Three famous origin stories: a Harvard dropout in Albuquerque, a Wall Street executive driving west to Seattle, a sophomore coding in a Harvard dorm. Each one starts earlier, and with more people, than the legend.
Behind the Success Stories
“He dropped out of Harvard.” “He started in a garage.” “He built it in his dorm room.” These stories are true, and they leave things out.
This chapter follows three founders through the documents that rarely make the headline: their families, their schools, where the first money came from, and who opened which door.
Every line drawn below is a sourced link. Lines marked “according to” are one source’s interpretation, not established fact. A connection is not evidence of wrongdoing.
The Gates family
Bill Gates is the son of William H. Gates Sr., a Seattle lawyer who co-founded a leading law firm, and Mary Maxwell Gates, a banker’s daughter, university regent and corporate director. He learned to program at Lakeside School, where the Mothers Club paid for a computer terminal, met Paul Allen there, and left Harvard in 1975.
For my part, I’m just happy that the Crimson has called me “Harvard’s most successful dropout.”
1980
The board seat
Mary Gates sat on the United Way’s national board with IBM’s president, John Opel. When Microsoft came up at IBM in 1980, the Seattle Times reported, Opel answered: “Oh, that’s run by Bill Gates, Mary Gates’ son.” According to the Seattle Times, she helped cement the connection. IBM’s and Microsoft’s own histories do not mention her.
Mrs. Gates also figured in her son's success. She helped cement Microsoft's early connection with IBM, which led to development of the IBM PC with DOS, an operating system supplied by Microsoft.
Nov 1980
The deal
Microsoft signed IBM’s contract in November 1980 without an operating system. It licensed 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products for $25,000, bought it outright for $50,000, shipped it with the IBM PC in August 1981, and kept the right to sell it to every clone maker as MS-DOS.
Microsoft originally licensed 86-DOS in December 1980 for a flat fee of $25,000. By the next summer they recognized the importance of owning it and being able to license it to other companies making IBM-PC clones, so they purchased all rights for an additional $50,000.
The Bezos family
Jeff Bezos’s mother, Jackie, was the daughter of Lawrence Preston Gise, who ran the Atomic Energy Commission’s operations for seven states from Albuquerque. She married Mike Bezos when Jeff was four. Jeff spent his childhood summers on his grandfather’s Texas ranch.
Miguel A. Bezos and Jacklyn Gise Bezos are the parents of Jeffrey P. Bezos.
1995
The first money
After Princeton, Bezos rose to senior vice president at the Wall Street firm D. E. Shaw. Amazon’s prospectus records what came next: in 1995 his parents bought shares worth about $245,573, much of their savings; in June 1996 Kleiner Perkins invested about $8 million and its partner John Doerr joined the board.
In February 1995, the Company sold 582,528 shares of Common Stock to Miguel A. Bezos at a price per share of $0.1717.
Feb 2004
The dorm room
Zuckerberg came to Harvard from Phillips Exeter Academy and launched Thefacebook in February 2004. By summer the company had moved to California. In 2017 he told Harvard’s graduates: “if I didn’t know I’d be fine if Facebook didn’t work out, I wouldn’t be standing here today.”
I’m an unlikely speaker, not just because I dropped out, but because we’re technically in the same generation.
2005
Who backed him
The first outside investor was Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder alongside Elon Musk: $500,000 for 10.2% in 2004, then a board seat until 2022. In May 2005 Accel invested $12.7 million at the urging of Jim Breyer, who joined the board. In 2007 Microsoft paid $240 million for a stake.
His $500,000 investment in 2004 represented 10.2 percent of the company at the time.
A documented path, and its limits
Thiel co-founded Palantir in 2003; In-Q-Tel, the venture firm the CIA set up and funds, was an early backer. In-Q-Tel also invested in Keyhole, which Google bought and turned into Google Earth. These links are on the record. No source here connects the CIA to Facebook, and a connection is not evidence of wrongdoing.
In February 2003, the CIA-funded venture-capital firm In-Q-Tel made a strategic investment in Keyhole, Inc., a pioneer of interactive 3-D earth visualization and creator of the groundbreaking rich-mapping EarthViewer 3D system.
The threads cross
Kleiner Perkins and John Doerr sat early at both Amazon and Google; Microsoft bought into Facebook; Thiel links PayPal, Facebook and Palantir. Open the explorer and ask how any two of these people are connected; every step shows its source.