Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were great rivals in the personal computer business, each very different from the other. Both were born in 1955 and both dropped out of college. Those were probably the only things they had in common. Well… they also shared a kind of love-hate admiration for each other, and both had similar ambitions for technology and the business world.
Bill Gates came from a well-off family. His father was a well-known Seattle lawyer, and his mother was a prominent figure in civic life who sat on very prestigious committees. He became obsessed with technology at one of the best private schools in the area. He was no rebel, and no hippie, unlike Steve Jobs.
(See: Bill Gates’s fascinating life and career)
Steve Jobs, on the other hand, was adopted by a lower-middle-class family who saved hard to send him to college.
According to Walter Isaacson in the official biography of Steve Jobs, each of these business geniuses thought he was smarter than the other, especially Jobs, who never came to respect Gates and always saw him as far beneath him.
Bill Gates was an excellent programmer, while Jobs could not code. Although Gates looked down on him for that, he admired the way Jobs captivated people despite his constant rudeness. He also admired his vision for knowing which products consumers would love.
See also: Eight simple keys to business success, from an Olympic athlete turned entrepreneur
Steve Jobs was all passion, romanticism and intuition, with an instinct for making technology easy to use and for pleasing designs. He pursued perfection, and that made him far too demanding with everyone around him.
(See: Steve Jobs gave money away anonymously for 20 years)
Bill Gates, by contrast, had a more practical and disciplined mind, with a greater capacity for analysis. He did not have Jobs’s love and passion for products, which let him focus squarely on the business and make rational decisions, not emotional ones like Jobs.
For Jobs, Apple was like a child and its products were his grandchildren. For Gates, Microsoft was a very profitable business, a machine for making money and creating jobs.
As we can see, both achieved success, and they had completely different mindsets and traits:
Heart + emotions = Jobs = success.
Methodical + analytical = Gates = success.
Their first business ideas reflect their personalities.
Each of them made a different first foray into creating things and doing business, but even their initial ideas and first ways of making money are recognisably those of their creators.
1. Steve Jobs’s first business idea.
As Jobs told Isaacson, the first dollars he made from a venture came, basically, from an idea for ripping off the phone company.
His friend Wozniak had built a device that played the tones phone companies used to connect calls, so, as a prank, they could call anywhere they liked for free.
Steve Jobs saw it as a gold mine and thought they could sell it and make some money together, as a first company, albeit an illegal one. Jobs was already showing his obsession with design: to make the invention more attractive to potential buyers, he thought it should look more eye-catching, so he decided to house the circuit boards in blue boxes.
Jobs showed his powers of persuasion and selling by managing to sell about a hundred of those boxes at around $150 each, in the money of the time.
That was the start of the synergy that would eventually become Apple. Wozniak built, and Steve Jobs sold. Jobs envisioned the future, and Wozniak built it. It was more complex than that, but that was basically it.
2. Bill Gates’s first business idea.
Bill Gates, a methodical and practical businessman, came up with a different kind of invention. He first showed his creativity by writing a program that arranged class schedules so that he would end up in the same classes as the girls he liked.
His first money-making invention, though, was a vehicle-counting program for local traffic engineers.
Clearly, Gates would use his programming skills to create useful software and make a living from it.
Conclusion:
There is no single path or set of traits that leads to success; you can get there by many routes. But there is something most successful entrepreneurs have in common: they are always creating, always thinking, inventing and doing, looking for business ideas around them and seizing the opportunities that come up. In other words, you always have to keep moving.
Further reading
Featured image: Maksym Kozlenko, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
