Steve Jobs was 21 years old when he co-founded Apple Computers.
Bill Gates was 19 years old when he co-founded Microsoft, as was Mark Zuckerberg when he founded Facebook.
Bill Gates was in the 0.01% in terms of access to computing resources at the time: a Teletype 33 and time on a GE mainframe via his private school. There are 19 year olds and 19 year olds when it comes to bring set up for Big Things.
He also had access to Paul Allen, who mentored him and was a professional programmer. Same for Jobs who had access to Steve Wozniak, the engineer behind the Apple I and II.
I read about how Bill Gates made a significant contribution to the pancake sorting problem in 1979 (iirc). Apparently, his results were bleeding edge for something like 30 years until someone managed to get a result that was slightly better (~1%). A result that was accomplished with a lot of computer assistance.
I strongly doubt that Gates made any significant contributions to computer science. So I'd appreciate a source to what you've claimed here.
Gates had a 'genius' for ruthlessly exploiting a monopoly in business; apart from that there is nothing else exceptional about the man apart from being a thoroughly unlikeable and harmful person, in my view.
"In 1979, Bill Gates and Christos Papadimitriou gave a lower bound of 1.06n flips and an upper bound of
(5n+5)/3. The upper bound was improved, thirty years later, to 18n/11 by a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas, led by Founders Professor Hal Sudborough." --https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting
Cheers. I've found the full paper is accessible through Sci-Hub [1]. I've had a very quick glance over it. The paper was submitted in January 1978 (when he'd already been at Microsoft for 2 years). But this NPR transcript [2] of a chat with Gates' Harvard professor Harry Lewis describes him as coming up with the solution a few days after the professor referenced the problem in class (in either 1974 or '75). Gates' co-author Christos Papadimitriou was an assistant professor at Harvard at the time. Papadimitriou went on to a glittering academic career and he recounts his recollection of the collaboration with Gates in a 2013 ACM profile [3].
So it appears that I do have to concede Gates this one contribution towards computer science. Although the paper contains a somewhat intriguing note right at the bottom :
> Ervin Györi of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and György Turán of J. Atilla University have independently discovered a proof of Theorem 1 [the five-thirds solution]. Their algorithm and proof are essentially the same as ours.
And their paper [4] was published in 1978, preceding publication of the Gates & Papadimitriou paper in 1979.
none of the three of them knew about database systems, relational algebra, sql, or concurrent programming; zuck might have known things about network programming but he wrote fecebutt in php, he wasn't writing a tcp/ip stack or even invoking socket(), bind(), and listen()
If the purpose of a for profit company is to make a profit and keep shareholders happy. How much “better” could Microsoft and Apple be than 2 of the top 5 most valuable companies in the US?
It probably would have been in worse shape. SJ needed the time to mature.
Don’t forget that as late as 1993, Apple was worth more than MS and it was going back and forth with HP to be the number one PC seller. Things started going south around the time of Windows 95 - only two years before he came back.
We can't all define "better" exactly the same way, but I think it can be agreed there were mistakes due to immaturity that would not have ocurred otherwise.
Profit is necessary to stay in business so it's important. But it can't be the only and exclusive goal. A company is just a structure to make things happen / collectively achieve things.
The goal of every company for profit company is fact to make its investors money. Do you really think that any investor cared about anything besides making money?
Please don’t tell me that you believe in sone BS “mission statement” that companies spout? Did you also believe Google’s “Don’t be Evil” motto thru had for years?
You're pushing a harmful, cynical and ultimately nihilistic agenda here. I've seen the same line pushed many times since it became 'en vogue' in the 80s but ultimately dating back to an influential Milton Friedman paper published in the early 70s. I reject it but I frankly also find it tedious to argue against it because those pushing it usually remain ideologically (neoliberalism) wedded to it. But if you do actually want to have your thinking challenged, there are many serious essays that have been written to contest the 'maximizing shareholder value' line. One I pulled up just quickly challenges it through Peter Drucker's views on the purpose of business. Quoting that :
> Profit and profitability are absolute requirements. That is why even non-profit corporations must strive mightily for profitability. However, this does not mean that profit is the basic purpose of a business. Profitability really is an essential ingredient by itself which might be better spoken of in terms of an optimal, rather than a maximum size. In support of this thesis, Drucker noted that the primary test of any business is not the maximization of profit, but the achievement of sufficient profit to allow for the risks of the financial activity of the business, and thus to avoid catastrophic loss leading to failure. And we might add, achieve the success which would benefit both the business and society. So profit is necessary, but [not] the purpose of business.
What is “nihilistic” about it? Why do you think investors invest in a company? Why do you think founders create companies? Most tech companies don’t desire to be “lifestyle companies” where they just want to make enough of a profit to support themselves. Most are looking for an “exit” which is statistically going to be an acquisition.
For instance, out of all the companies that YC has invested in, less than a dozen have gone public.
And once you either accept outside funding, you are immediately at the mercy of the investors whose only goal is to make a profit.
And honestly what Drucker thinks is irrelevant. What’s relevant is what the owners of the companies want - either public or private companies.
What do you think the pension funds and mutual funds want when they own stock in a company? What do you want from your retirement accounts?
>The goal of every company for profit company is fact to make its investors money.
Not every for-profit company has investors.
>Do you really think that any investor cared about anything besides making money?
Some of the most successful investors already have enough money and/or lucrative investments, and truly do care more about other things, sometimes even while executing their foundational money-making investments.
Most people are not geniuses though. Of course one should benchmark against the best, but those you listed some real outliers here.
For start all 3 were from top Universities? Gates and Zuck were at Harvard, Jobs was I think at Reed and partially at Stanford. How many people graduate from there? How many graduates of top universities go straight to FAANG for those fat salaries? How many go to work at their rich parents' companies?
Steve Jobs founded his company (with the genius Wozniak) at young age. Why would the theoretical "next Jobs" want to work at OPs company? The "next Jobs" (whoever they are) probably had already funded their own company.
Also founders are outliers, since most new companies fail, you dont hear about those who tried and lost.
Bill Gates knew how to program well enough to get BASIC by the time he dropped out. There are people like this nowadays too. But they wont work as a junior in OPs company, when they can be hired as a mid or even a senior. They probably did few internships since year one university, so they can go to FAANG and earn a ton of money, or they just get hired by the place where they did the first internship.
