At a recent event hosted by the founders of Village Global, one of its most important investors, Bill Gates, talked about the difficult decisions required almost daily to build a thriving business.
The founding counselor of Eventbrite Julia Hartz asked Bill Gates for his thoughts on the balance between work and personal life. The question came when Gates said, "I do not really believe in the holidays."
His answer, briefly:
No, not in the early years of the company and especially not if that company builds platforms software. As Gates told Hartz, "there's a lot of sacrifice to be made during those early years, especially if you're trying to do some technical stuff."
In fact, Gates still blames himself for allowing Google to develop Android, a "standard non-Apple phone form form platform," as he describes it.
"It was natural for Microsoft to win."
You can find your whole conversation below, but here is Gates' complete answer translated from English:
The truth is that I did not believe in the weekends. I did not believe in the holidays….
…once I entered my 30s, I couldn't imagine liking the weekends. And, you know, my girlfriend liked the vacation. And this ended up becoming a habit. Now I take a lot of vacations. My old self would definitely be disgusted by my current self.
But yes, it's nice if during these first years, you have a team of workaholics for your company….
Or yes, I have a pretty tough view that very big sacrifices should be made during the early years, especially if you are trying to do some technical things that need to be implemented immediately.
You know, in the software world, and especially on platforms, winners take all the markets. So you know that my biggest mistake ever is the mismanagement that made Microsoft not what Android is today, [meaning that Android is a standard non-Apple phone form platform. That's what Microsoft had to do.
It really does matter here that the winner gets it all. …there was space for one operating system that didn't belong to Apple, and what was that worth? 400 billionmillions dollars that could be transferred from company G [Google] to company M [Microsoft].
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