Raising Bill Gates

What are the secrets to rearing a future business icon? An exclusive excerpt from "Showing Up for Life."

EMAIL  |   PRINT  |   SHARE  |   RSS
 
google my aol my msn my yahoo! netvibes
Paste this link into your favorite RSS desktop reader
See all CNNMoney.com RSS FEEDS (close)
By William H. Gates

bill_gates_sr.03.jpg
The Gateses are avid readers.
gates_book.03.jpg

(Fortune Magazine) -- In the early days of Microsoft's success, when my son's name was starting to become known to the world at large, everybody from reporters at Fortune to the checkout person at the local grocery store would ask me, "How do you raise a kid like that? What's the secret?" At those moments I was generally thinking to myself, "Oh, it's a secret all right ... because I don't get it either!"

My son, Bill Gates III, has always been known in our family as Trey. While still in school, Trey, Paul Allen, and another friend developed their first entrepreneurial venture: a company that created and marketed a piece of equipment they had developed called the Traf-O-Data. It was designed to collect and make sense of the information generated by those little car-counting devices you've probably seen hundreds of times - a thin hose stretched across a road and connected to a black box. The Traf-O-Data took the raw data from all those little black boxes and created a graph that gave you an hour-by-hour picture of each day's traffic flow.

After many successful kitchen-table practice sessions, my son persuaded some employees of the city of Seattle to come to the house for a demonstration. Well, things that day at the Gates home didn't go according to plan. The Traf-O-Data did not perform.

How did Trey react when the first live demonstration of his system failed? He went running into the kitchen, shouting on the way, "Mom! Mom! Come and tell them that it worked!"

It's probably no surprise that he made no sale that day. The Traf-O-Data did finally achieve some success, although it didn't foreshadow anything like a Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500). Perhaps the lesson here is that every success involves a few false starts.

Trey had dropped out of college in 1975 as a Harvard sophomore. The impetus came from a phone call he made from his dormitory room to a company in Albuquerque that had begun making the world's first personal computer. Paul Allen, who was living nearby in Boston at the time working for Honeywell, had seen an article on the new computer in Popular Electronics and rushed over to show it to Trey. They had been expecting that personal computing would arrive and that when it did, software would be a critical ingredient.

So when Trey called the company making the computer, he offered to sell it software. The company immediately expressed interest, opening the door to Trey and Paul's marvelous adventure with Microsoft.

Of course, Trey's mother and I were sick when he told us he planned to leave college to take advantage of a window of opportunity he believed would be long gone by the time he graduated from Harvard. However, he promised us that he would go back to Harvard later to get his degree.

"Later" finally arrived on June 7, 2007, the day Harvard awarded Trey an honorary doctor of laws degree. I traveled to Cambridge with him and Melinda to watch him collect his honors and deliver Harvard's commencement address.

After the appropriate acknowledgments, Trey told the audience, "I've been waiting more than 30 years to say this." Then he looked out into the audience, directly at me, and said, "Dad, I always told you I'd come back and get my degree."

Perhaps there's a lesson in this for the parents of other curious children who, from the start, require the freedom to meet life on their own terms: It is that there is no statute of limitations on the dreams you have for your children. And there is no way to predict how much delight you might feel when those dreams are realized in a far different way than you could have imagined.

Adapted from Showing Up For Life: Thoughts on the Gifts of a Lifetime Copyright © 2009 by William H. Gates and Mary Ann Macklin. Published by Broadway Business, a division of Random House, Inc. To top of page

Company Price Change % Change
Ford Motor Co 8.29 0.05 0.61%
Advanced Micro Devic... 54.59 0.70 1.30%
Cisco Systems Inc 47.49 -2.44 -4.89%
General Electric Co 13.00 -0.16 -1.22%
Kraft Heinz Co 27.84 -2.20 -7.32%
Data as of 2:44pm ET
Index Last Change % Change
Dow 32,627.97 -234.33 -0.71%
Nasdaq 13,215.24 99.07 0.76%
S&P 500 3,913.10 -2.36 -0.06%
Treasuries 1.73 0.00 0.12%
Data as of 6:29am ET
More Galleries
10 of the most luxurious airline amenity kits When it comes to in-flight pampering, the amenity kits offered by these 10 airlines are the ultimate in luxury More
7 startups that want to improve your mental health From a text therapy platform to apps that push you reminders to breathe, these self-care startups offer help on a daily basis or in times of need. More
5 radical technologies that will change how you get to work From Uber's flying cars to the Hyperloop, these are some of the neatest transportation concepts in the works today. More
Sponsors
Worry about the hackers you don't know 
Crime syndicates and government organizations pose a much greater cyber threat than renegade hacker groups like Anonymous. Play
GE CEO: Bringing jobs back to the U.S. 
Jeff Immelt says the U.S. is a cost competitive market for advanced manufacturing and that GE is bringing jobs back from Mexico. Play
Hamster wheel and wedgie-powered transit 
Red Bull Creation challenges hackers and engineers to invent new modes of transportation. Play

Most stock quote data provided by BATS. Market indices are shown in real time, except for the DJIA, which is delayed by two minutes. All times are ET. Disclaimer. Morningstar: © 2018 Morningstar, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Factset: FactSet Research Systems Inc. 2018. All rights reserved. Chicago Mercantile Association: Certain market data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. Dow Jones: The Dow Jones branded indices are proprietary to and are calculated, distributed and marketed by DJI Opco, a subsidiary of S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and have been licensed for use to S&P Opco, LLC and CNN. Standard & Poor's and S&P are registered trademarks of Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC and Dow Jones is a registered trademark of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC. All content of the Dow Jones branded indices © S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC 2018 and/or its affiliates.