Microsoft founder Bill Gates turns 60 today and most of the coverage has focused on his ground-breaking work as a philanthropist, promoting public health and other important causes throughout the world. But the soft, cuddly Bill Gates of today hardly would be recognizable to veterans of the tech industry who either worked for—or competed against—Gates during his prime company-building years in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Back then, Gates was famously the office bully. He dressed down employees in public, hurled sarcasm at rivals, and would reportedly troll around Microsoft's parking lots on weekends to see which employees were working overtime. He was even pretty mean to his one-time business partner, Paul Allen. In his memoir, the Seattle Seahawks owner writes that Gates seemed to thrive on conflict, always pressed for advantage, and even schemed to dilute Allen's stake in the company when Allen was ill with Hodgkin's disease. "I'd assumed that our partnership would be a 50-50 proposition. But Bill had another idea," Allen writes. "I'd been taught that a deal was a deal and your word was your bond. Bill was more flexible."
Another anecdote comes from entrepreneur and blogger Joel Spolsky, the founder of StackExchange and Fog Creek Software. Spolsky was a program manager assigned to the Excel product line at Microsoft in the 1990s. On his blog Joel on Software, Spolsky recalls the first time he had a face-to-face product spec review with Gates, in 1992. The room was filled with Gates, Spolsky, various managers, and "a person who came along from my team whose whole job during the meeting was to keep an accurate count of how many times Bill said the F word."
"The lower the f***-count, the better," Spolsky writes.
As the meeting progressed, Gates peppered Spolsky with increasingly more pointed and difficult questions about Excel and how it worked, culminating in an abstruse query about the date and time. At the end of the meeting, the F counter reported that Gates had only sworn 4 times, an all-time low.
Later, Spolsky learned: "'Bill doesn't really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you've got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don't know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared.'" As it happened Spolsky had been able to answer Gates' random question, so no yelling ensued.
Spolsky's story about Gates is of-a-kind with Aaron Sorkin's Steve Jobs, which opened this weekend, as well as T.J. Miller's character Erlich on HBO's Silicon Valley. Guys like Jobs and Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and Travis Kalanick have to be dicks at work, or so the thinking goes, in order to achieve what they want. But Gates' life story also suggest something else, which is that at some point even the biggest jerk thinks about his life's work and whether or not he wants to be remembered as the rich guy who dominated everyone around him, or for something more. Here's hoping you're not the guy at the office who gets off on being feared. But if you are, maybe take a page out of Bill Gates' book and think about channeling your intense, macho instincts into doing good instead of winning every argument.