‘Incredible’ Friendship With Warren Buffett Was Completely Unexpected: Bill Gates
Bill Gates says he was not very interested in meeting Warren Buffett at first.
Business magnates Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s long-standing friendship has always remained in the public eye but the Microsoft founder said that the beginning of the friendship was unexpected.
Gates was speaking with renowned private equity investor and founder of the the Carlyle Group, David Rubenstein, on Bloomberg’s The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations.
Gates spoke at length about how he was not very interested in meeting Buffett for the first time when the two were invited to a dinner by Gates’ mother. Gates said he thought of Buffett as "somebody who just bought and sold securities” which according to him was a “zero sum thing”. But that impression turned on its head pretty quickly.
..it was quite shocking when I met him, he was the first person to ask me about software and software pricing and why IBM, with all its strength, was not able to overwhelm Microsoft and what would happen, in terms of how software changed the world. He let me ask him about why he invested in certain industries, and why some banks are more profitable than others. He was clearly a broad systems thinker, and it started a conversation that was fun and enriching - an incredible friendship that was completely unexpected.Bill Gates, Co-Founder, Microsoft
The Early Microsoft Years
The Microsoft co-founder said he had to fight for acceptance from investors who found “geekiness” untrustworthy at first but it was Microsoft’s deep belief in software that eventually fascinated people.
Reminiscing about the days when Microsoft was going public in 1986, Gates said, “That whole period was amazing. I was hiring people as fast as I could. I brought in Steve Ballmer. We had a sense of urgency that we wanted to lead the way...The idea that I could hire so quickly and build this worldwide company was fascinating to me.”