

Inside The Deal That Made Bill Gates $350,000,000 [1986] - Rexxar
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/13/inside-the-deal-that-made-bill-gates-350000000/

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breck
This is one of the most interesting articles I've read in a while.

A few observations:

\- The similarities between GOOG's IPO strategy and MSFT's IPO strategy
surprised me. MSFT did it on their own terms over a decade before GOOG was
even founded. I wonder if the GOOG guys referred to how MSFT did it to draft
their own strategy. Also, it seems that MSFT and GOOG, (and also FBOOK) all
treat going public as a very low priority and not a goal in and of itself but
really just something that needs to be done. Almost as a nuisance.

\- I admire the fact that Bill Gates granted this type of access to Fortune
during the IPO process. I found it quite interesting and instructive. We're so
used to CEOs blogging and tweeting about the startup process nowadays but BG
was doing it back in the 80's.

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chopsueyar
So, with private stocks, who decides on the symbol?

~~~
breck
Uninformed hn users decide, of course.

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obtino
Posted a while back here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2319236>

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Rexxar
I thought that news.ycombinator.com detects duplicates. It's the same URL,
character to character.

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kgermino
Only if it's in memory, that one was posted two months ago so the server
wouldn't have been able to detect it. However I'm not sure why obtino linked
to it as there's no comments on that story.

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chopsueyar
Maybe to prove it was previously posted?

~~~
kgermino
Well yes, but I don't see how that's relevant in the discussion. The topic
hadn't come up and since there was no fission on the other submission mention
it doesnt add anything to the potential conversation, not to my mind anyway,
perhaps I'm missing a use case.

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SeanDav
I wonder if he regrets selling those $1.6 million of shares then, considering
that they probably at least 100 times more valuable now?

~~~
hubb
you seriously think bill gates has any concern about his personal fortune at
all now?

~~~
chopsueyar
Enough so to go from robber baron to philanthropist.

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mrpixel
"Bill Gates the software prodigy". Ha-ha. A PR-fuckup that unfortunately found
its way into the minds of journalists who should know better.

In the 80's many books have been written that point out nicely that Microsoft
is just a bunch of criminals. They didn't do anything to make our lifes
better.

