STORY ONE
How to become as rich as Bill Gates?

Lesson 1.
Choose your grandparents carefully

"There are three ways to make money. You can inherit it. You can marry it. You can steal it."
— conventional wisdom in Italy

William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III.

Lesson 2.
Choose your parents carefully

A young man asked an old rich man how he made his money. The old guy fingered his worsted wool vest and said, "Well, son, it was 1932. The depth of the Great Depression. I was down to my last nickel. I invested that nickel in an apple. I spent the entire day polishing the apple and, at the end of the day, I sold the apple for ten cents. The next morning, I invested those ten cents in two apples. I spent the entire day polishing them and sold them at 5 pm for 20 cents. I continued this system for a month, by the end of which I'd accumulated a fortune of $1.37. Then my wife's father died and left us two million dollars."

Lesson 3.
Acquire research results by hiring and buying

Conventional (loser) economic wisdom holds that monopolies should spend heavily on research because they are in a position to capture the fruits of the research. But if you want to become as rich as Bill Gates, you have to remember that it is cheaper to wait for a small company to come up with something good and then buy them.When Microsoft products were threatened by network computers and Web-based applications, they simply bought their competitors. So the same approach can be applied everywhere, in every business.

Lesson 4.
Let other people do the programming

If you're a great engineer, it can be frustrating to rely on other people to translate your ideas into reality. However, you're not going to get rich being "just a coder, just an engineer, just a builder." Someone else has to do hard work for you.

Lesson 5.
Train your new CEO

If you're an intelligent curious person it can be painful to run a company of more than 50 people. You spend more time than you'd like repeating yourself, sitting in boring meetings, skimming over long legal documents in which you know there are errors but aren't sure how serious, etc. The temptation is to hand over the reins to the first "professional manager" who comes along. And that's what the standard venture capitalist formula dictates. But Bill Gates didn't do that. He hired Steve Ballmer in 1980 and gave him the CEO job 20 years later.

Note that this is a principle that Old Economy companies have long understood. Jack Welch joined GE in 1961 and became CEO 20 years later. Sometimes an Old Economy company may pull in a few outsiders to senior positions but, because they have such stable bureaucracies underneath, they can more easily afford this than startups.

See Charles Ferguson's book, High Stakes, No Prisoners for a longer explanation of how hired-gun CEOs manage to kill many companies.

Lesson 6.
Focus on profit

It's as simple as that!

Lesson 8.
Self-esteem is NOT your job no. 1

Gentility, politesse, decorum, and high self-esteem are wonderful. You can achieve all of these things within your organization. And then watch it be destroyed by competitors where frank and, if necessary, harsh criticism is encouraged.