
How Bill Gates and Warren Buffett met - wslh
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/06/how-bill-gates-and-warren-buffett-met.html
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oh_sigh
Was Gates' mom the kind of person who would be going to dinner parties with
Buffet even if her son wasn't a billionaire at that point? I know the Gates
were kind of big, but I always assumed in a modest regional way, and not the
kind of go to dinner with the most influential people in the world kind of
way.

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Clubber
Apparently. She was on a charity board with the CEO of IBM. That's how
Microsoft got it's DOS break.

 _She was the first female president of King County 's United Way, the first
woman to chair the national United Way’s executive committee where she served
most notably with IBM's CEO, John Opel, and the first woman on the First
Interstate Bank of Washington's board of directors._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates)

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koonsolo
Yes! And somehow this part is always left out when telling the tale of MS and
Bill Gates. While in my opinion, it's one of the biggest reasons of the
success.

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wslh
No company can survive and strive so many years because of a single event like
this, not even multiple few lucky events.

I don't also think other people have had the gut and attitude to negotiate a
non exclusive agreement with IBM at that time.

~~~
koonsolo
You are absolute correct. And in no way I want to say Bill Gates didn't
deserve his success.

But it's hard to argue that this didn't have any effect on the deal that
basically made Microsoft.

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bambax
> _" It's important to associate with people that are better than yourself."_

We hear this repeated often, but how does it really work? It's impossible to
do if everyone tries to follow this advice, because if you associate with
people who are better than yourself, then they themselves being with you
associate themselves with people worse than themselves.

It only works if we consider "better" in multiple dimensions; I associate with
people who are better than me in a given dimension, while I'm better than them
in some other dimension.

But then isn't it simply trivial / obvious that everyone is better at
something and worse at something else?

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tossaway1
I think they have to be better than you in something you care about (or aspire
to be better at) for it to matter to you. Seems like you're overcomplicating
this... :-)

