

Do You Really Know Bill Gates? The Myth of Entrepreneur as Risk-Taker - idiotb
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/09/13/bill-gates-risk-taker/

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noahc
This is something a lot of people don't always see. For example, I spent 20
hours building a website and doing all the SEO, link generation,etc and then
just let it sit. It had a bunch of fake products and now 2 or 3 months later
people are now trying to place orders.

Now I can start devoting time to it and build out the infrastructure to
support the website and business. I didn't jump and quit my job to see if it
will work.

At the end of the day, when the money runs out you have to get a real job. The
goal should be to take small-risk big-reward plays and lots of them until
something catches.

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nerfhammer
Just curious: how did you decide what products to (pretend to) offer?

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burgerbrain
_"The thought of Gates and Allen as the godfathers of a hacking subculture
that has cost Microsoft and the world overall hundreds of billions of dollars
does indeed boggle the mind."_

Lulwat? Talk about somebody not knowing their history.

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roel_v
In what sense? What he mean was 'G&A did the same computer vandalism that has
cost the world $bb since then'. Which, even if a bit dramatic and un-nuanced,
is not really wrong.

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burgerbrain
_"the godfathers of a hacking subculture"_

The "hacking subculture" had it's roots way before Gates and Allen, and in
completely different social circles. The effect of the comment is to mis-
attributed something that was much bigger than them.

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brudgers
The Gates story reads like it was mostly cribbed from the Wikipedia entry and
dates from[2009]. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_gates#Early_life>

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boh
Malcolm Gladwell wrote a similar article in the New Yorker:

<http://www.gladwell.com/2010/2010_01_18_a_surething.html>

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staunch
Ambition is the overriding characteristic that Gates has in such abundance and
most people lack. Gates was lucky to have had so much support but probably
would have taken more risk if he had been forced to.

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boh
The amount of risks that Bill Gates would have (supposedly) been wiling to
take (due to his superhuman ambition) doesn't make a difference. The support
he had allowed his risks to actually come to some end and would have helped
him survive failure should it have come to that. There is nothing in the
history of Bill Gates that suggests that Microsoft was successful due to it's
competitors' lack of ambition.

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rbanffy
I believe the PC-DOS deal (without which Microsoft would be a footnote) stems
from Microsoft's role in the BASIC interpreter built into the PC's ROM rather
than an indirect intervention from Mary Gates. The BASIC deal, however, is
somewhat attributed to her.

