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The only thing I ever think of when Gates speaks about Allen is how they tried to reduce his equity when he got sick. It's something that has stuck with me for

• captain_perl 8y ago
  Me too. My understanding is the minute Allen overheard that, he walked out of the Microsoft office and never went back. Hence why whenever you heard about him, it was from his yacht. I bet Gates and Ballmer have remembered that every day for 40 years.
  • adventured 8y ago
    That's false. Paul Allen remained on Microsoft's board of directors for two decades, continued to be involved with Microsoft for four decades, as well as being a major shareholder for its entire existence.
• azhenley 8y ago
  Is there a detailed account of this somewhere? I'd like to read more about it.
  • ProAm 8y ago
    There are stories, articles and biographies about it all from over the years but here is one mention of it: "In December 1982, when Allen was sick with cancer, he overheard Gates and Ballmer discussing his lack of contributions and how to dilute his equity by offering stock options to other employees and shareholders. Allen confronted them and quit a little bit later. " [1] [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/what-paul-allen-really-thinks-of-bill-gates-2011-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/what-paul-allen-really-think...
  • randyrand 8y ago
    What I found: https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2011/03/30/bill-gates-tried-to-screw-paul-allen-whats-the-surprise/#1906767928d1 https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2011/03/30/bill-...
  • jkuria 8y ago
    There is a detailed account in Allen's book "Idea Man": https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Man-Memoir-Cofounder-Microsoft/dp/1591845378 https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Man-Memoir-Cofounder-Microsoft/d...
• wwarner 8y ago
  True, but not fair, to Gates OR to Allen. "After a few years all that passes. Bill and I have always been friends, even through the ups and downs" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/02/paul-allen-microsoft-bill-gates-ideas https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/02/paul-alle...
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • ProAm 8y ago
    I didn't say if it was fair or unfair, it's always the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Similiar to Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs and the Breakout game incident.
    • Nomentatus 8y ago
      "No remark without remarkableness" - which makes me curious: what do you think the remarkableness was, if not fairness or unfairness?
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • 2_listerine_pls 8y ago
    Just because the friendship remained, it doesn't make that particular event any better.
    • adventured 8y ago
      Had they gone through with it, it certainly would have been despicable. As it was, it was nothing more than a conversation that was hurtful to Allen. You can't indict someone for an action they didn't take, as though they did take it. It's entirely impossible to know if Gates would have gone through with that action. Allen retained his full Microsoft stake and yielded tens of billions of dollars from the Microsoft that Gates, Ballmer and others proceeded to build up in the coming 15-20 years. I suspect there are few here that haven't had insulting conversations about other people. Said negative, rude, belittling things that they later regretted. Hurled a very mean statement in the middle of a fight. Discussed leaving a spouse behind their back. So on and so forth. It's not necessary to excuse the behavior of Gates, it was a crass mistake by a 27 year old. Allen retained his ownership, forgave Gates, and that's that.
• iooi 8y ago
  In case anyone wants to read more, it was my first time hearing about this too, I found a good resource here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2011/03/30/bill-gates-tried-to-screw-paul-allen-whats-the-surprise/#69b5b2bc28d1 https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2011/03/30/bill-...
• mobileexpert 8y ago
  I don’t know the exact specifics, but the notion of co-founder vesting schedules exist today. This provides a simpler pre-agreed upon way to handle that kind of situation. If I recall correctly Micro-Soft wasn’t even a properly incorporated entity for the DOS deal making things like a founder needing to stop having an execution role for health reasons hard to deal with.
  • harryh 8y ago
    It's not clear that typical co-founder vesting schedules are really capable of handling this sort of event: a co-founder develops a major disease that limits their ability to work but does not halt it completely. In most instances like this the co-founder is likely to continue vesting as normal. Whether all parties are happy with this arrangement or not is likely to vary significantly from case to case.
    • blazespin 8y ago
      Yeah, some kind of disability vesting would make sense.
  • projectramo 8y ago
    That's an interesting way of looking at it. I wonder if you're right in looking at it that way. i.e. if one co-founder cannot work as much as the other, should there be a change in compensation?
    • saalweachter 8y ago
      I think there's room for both compassion and contingency in compensation. You can make sure that "your people" (operating from the mindset of corporate feudalism) are taken care of, that if they die prematurely from illness or accident their families are taken care of, and that if they are rendered simply unable to work they and their families are not worse off than in the worst case, without giving someone multi-digit ownership of the company. It's something to consider when you start drawing up paperwork for your own startup, grisly as that may seem. What happens when one of your founders is struck by a bus a day, a month, a year, five years into the venture? How much of their vested and unvested founder-share goes to their heirs? Does it make a difference if their heirs are their children, their spouse, their siblings, or their favorite charity? Do you want to turn their founder-share from your super-voting shares to a share class with less voting power upon transfer [is that even legal? with vested or unvested shares?]? Does it make a difference if they are killed or merely incapacitated? It's not a pleasant thing to think about, and it won't matter most of the time, but when it does...
• Isamu 8y ago
  That's why it's a mistake to oversimplify public figures into "hero" or "demon" or whatever. They are always just people. If Bill Gates is just a person and not a hero, you don't have to explain away any of his mistakes. You don't have to elevate him for his philanthropy. You don't have to make any judgments about him, unless it has any bearing on any decision or action you have to take.
  • nabla9 8y ago
    Fanboyism is like a cognitive disease. Gates has himself admitted that he was a bully, yet people feel the need to defend him. Rockefeller ruthlessly destroyed lifes but he was also committed philanthropist that started to give six percent of his earnings to charity at age 16. As he grew richer he gave more.
    • squarefoot 8y ago
      Some donations can be tax deductible, and even it they aren't they boost the donor public image as soon as it become news. I'm not saying Gates, Allen, Rockefeller or anyone else donated to charities only as a form of personal advertising, yet there's certainly a good incentive to do that which should be taken into account before making an opinion about someone.
      • nostrademons 8y ago
        Charitable contributions weren't tax-deductible when Rockefeller was 16. Hell, there was no income tax when Rockefeller was 16. He probably did it to gain favor with God (most of his charity was church-based until he got fabulously wealthy), but of all the things done in the name of God, charity is a pretty good one.
      • hueving 8y ago
        Being tax deductible doesn't somehow make it profitable or even free. It just means that on a million dollar donation, it actually cost you something like $600k in the end. You're still down that money in every scenario. Nobody is driven to donations because they are tax deductible. Deductions just allow you to donate more than you would have.
• mixmastamyk 8y ago
  Considering that he left at the end of 1982, contemplating the idea sounds fair. Believe they decided not to go through with it as well.
• jnwatson 8y ago
  What struck me is that Allen was living with cancer for the last 36 years of his life.
  • Insanity 8y ago
    Yeah that struck me as well. That must be quite horrible and lucky at the same time. (lucky in the sense that, it could have ended much sooner, but it must be quite a horrible way to live. In my opinion)
  • bluedino 8y ago
    Magic Johnson has had HIV for the last 27 years
• btian 8y ago
  Which is absolutely the right thing to do, especially if you have any external investor, or if you need external funding some day.
• ainiriand 8y ago
  That is the power of lawyers and contracts, that´s the power of the dark side.
• pradn 8y ago
  It's certainly horrible behavior, but we must allow the chance that he has changed for the better.
  • partiallypro 8y ago
    Gates and the company never went through with it, it was just a conversation...and I'm sure it would be a conversation that any company in that predicament would have had.
• deleted 8y ago
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• ryanmccullagh 8y ago
  Gates probably could have did what the Zuck did, but it doesn't look like he did it because Allen was still very rich. Anyone with a controlling interest can dilute someone anytime?
• lalos 8y ago
  Put yourself in his shoes, do you prefer to go after the stock or have him do something desperate and bring a rando with 'cofounder' power to your business? Don't know the specifics, but I know better than to judge quickly.
• NicoJuicy 8y ago
  The road to being a billionaire is surrounded with bumps. They started and ended as friends, the rest are details
• tinkerteller 8y ago
  This is well covered in many books and articles. The back story, as I understand, is that Allen was checked out from Microsoft even before he got sick. He was going through relationship and other personal issues and went through long stretch of times travelling through Europe. Gates and Ballmer felt at the time that Allen received far bigger chunk of share of their success than he had actually worked for. You have to remember that Gates and Ballmer were both putting in 14-18 hours a day and many times not even have time to shower while Allen was touristing in Southern France for months with no indications of his commitments to the company. Even while at the founding of Microsoft, Allen's contributions to BASIC interpreter was not in balance as Gates but he did received same share of company because it was his idea. There are several authors who limit Allen's major contributions to Microsoft as: (1) Pointing out potential of microchips to Gates (2) be older face to partners like IBM (3) write small chunk of code in BASIC interpreter (4) suggest packaging apps as "office suit". There are few authors who believes that Allen did wanted to stay engaged but was sidelined by Gates when he started forming leadership team. This combined with his relationship issues and then sickness pushed him out of the loop. There are lot of parallels to Zuck and Eduardo except that Allen was lucky enough to be at right place and right time to overhear the plan to dilute his stack and prevent it before it was executed.