”.

In addition to the foundation’s work, Bill has separately taken on some projects to address issues that interest him personally, such as delivering clean energy to everyone who needs it.

In all his work—with the foundation and otherwise—he’s focused on what he calls catalytic philanthropy: investments in innovations that will improve life for the poorest. They’re solutions to problems where markets and governments underinvest.

2006 Bill helped launch TerraPower, a company that aims to provide the world with a more affordable, secure, and environmentally friendly form of nuclear energy.

2010 melinda, warren buffett, and bill launched the giving pledge, a commitment by the world’s wealthiest people to dedicate most of their wealth to philanthropy., 2011 children in kenya, nicaragua, and other countries get the first vaccine designed to prevent pneumonia in poor countries—thanks to a partnership of governments, pharmaceutical companies, and other key players. pneumonia is the biggest killer of children in the world., 2014 bill tried his hand at making a viral video with jimmy fallon. this has nothing to do with catalytic philanthropy–he just thought you might enjoy it..

2015 Bill spearheaded the formation of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition to fund clean energy initiatives, avoid a climate disaster, and make sure that everyone on the planet can enjoy a good standard of living.

2017 bill teamed up with roger federer in the fourth annual match for africa, a charity tennis match that raises money for the roger federer foundation., 2018 bill joined forces with a group of philanthropists to create the diagnostics accelerator, a program aimed at finding a way to diagnose alzheimer’s earlier., 2019 bill joined long-time friend warren buffett to serve customers at dairy queen. it did not go well., 2019 the netflix documentary inside bill’s brain: decoding bill gates was released. the three-part series told the story of bill’s life from childhood through microsoft through his work today., 2020 bill and melinda committed about $1.75 billion to support the global response to covid-19., 2020 bill and rashida jones co-hosted a new podcast, “bill gates and rashida jones ask big questions.”, 2021 bill published his book how to avoid a climate disaster , proposing a plan to prevent the worst effects of climate change., a message from bill.

I feel very lucky to get to connect with so many extraordinary people. Whenever I have the chance, I set aside a few minutes to share what I’m learning here on the Gates Notes. Thanks for reading.

This is my personal blog, where I share about the people I meet, the books I'm reading, and what I'm learning. I hope that you'll join the conversation.

Q. How do I create a Gates Notes account?

A. there are three ways you can create a gates notes account:.

• Sign up with Facebook. We’ll never post to your Facebook account without your permission.
• Sign up with Twitter. We’ll never post to your Twitter account without your permission.
• Sign up with your email. Enter your email address during sign up. We’ll email you a link for verification.

Q. Will you ever post to my Facebook or Twitter accounts without my permission?

A. no, never., q. how do i sign up to receive email communications from my gates notes account, a. in account settings, click the toggle switch next to “send me updates from bill gates.”, q. how will you use the interests i select in account settings, a. we will use them to choose the suggested reads that appear on your profile page..

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4 things Bill Gates did wrong on his 1974 Harvard student resume, from experts: 'He even has his dorm room number'

Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates recently shared on LinkedIn his 1974 resume from when he was a student at Harvard. "Whether you're a recent grad or a college dropout," he wrote , "I'm sure your resume looks a lot better than mine did 48 years ago."

The document looks more like an essay than a resume, featuring neatly typed out paragraphs from top to bottom. As it was likely created on a typewriter, it's written in Courier font, which would be unusual to see today.

Gates was only 18 at the time it was written, a year away from dropping out of Harvard to found his company. The resume showcases some impressive achievements: He'd already mastered multiple computer programming languages and had work and project management experience.

Still, there were a few faux pas in it experts would advise against including if you're working on your own resume . Here are four thing s they say Gates did wrong.

He included height, weight, and dependents  

Gates included some information that people today might find amusing.

"All the personal information makes everybody chuckle," says Stacie Haller, career expert at ResumeBuilder.com . "He even has his dorm room number."

He made sure to include his height, for example (5'10"), his weight (130 lbs), and his number of dependents (none). Likely, it wasn't typical to include those kinds of details even then.

"There's a lot of information here that we can't even legally ask in interviews," says Angelina Darrisaw , career coach and founder and CEO of C-Suite Coach, about all of the above.

When writing your own resume, it's wise to leave out any similar personal information.

He included a previous salary

Gates included that his previous salary was $12,000 and, in a section related to his desired salary, wrote, "Open."

You do not need to include these kinds of financial details on your resume. In fact, some cities have legally barred employers from asking about previous salaries.

But once you're called in by a recruiter or a hiring manager, be prepared to discuss specific figures.

"You want to come in as you're entering the interview process with some clear thoughts on the range that's appropriate for where you are in your level and your career," says Darrisaw. Look for similar titles to your intended role on sites like ZipRecruiter, LinkedIn, Monster and Indeed, and see what kind of range those positions are offering to get a sense of what to ask for yourself.  

The way Gates approached salary on his resume, it's not clear what he's looking for. "I don't know if that means he's willing to get less, or he wants to negotiate, or what that's about," says Haller.

His resume format was unclear and hard to scan

Gates' paragraph-like formatting is somewhat cumbersome and makes it tough to understand important information about his work background. "It's kind of hard to for me to figure out were those school jobs, were they not school jobs," says Haller. "I am still not sure."

These days, recruiters and HR personnel have very little time to spend on each resume. In fact, they spend an average of just 7.4 seconds on each initial screening, according to a 2018 study by career site Ladders .

"So when you're sharing your resume," says Darrisaw, "you want to make sure that it's formatted in a way that's easy for someone who's taking maybe just a few minutes, if that, to be able to assess some key things about you."

Include a several-line summary of who you are and what your experience is at the top of the page. Instead of using chunks of text the way Gates has, under "experience," write each job title clearly then use bullet points to outline your responsibilities and achievements in that role. And write the dates in which you performed the job on the right of each title.

He didn't use convincing wording

Gates could have used more specific language, Haller says, pointing to his description of the work he did at the TRW Systems Group from January to September 1973. Gates wrote that as a systems programmer, he was "involved with file design and modifications to operating system."

"'Involved with' is, like, a meaningless word," says Haller.

Use strong, active verbs to indicate the kinds of responsibilities you took on for each position. For a leadership role, for example, Indeed recommends using words like "coach," "delegate," "direct," "guide," and "foster."

Despite these minor flubs, what's clear in this resume is that Gates was always a go-getter. "For a guy being in his first year of Harvard, he has pretty significant experience," says Haller. "And that's what somebody's going to notice."

3 strategies for writing a resume that will 'instantly impress' any hiring manager, according to a recruiting expert

93% of employers want to see soft skills on your resume—here are 8 of the most in-demand ones

Bill Gates plans to give away 'virtually all' his $113 billion—here's the impact that could actually have

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Born to attorney, William Henry II and teacher, Mary Maxwell Gates in Seattle, Washington on 28 th October, 1955, Bill Gates was curious and competitive even as a child. Not surprisingly, his parents enrolled him in the private preparation school, Lakeside School where Gates excelled at a number of subjects including Math, Science, English Literature, and Drama. Bill Gates first encounter with computer occurred at Lakeside when the school acquired one as part of a deal with the city of Seattle (Sean).

Bill Gates was 13 years old when his interest in computers began and he would spend much of his time in the computer terminal. His enthusiasm for computers was shared by another student Paul Allen who was two years his senior. The two friends went into business together in 1970 when Bill was only fifteen years old and their first software “Traf-o-Data” that monitored traffic patterns in Seattle netted them $20,000. Gates enrolled at Harvard University in the fall of 1973 with the aim of pursuing a career in Law but continued to spend most of his time in the computer lab. In 1974, Gates joined Paul Allen at Honeywell but the two friends soon joined Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry System (MITS) when the BASIC software program written by the duo worked perfectly on MITS Altair computer. Gates had already dropped out of Harvard before joining MITS even though his parents were disappointed by his decision to drop out of the college (Biography.com).

Bill Gates journey from Lakeside to MITS reveal several clues about his personality. First of all, Bill Gates knew what he enjoyed and would even go to the extremes to follow his passion. He would spend hours at the computer terminal at Lakeside and even though he intended to major in Law at Harvard, his love affair with the computer lab continued. Second, Bill Gates was not afraid to challenge the norms and take risks. He went into business first time when he was only 15 years old and even dropped out of Harvard to join MITS because computers were his real passion.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft as a software company in 1975. When IBM approached Microsoft in 1980 for help with the personal computer project, code named Project Chess, Gates MS-DOS operating system but didn’t license it exclusively to IBM. By early 1990s, Microsoft had sold more than one hundred million copies of MS-DOS operating system (Encyclopedia of World Biography). Bill Gates refusal to exclusively license MS-DOS to IBM demonstrates that he was as shrewd a businessman as he was software visionary. Gates probably realized that the marginal cost of producing MS-DOS is almost zero while volume will not only ensure tremendous profit but also huge market share. The fact that Microsoft didn’t enter computer hardware market proves that Gates understood the economics of hardware and software very well and knew that software dominance is much more difficult to break. By generously licensing software to all hardware manufacturers unlike Apple’s Steven Jobs, Bill Gates locked in consumers and created huge entry barriers for potential competitors.

In 1981, Apple invited Microsoft to help develop software for Macintosh computers. When Gates saw Apple’s VisiCorp software which incorporated Graphical User Interface (GUI), he sensed both a threat to relatively complex MS-DOS operating system as well as an opportunity. This experience became the foundation for Microsoft Windows operating system that also incorporated GUI. Though Apple unsuccessfully sued Microsoft and stories are still prevalent that Gates stole the GUI idea from Apple, this event also demonstrated Gates leadership skills. Gates kept eyes on both current and potential competitors and could recognize a threat when he came across one. In addition, Gates was also willing to learn from competitors for as long as the idea held promise. Gates realized that GUI operating system posed a real threat because it was intuitive and could be used even by technologically-novice individuals. He also knew he had to act fast which is why Microsoft announced GUI operating system about two years before it actually introduced Windows in 1985.

Bill Gates also used the dominance of its operating system to introduce other products with significant success including Microsoft Office Suite and Internet Explorer browser. Microsoft’s monopoly became the basis of federal lawsuit against the company that could have broken the company into three parts (Biography Online). Microsoft’s dominance in several software markets under Gates’ leadership reflects Gates competitiveness. Gates might have transformed himself through his philanthropic activities but he was never easy on the competition. When he would sense a threat, he would immediately take steps to encounter it before the threat becomes a serious challenge. Gates was never the one to procrastinate which is why Microsoft almost never lost a competition until it lost the search engine battle to Google.

Bill Gates has been a lifelong learner and once he got interested in philanthropy, also due to his wife, Melinda Gates, he extensively studied Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Bill and Melinda Gates founded William H. Gates Foundation in 1994 and combined several family foundations in 2000 to form Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Beginning in 2000, he gradually started decreasing his involvement in Microsoft and in 2008, fully committed himself to his philanthropic endeavors (Biography.com). Gates transition to philanthropy once again demonstrates that he is never happy with the average. When he decides to make a difference, whether through computer software or through philanthropy, he wants to do the best he is capable of. Through his foundation, he has been tackling some of the world’s toughest health challenges such as AIDS and malnutrition which shows that he has never been shy of taking difficult challenges and has tremendous belief in himself. Bill Gates has demonstrated his ability to inspire not only ordinary individuals but successful people as well many of whom have pledged to donate a significant proportion of their wealth to philanthropic activities. The fact that Warren Buffet has pledged most of his fortune to Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Nichols) reflects Buffet’s trust in Gates leadership.

Bill Gates success has not merely been the outcome of being in the right place at the right time but also his personal qualities such as willingness to take risks, acting upon his dreams, carefully monitoring the external environment and responding in a timely manner, and having a huge self-confident. Gates has always been a practical person as both his professional and philanthropic lives show. When he dreamt of putting computer in every house, he knew the solution was to make an operating system of decent quality at a reasonable price rather than a high-quality operating system at a premium price. As he ventured into philanthropy, he realized the magnitude of challenges was too much even for him despite his huge wealth, thus, he invited fellow billionaires to join him. Gates will be remembered for a long time after he is gone, both for his accomplishments in the tech sector as well as his courage to tackle the world’s greatest health challenges.

Biography Online. Biography of Bill Gates. 9 October 2012 <http://www.biographyonline.net/business/bill-gates.html>.

Biography.com. “Bill Gates.” 9 October 2012 <http://www.biography.com/people/bill-gates-9307520?page=1>.

Encyclopedia of World Biography. Bill Gates Biography. 9 October 2012 <http://www.notablebiographies.com/Fi-Gi/Gates-Bill.html#b>.

Nichols, Michelle. “Bill Gates’s philanthropy costs him richest-man title.” 8 March 2011. Reuters. 9 October 2012 <http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/08/us-wealth-gates-philanthropy-idUSTRE72668V20110308>.

Sean, Peter. Bill Gates. 9 October 2012 <http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0309540/bio>.

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Lessons from Amazon’s Early Growth Strategy

If you’re interested in strategies for scaling start-ups, this episode is for you.

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So much has been written about Amazon’s outsized growth. But Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta says it’s the company’s unusual approach to strategy that has captured his scholarly attention. Gupta has spent years studying Amazon’s strategy and its founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos.

In this episode, Gupta shares how Amazon upended traditional corporate strategy by diversifying into multiple products serving many end users, instead of having a narrow focus.

He argues that some of Amazon’s simplest business strategies — like their obsession with customers and insistence on long-term thinking — are approaches that companies, big and small, can emulate.

Key episode topics include: strategy, innovation, leadership, scaling, Jeff Bezos, long-term thinking, customer focus.

HBR On Strategy curates the best case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week.

• Listen to the full HBR IdeaCast episode: How Jeff Bezos Built One of the World’s Most Valuable Companies (2020)
• Find more episodes of HBR IdeaCast
• Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org .

HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR On Strategy , case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock new ways of doing business.

So much has been written about Amazon’s outsized growth. But Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta says it’s the company’s unusual approach to strategy that has captured his scholarly attention.

Gupta has spent years studying Amazon’s strategy and its founder and former CEO, Jeff Bezos.

In this episode, Gupta shares how Amazon upended traditional corporate strategy by diversifying into multiple products serving many end users instead of focusing more narrowly.

And he argues that some of their simplest business strategies – like their obsession with the customer and insistence on long-term thinking – are approaches that companies, big and small, should emulate.

If you’re interested in innovation strategy, this episode is for you. It originally aired on HBR IdeaCast in November 2020. Here it is.

ALISON BEARD:  Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review.  I’m Alison Beard.

If you had to name the most successful business leader alive today, who would you say?  I can’t hear you from my basement podcasting room, but I would bet that for many of you, the answer is Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.  This is a man who over the past 25 years turned his online bookstore startup into a diversified company currently valued at $1.6 trillion.

Amazon is a digital retailing juggernaut, it’s also a web services provider, media producer, and manufacturer of personal technology devices like Kindle and Echo.  Oh, and Bezos also owns the Washington Post and Blue Origin, a space exploration company.  Forbes tells us he is the richest person in the world.

How did he accomplish so much?  How did he change the business landscape?  What mistakes has he made along the way?  A new collection of Bezos’s own writing, which full disclosure, my colleagues at Harvard Business Review Press have published, offer some insights.  Here’s a clip from one speech that’s included.  The book is called Invent and Wander.

And our guest today, who has spent years studying both Amazon and Bezos, is here to talk with me about some of the key themes in it, including the broad drivers of both the company and the CEO’s success.  Sunil Gupta is a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and cochair of its executive program, and cochair of its executive program on driving digital strategy, which is also the title of his book.  Sunil, thanks so much for being on the show.

SUNIL GUPTA:  Thank you for having me, Alison.

ALISON BEARD:  So Invent and Wander.  I get that Bezos is inventive.  You know, he created a new way for us to buy things – everything.  How is he also a wonderer?

SUNIL GUPTA:  So he’s full of experiments.  His company and his whole style is known for experimentation, and he says that in so many words that if you want big winners, then you have to be willing to have many failures.  And the argument is, one big winner will take care of a thousand failed experiments.  So I think that’s the wandering part.  But also his experiments are not aimless.  There is a certain thought and process behind what experiments to do and why they will connect to the old, old picture of what Amazon is today.

ALISON BEARD:  And your expertise is in digital strategy.  How does he break the traditional rules of strategy?

SUNIL GUPTA:  So for the longest time the way, at least I was taught in my MBA program and the way we teach to our MBA students and executives, is strategy is about focus.  But if you look at Amazon, Amazon certainly doesn’t look like it’s focusing on anything, so obviously Jeff Bezos missed that class, otherwise it’s a very, very different thing.

And then you’d say, why is it that so called lack of focus strategy seems to be working for Amazon?  And I think the fundamental underlying principle that he’s guiding his whole discussion of strategy is, he’s changed the rules of strategy.  So the old rules of strategy were, the way you gained competitive advantage is by being better or cheaper.  So if I am selling you a car, my car is better of cheaper.  But the inherent assumption in that strategy statement is, I’m selling one product to one customer.  And what Amazon is basically arguing is, the digital economy is all about connection.  We have got to connect products and connect customers.  Let me explain why that is so powerful.

So connecting products, here the idea is, I can sell you, this is a classic razor and blade strategy.  I can sell you a razor cheap in order to make money on the blade.  So I can sell you Kindle cheap in order to make money on the ebooks.  Now, at some level you might say, hey, razor and blade have been around forever.  What’s so unique today?  I think unique today is razor could be in one industry and blades could be in completely different industrys.

So for example, if you look at Amazon’s portfolio of businesses, you sort of say, not only Amazon is an e-commerce player, but also is making movies and TV shows, its own studio.  Well, why does it make sense for an e-commerce player, an online retailer to compete with Hollywood.  Well, Walmart doesn’t make movies.  Macy’s doesn’t make movies?  So why does it make sense for Amazon to make movies?

And I think once you dig into it, the answer becomes clear that the purpose of the movies is to keep and gain the Prime customers. Two day free shipping is fine, but if  you ask me to pay $99 or $119 for two day free shipping, I might start doing the math in my head, and say, OK, how many packages do I expect to get next year?  And is the Prime membership worth it or not?

But once you throw in, in addition to the two-day free shipping, you throw in some TV shows and movies that are uniquely found only on Amazon, I can’t do this math.  And why is Prime customers important to Amazon?  Because Prime customers are more loyal.  They buy three or four times more than the non-Prime customers, and they’re also less price sensitive.

And in fact, Jeff Bezos has said publicly that every time we win a Golden Globe Award for one of our shows, we sell more shoes.  So this is, and he said it in your book, Invent and Wander, also, that we might be the only company in the world which has figured out how winning Golden Globe Awards can actually translate into selling more products on the online commerce.

So this is a great example of the razor being in a very different industry and blade being in another industry.  Take another example.  Amazon has a lending business where they give loans to small and medium enterprises. If Amazon decides to compete with banks tomorrow, Amazon can decide to offer loans to the small merchants at such a low price that banks would never be able to compete.  And why would Amazon be able to do that?  Because Amazon can say, hey, I’m not going to make money on loans, as much money on loans, but I’ll make more money when these businesses, small businesses grow and do more transactions on my marketplace platform.  And I get more commissions.  So again, loan can become my razor in order to help the merchants grow and make money on the transaction and the commission that I get from that.  The moment I make somebody else’s, in this case the banks, core business my razor, they will make a very hard time competing.  So I think that’s the key change, the fundamental rules of strategy and competition in that direction.

The second part of connection is connecting customers, and this is the classic network effect.  So marketplace is a great example of network effects.  The more buyers I have, the more sellers I have.  The more sellers I have, the sellers I have, the more buyers I get, because the buyers can find all the items.  And that becomes flywheel effect, and it becomes a situation where it’s very hard for a new player to complete with Amazon.

ALISON BEARD:  In this diversification that Amazon has done, how have they managed to be good at all of those things?  Because they’re not focused.  You know, they’re not concentrated on an area of specific expertise.  So how have they succeeded when other companies might have failed because they lacked that expertise, or they were spreading themselves too thin?

SUNIL GUPTA:  So I think it depends on how you define focus.  Most of us, when we define focus, we sort of define focus by traditional industry boundaries, that I’m an online retailer, therefore going into some other business is lack of focus.  The way Amazon thinks about is focus on capabilities.

So if you look at it from that point of view, I would argue that Amazon had three fundamental core capabilities.  Number one, it’s highly customer focused, not only in its culture, but also in its capability in terms of how it can actually handle data and leverage data to get customer insight.  The second core capability of Amazon is logistics.  So it’s now a world class logistics player.  It uses really frontier technology, whether it’s key word, robotics, computer vision, in its warehouse to make it much more efficient.

And the third part of Amazon’s skill or the capability is its technology.  And a good example of that is Amazon Web Services, or AWS.  And I think if you look at these three core capabilities, customer focus and the data insight that it gets from that, the logistics capability, and the technology, everything that Amazon is doing is some way or the other connected to it.  In that sense, Amazon, and there’s no lack of focus, in my judgment on Amazon.

Now, if he starts doing, starts making cream cheese tomorrow or starts making airplane engines, then I would say, yes, it’s got a lack of focus.  But one of the other things that Jeff Bezos has said again and again is this notion of work backwards and scale forward.  And what that means is, because you’re customer obsessed, you sort of find ways to satisfy customers, and if that means developing new skills that we don’t have because we are working backwards from what the customer needs are, then we’ll build those skills.

So a good example of that is, when Amazon started building Kindle, Amazon was never in the hardware business.  It didn’t know how to build hardware.  But Bezos realized that as the industry moved, people are beginning to read more and more online, rather, or at least on their devices, rather than the physical paper copy of a book.  So as a result, he says, how do we make it easier for consumers to read it on an electronic version?  And they’re spending three years learning about this capability of hardware manufacturing.  And by the way, Kindle came out long before iPad came out.  And of course, that capability now has helped them launch Echo and many other devices.

ALISON BEARD:  Right.  So it’s the focus on the customer, plus a willingness to go outside your comfort zone, the wander part.

SUNIL GUPTA:  Exactly.

ALISON BEARD:  Yeah.  How would you describe Bezos’s leadership style?

SUNIL GUPTA:  So I think there are at least three parts to it.  One is, he said right from day one that he wants to be a long-term focus.  The second thing is being customer obsessed.  And many times he has said that he can imagine, in the meetings he wants people to imagine an empty chair.  That is basically for the customer. And he says, we are not competitor focused.  We are not product focused.  We are not technology focused.  We are customer focused.  And the third is, willingness to experiment.  And fail, and build that culture in the company that it’s OK to fail.

ALISON BEARD:  What about personally, though?  Is he a hard charger?  Is he an active listener?  What’s it like to be in a room with him?

SUNIL GUPTA:  Oh, he’s certainly a hard charger.  I mean, he’s also the kind of guy, when he hires people, he says, you can work long, hard, or smart.  But at Amazon, you can choose two out of three.  And I think this is similar to many other leaders.  If you look at Steve Jobs, he was also a very hard charging guy.  And I think some people find it exhilarating to work with these kind of leaders.  Some find it very tough.

ALISON BEARD:  Do you think that he communicates differently from other successful CEOs?

SUNIL GUPTA:  So the communication style that he has built in the company is the very famous now, there’s no PowerPoints.  So it’s a very thoughtful discussion.  You write six-page memos, which everybody, when their meeting starts, everybody sits down and actually reads the memo.

In fact, this was a very interesting experience that I had.  One of my students, who was in the executive program, works at Amazon in Germany.  And he is, he was at that point in time thinking of moving to another company and becoming a CEO of that company.  So he said, can I talk to you about this change of career path that I’m thinking about?  I said, sure.  So we set up a time, and five minutes before our call, he sends me an email with a six-page memo.  And I said, well, shouldn’t he have sent this to me before, so I could at least look at it?  He says, no, that’s the Amazon style.  We’ll sit in silence and read it together.  And so I read it together, because then you’re completely focused on it.  And then we can have a conversation.  But this discipline of writing a six-page memo, it’s a very, very unique experience, because you actually have to think through all your arguments.

ALISON BEARD:  You also mentioned the long term focus, and that really stood out for me, too, this idea that he is not at all thinking of next year.  He’s thinking five years out, and sometimes even further.  But as a public company, how has Amazon been able to stick to that?  And is it replicable at other companies?

SUNIL GUPTA:  I think it is replicable.  It requires conviction, and it requires a way to articulate the vision to Wall Street that they can rally behind.  And it’s completely replicable.  There are other examples of companies who have followed a similar strategy.  I mean, Netflix is a good example.  Netflix hadn’t made money for a long period of time.  But they sold the vision of what the future will look like, and Wall Street bought that vision.

Mastercard is exactly the same thing.  Ajay Banga is giving three year guidance to Wall Street saying, this is my three-year plan, because things can change quarter to quarter.  I’m still responsible to tell you what we are doing this quarter, but my strategy will not be guided by what happens today.  It will be guided by the three-year plan that we have.

ALISON BEARD:  There are so many companies now that go public without turning any profit, whereas Amazon now is printing money, and thus able to reinvest and have this grand vision.  So at what point was Bezos able to say, right, we’re going to do it my way?

SUNIL GUPTA:  I think he said it right from day one, except that people probably didn’t believe it.  And in fact, one of the great examples of that was, when he was convinced about AWS, the Amazon Web Services, that was back in the early 2000s, when a majority of the Wall Street was not sure what Jeff Bezos was trying to do, because they say, hey, you are an online retailer.  You have no business being in web services.  That’s the business of IBM.  And that’s a B2B business.  You’re in a B2C business.  Why are you going in there?

And Bezos said, well, we have plenty of practice of being misunderstood.  And we will continue with our passion and vision, because we see the path.  And now he’s proven it again and again why his vision is correct, and I think that could give us more faith and conviction to the Wall Street investors.

SUNIL GUPTA:  Oh, absolutely.  And he’s one of the persons who has his opinion, and you always surround yourself with people better than you.

ALISON BEARD:  How has he managed to attract that talent when it is so fiercely competitive between Google, Facebook, all of these U.S. technology leaders?

SUNIL GUPTA:  So a couple of things I would say.  First of all, it’s always good fun to join a winning team.  And all of us want to join a winning team, so this certainly is on a trajectory which is phenomenal.  It’s like a rocket ship that is taking off and has been taking off for the last 25 years.  So I think that’s certainly attractive to many people, and certainly many hard charging people who want to be on a winning team.

And a second thing is, Amazon’s culture of experimentation and innovation.  That is energizing to a lot of people.  It’s not a bureaucracy where you get bogged down by the processes.  So the two type of decisions that we talked about, he gives you enough leeway to try different things, and is willing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into things that may or may not succeed in the future.  And I think that’s very liberating to people who are willing to take on the ownership and build something.

ALISON BEARD:  But don’t all of the tech companies offer that?

SUNIL GUPTA:  They do, but if you think about many other tech companies, they’re much more narrow in focus.  So Facebook is primarily in social media.  Google is primarily in search advertising.  Yes, you have GoogleX, but that’s still a small part of what Google does.  Whereas if you ask yourself what business is Amazon in, there are much broader expansive areas that Amazon has gone into.  So I think the limits, I mean, Amazon does not have that many limits or boundaries as compared to many other businesses in Silicon Valley.

ALISON BEARD:  So let’s talk a little bit about Bezos’s acquisition strategy.  I think the most prominent is probably Whole Foods, but there are many others.  How does he think about the companies that he wants to bring in as opposed to grow organically?

SUNIL GUPTA:  So some acquisitions are areas where he thinks that he can actually benefit and accelerate the vision that he already has.  So for example, the acquisition of Kiva was to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the systems that he already put in place in his warehouse.  And logistics and warehouse is a key component or key part of Amazon’s business, and he saw that Kiva already was ahead of the curve in technology that he probably wanted to have that in his own company.  So that was obvious acquisition, because that fits in the existing business.

Whole Foods is kind of a slightly different story, in my judgment, because I some ways, you can argue, why is Amazon, an online player, buying an offline retail store, Whole Foods?  And in fact, they bought it at 27% premium.  So that doesn’t make sense for an online retailer commerce to go to offline channels.  And I think, in fact, part of the reason in my judgment is, it’s not just Whole Foods, but it’s about the food business, per se.  And why is Amazon so interested in food?  In fact, Amazon has been trying this food business, online food delivery for a long period of time without much success.  And Whole Foods was one, another way to try and get access to that particular business.  And why is that so important to Amazon, even though you could argue, food is a low margin business?

And I would say, part of the reason is, food is something, grocery is something that you buy every week, perhaps twice a week.  And if I, as Amazon, can convince you to buy grocery online from Amazon, then I’m creating a habit for you to come onto Amazon every week, perhaps twice a week.  And once you are on Amazon, you will end up buying other products on Amazon.  Whereas if you are buying electronics, you may not come to Amazon every day.

So this is a habit creation activity, and again, it may not be a very high margin activity to sell you food.  But I’ve created a habit, just like Prime.  I’ve created a loyal customer where you think of nothing else but Amazon for your daily needs, and therefore you end up buying other things.

ALISON BEARD:  And Amazon isn’t without controversy.  You know, and we should talk about that, too.  First, there are questions about its treatment of warehouse employees, particularly during COVID.  And Bezos, as you said, has always been relentlessly focused on the customer.  But is Amazon employee centric, too?

SUNIL GUPTA:  So I think there is definitely some areas of concern, and you rightly said there is a significant concern about the, during the COVID, workers were complaining about safety, the right kind of equipment.  But even before COVID, there were a lot of concerns about whether the workers are being pushed too hard.  They barely have any breaks.  And they’re constantly on the go, because speed and efficiency become that much more important to make sure customers always get what they are promised.  And in fact, more than promised.

Clearly Amazon either hasn’t done a good job, or hasn’t at least done the public relations part of it that they have done a good job.  Now, if you ask Jeff Bezos, he will claim that, no, actually, they have done things.  For example, they offer something called carrier choice, where they give 95% tuition to the employees to learn new skills, whether they’re relevant to Amazon or not.  Pretty much like what Starbucks does for its baristas, for college education and other things.  But I think more than just giving money or tuition, it requires a bit of empathy and sense that you care for your employees, and perhaps that needs, that’s something that Amazon needs to work on.

ALISON BEARD:  And another challenge is the criticism that it has decimated mom and pop shops.  Even when someone sells through Amazon, the company will then see that it’s a popular category and create it itself and start selling it itself.  There’s environmental concerns about the fact that packages are being driven from warehouses to front doors all over America.  And boxes and packaging.  So how has Bezos, how has the company dealt with all of that criticism?

SUNIL GUPTA:  They haven’t.  And I think those are absolutely valid concerns on both counts, that the small sellers who grow to become reasonably big are always under the radar, and there are certainly anecdotal evidence there, small sellers have complained that Amazon had decided to sell exactly the same item that they were so successful in selling, and becoming too big is actually not good on Amazon, because Amazon can get into your business and wipe you away.  So that’s certainly a big concern, and I think that’s something that needs to be sorted out, and Amazon needs to clarify what its position on that area is, because it benefits from these small sellers on his platform.

And your second question about environmental issues is also absolutely on the money, because not only emission issues, but there’s so many boxes that pile in, certainly in my basement, from Amazon.  You sort of say, and it’s actually ironical that Millennials who are in love with Amazon are extremely environmentally friendly.  But at the same time, they would not hesitate to order something from Amazon and pile up all these boxes.  So I think Amazon needs to figure out a way to think about both those issues.

ALISON BEARD:  And at what point will it have to?  I mean, it seems to be rolling happily along.

SUNIL GUPTA:  Well, I think those issues are becoming bigger and bigger, and it’s certainly in the eye of the regulators, also, for some of these practices.  And not only because it’s too big, and there might be monopoly concerns, but these issues will become larger, and any time you become a large company, you become the center of attraction for broader issues than just providing shareholder value.

ALISON BEARD:  Yeah.  So those are weaknesses possibly for the company.  What are some of Bezos’s personal weaknesses that you’ve seen in studying him and the company?

SUNIL GUPTA:  So I think one thing that stands out to me, and at least in the public forums, I have not seen any empathy.  And it’s, I mean, we talk about that the leaders have, should have three qualities.  They should be competent.  They should have a good character.  And they should have compassion.  So he’s certainly very competent.  I mean, he’s brilliant in many aspects, right, from the computer vision and AI and machine learning, to the nuances of data analytics, to the Hollywood production, etc.  He also seems to have good character, at least I have not heard any personal scandals, apart from his other issues in his personal life, perhaps.

Those characteristics of competence and character make people respect you.  What makes people love you is when you show compassion, and at least I haven’t seen compassion or empathy that comes out of him.  I mean, he certainly comes across as a very hard charging, driven person, which probably is good for business.  But the question of empathy is perhaps something lacking right now.

ALISON BEARD:  Yeah.  The other issue is his just enormous wealth.  He did invent this colossally valuable company, but should anyone really be that rich?

SUNIL GUPTA:  Well, I guess that’s, you can say that’s the good or the bad thing about capitalism.  But I think, and again, my personal view is there’s nothing wrong in becoming rich, if you have been successful and done it with hard work and ingenuity.  But how you use your wealth is something that perhaps will define Jeff Bezos going forward.  I think Bill Gates is a great example how he actually has used his wealth and his influence and his expertise and his brilliance into some certain thing that actually is great for humanity.

Now, whether Jeff Bezos does that down the road, I don’t know, whether his space exploration provides that sort of outlet which is both his passion as well as good for humanity, I don’t know.  But at some point in time, I think it’s the responsibility of these leaders to sort of say, my goal is not simply to make money and make my shareholders rich, but also help humanity and help society.

ALISON BEARD:  If you’re talking to someone who’s running a startup, or even a manager of a team at a traditional company, what is the key lesson that you would say, this is what you can learn from Jeff Bezos?  This is what you can put to work in your own profession?

SUNIL GUPTA:  So I would say two things that at least I would take away if I were doing a startup.  One is customer obsession.  Now, every company says that, but honestly, not every company does it, because if you go to the management meetings, if you go to the quarterly meetings, you suddenly go focus on financials and competition and product.  But there’s rarely any conversation on customers.  And I think, as I mentioned earlier, that Jeff Bezos always tells his employee to think of the imaginary chair in which a customer is sitting, because that’s the person that we need to focus on.  Howard Shultz does the same thing at Starbucks, and that’s why Starbucks is so customer focused.

So I think that’s the first part.  And the argument that Bezos gives is, customers are never satisfied.  And that pushes us to innovate and move forward, so we need to innovate even before the rest of the world even sees that, because customers are the first ones to see what is missing in the offering that you have.

And the second I would say that I would take away from Jeff Bezos is the conviction and passion with what you do.  And many times that goes against the conventional wisdom.  And the Amazon Web Services is a great example of that.  The whole world, including the Wall Street Journal and the Wall Street analysts were saying, this is none of Amazon’s business to do web services.  But he was convinced that this is the right thing to do, and he went and did that.

And part of that conviction may come from experiments.  Part of that conviction comes from connecting the dots that he could see that many other people didn’t see.  I mean, that’s why he went, left his job, and went to Seattle to do the online bookstore, because he could see the macro trends as to what the Internet is likely to do.  So, I think that’s the vision that he had.  And once you have the conviction, then you follow your passion.

ALISON BEARD: Sunil, thanks so much for coming on the show.

SUNIL GUPTA:  Thank you for having me. Alison.

HANNAH BATES: That was Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta, in conversation with Alison Beard on the HBR IdeaCast .

We’ll be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation about business strategy from Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues, and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you’re there, be sure to leave us a review.

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This episode was produced by Mary Dooe, Anne Saini, and me, Hannah Bates. Ian Fox is our editor. And special thanks to Maureen Hoch, Nicole Smith, Erica Truxler, Ramsey Khabbaz, Anne Bartholomew, and you – our listener. See you next week.

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