Well I've been at a lot of events in this room but that is the warmest
welcome I think Frank Doyle has ever had.
Thank you all for being here. This is not too subtle I am very pleased to welcome
my college classmate Bill Gates and I just want to say a word or two about
Bill. The first I ever heard about Bill was when we were freshmen and a friend
of mine, another classmate told me keep an eye keep an eye out for Bill Gates.
He's going to do some really amazing things and this classmate was pretty
impressive himself somebody who I expected great things of and I dare say
that none of us could have predicted the great things that Bill would do. When I
was an undergraduate, when Bill and I were undergraduates you have to
understand that the world especially when it came to computation look very
different. To the best of my knowledge and Bill may correct me about this the
only computer on Harvard campus was in the Science Center. Now I was a research
assistant as an undergrad and I would work at a building that was on Cambridge
Street where CJIS North is today and I would cross the street to go to the Harvard
computer center where CGA CJIs South is today where I would run jobs there
wasn't absolutely a computer there the computer was at MIT so we were just
connected to the mainframe at MIT and in those days the greatest anxiety that
anybody could have in a job like mine was to drop the box of punch cards,
because if you did that you would lose maybe a week's worth of work. Bill had a
vision and I understand it went back even then that computing would be
ubiquitous it would be part of all of our lives and
indeed as you all know he executed on that vision and the world today has
changed so dramatically in large part due to the work that Bill has done
throughout the years so indeed he has changed the world he has done amazing
things in technology. Arguably he has done even more if you want to
call it that his second career as a philanthropist. Bill has an incisive
analytic mind. He demands rigor, he relies on data, and he looks at outcomes. If any
of us reflect for a little bit about the good things that we try to do the
altruistic acts that we engage in we have to admit that from time to time we
wonder whether we're doing it more to make ourselves feel good about doing the
right thing or whether we're actually helping the people we want to help. Bill
has removed all doubt about helping other people because the measures and the
effects of his philanthropy has simply have simply been profound.
Today the New England Journal of Medicine published an article, I kid you
not the name of the study is Mordor, a study about the use of some
very simple antibiotics given twice a year to preschool children in three
countries in Africa and on average it reduced childhood mortality by 13% and
what's even more encouraging the effects were larger in Niger which had the
greatest childhood mortality rates this is a cheap easy to implement
intervention and this work was sponsored by the Gates Foundation. There is example
after example of the work that Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation have supported over the year that have transformed health and maybe
not as much as Bill would like as we just heard from him,
education as well. Few people in history have had as profound an impact on
mortality and on human well-being as Bill has and I dare say that none of us
will know the full impact during our lives the work that he has done will pay
off for many many years. So to close let me just say my friend whose name as
Bill probably knows, is Steve Ballmer, he's not always right but he's often
right, and in this case he was right but he probably had no idea how right he would
be when he said "Bill will do amazing things", so Bill-thank you for the amazing
things you do, thank you for the inspiration, and we all look forward to
your dialogue with Frank, please welcome again Bill Gates.
Well it's terrific to welcome you back here to Harvard I'm hoping you can
explain this piece of paper that's projected up on the screen here break
the ice. Well I took a course called 2010 that was at my expense taught on
microeconomics and that's part of my final. My whole thing was that I didn't
want to attend to any of the course I was signed up for and I had all these
other courses that I attended. I remember when I went into that final
everybody was in my study group was kind of mad at me because, "Hey you never
showed up, what you know now all of a sudden here you are." But it was an
amazing course, the people of majored in economics were at a disadvantage because
knowing math was very helpful in that fact course. But it was fantastic. The
people in the back, I don't know if you can read it, but the instructors comment in the
lower corner there says 'arithmetic error no sweat'. Well Bill we just had a really
fun hour and a half, two hours with the robotics folks in the engineering
school here, touring various labs, and I'm wondering if you would share with this
community, your impressions of what you saw happening in robotics and the
implications of that technology for humans. The impact good, bad, and otherwise.
Well robotics is a very broad field at a very early stage and there's some
exciting and promising things that come out of it. Normally when we think
that we think of a human-sized sort of a lot of metal type contraption that's
doing things humans would do like cleaning up a room or being an infantry
soldier are some sort of manufacturing job. The work here is taking robotics in
in many dimensions, into different realms. So I saw the robot bee which is a tiny
little pea-sized robot that can fly around, it doesn't quite go anywhere yet
but it's a I'm sure they'll get that figured out. I also saw a lot of what
they called 'soft robotics' where instead of having metal parts you have
actually fabric and either through hydraulics or pneumatics you're
manipulating this, you know, I wore a glove that the air pressure
pneumatically would provide gripping and so it's both thinking of enhancing
humans who have normal functionality and taking people who have had a stroke or
ALS, and and allowing them to do normal functions
despite that disability. So robotics is very cool because it's a lot of
sciences there, yes there's some good software that's in it, but actually,
looking at evolution how do insects fly, you know understanding Reynolds numbers,
and turbulence and how you modeled, that which at small scale
it's amazing.Nobody really understands how insects fhy slowly but surely we're
figuring it out so I saw a variety of robots that are really amazing and of
course nowadays people share their latest ideas so the collaboration
between the various teams was amazing to see. You know, as I was
preparing for this, I went back and I found one of your former professors,
who's still on the faculty. Harry Lewis, in computer science, to try to get some
insight into your character. Back in the day when the picture we saw earlier was
a reflection and one of the things Harry recalled was you had this voracious
appetite for reading, you have this immense capacity for learning, a sense of
curiosity that as we've watched over your career that doesn't seem to have narrowed any.
Especially as we think about in Alan's introduction the the array of
topics that your foundation touches on that you have expertise in the knowledge
in from public health to education reform to renewable energy. How is it
that where many of us who get to a certain level in our career dive deep,
and narrow, and specialized, you've managed to not narrow and keep your
curiosity very very broad. Yes, certainly during the time I was Harvard I wasn't
sure what I was going to do. The idea that
where it was this field that was the opportunity was unbelievable that became
more obvious during the three-year period I was here. But my dad had been a
lawyer, I thought of mathematics you know like
doing him all on the Putnam that was the coolest thing and the computer software
I didn't think those people were smart just the math people. So it's like, well
am I gonna go into the easy field, or this really hard field, but anyway math
was fantastic, when I finally picked and decided to go do Microsoft. Then I got
into a period from age 19 to about 40 where I wasn't able to look at the
latest on you know how tornadoes work or how mitochondria at work I was pretty
monomaniacal and when I was able to ask Steve, this is the year 2000, Steve Ballmer,
he he mistakenly graduated, [laughter]he started at Stanford, I was trying to hire him
but his parents told him you're supposed to graduate; which was fine,
but then he started at Stanford Business School and he was in his first year and
I thought, 'oh this is perfect I'll get him to drop out of Stanford Business
School!', so in a certain sense he is a dropout and he was very key to the
success of Microsoft. I mean he knew a lot of things but during that period I
didn't get to do much at Harvard you know I took all these courses because it
was just so amazing that people were interested in talking about my and I I
have to say I never went to a lecture during reading period or any anything
because the courses that I was actually signed up for I finally started to work
on those so I was in Hallel the minute would open to the minute it would close
during reading period trying to catch up on on that other set of courses. So
people say I'm a dropout which is literally true but because I like
college courses the online college courses there's a company called the
learning company that I buy tons and tons of their stuff and I do in at least
four or five courses a year. In a sense I like going to college more than anyone
so I'm sort of made sure my job certainly post Microsoft, that I get to
spend my time meeting with scientists, learning new things, you know, seeing what
the hard problems are, in some cases giving money to people to take on those
very very hard problems. So knowing you have such a passion for education reform
and you touched on MOOCs what's your vision of how MOOCs will or will not
transform education there's been a lot of prophecies about the doom of
universities as we know it and that mercifully has not come to pass; but what
are your thoughts about where MOOCs are going to fit in, whether at the k-12
level,or at the the higher level? Well education is essentially a social
construct, it's not that the universities have secret knowledge that only they
have available. You know I took these numbers, this won't make any sense anymore, but
the hardest freshman math class was called math 55, I assume it's not called
that anymore, but it was it was a group of
of 80 people whose personal positioning was, they were the best person at math
that they had ever met, so there were 79 frauds. One person who really was the the
best at math. The guy who came in first in the class is a lawyer in New
York now, the guy who came in second is a professor of chaos theory at Princeton, and
then I came in third. So I knew, 'okay Math- jeez that's interesting', anyway I didn't
take physics 55 but I read the Fineman book and so if you're motivated,
seriously, you don't have to take a course the Fineman book if you're
hardcore, just read the Fineman and book and work through the problems, if you want to learn
to do software, read the Art of Computer Programming - good luck doing the problems. But you know anyone that's rated 30 or harder is like super hard to do and so
a MOOC in a sense doesn't change what counts you know it's always been in the
textbook but the percentage of students who just buy textbooks and and read them
and know the subject is vanishingly small you kind of have to have this
thing where a bunch of kids all come at the same time and you know if you don't
study you're gonna get a bad grade and your parents may not like that you have
to create all these social things in order for people to get into this mode
of hyper concentrating and actually understanding why should I concentrate
you know, if I'm a high school student they put X's and Y's up on the board, 'how
does that relate to my life now?', if you understood that being good at math lets
you get a good job, travel the world, you might say 'okay it does relate to me' but
that's a very indirect thing and the kind of discipline to care about that,
to concentrate, that's what's missing, and so MOOCs - to the degree that it's easier
to take a MOOC than it is to read a textbook - yeah that's nice, it's a little
bit interactive there's a video, that's part of the what I like about the Learning
Company, like all their economics, there's a guy named Timothy Taylor who has five
courses on economics, I super recommend and you learn to like him and his way of
explaining things. So a MOOC is a slightly more digestible form of
learning but it doesn't take particularly for somebody at a young age
it in no way changes this question of - why should people engage in that
learning and how do you create the environment and the sense of achievement
and the sense of capability that sitting in there and you know looking at X's and
Y's manipulating them seems like a smart thing to do. Terrific insights. Well Bill
let me ask you to kind of reflect back to when you were the age of the folks in
the room here, 20 or so, with the experience that you've accumulated since
that time. We've got a bunch of incredibly smart ambitious, creative
folks in the room here who are going to be the future doers and makers and
influencers. What advice would you, in part based upon your recollection when
you were sitting in this seat at that age? Well I think it's if
anything a more interesting time to be lucky enough to be a student at Harvard. The
ability to take innovation and solve problems including the class of problems
I'll call 'inequity problems', how do you, you know, how low-income students do as
well as high income students, how do you go to Africa and help the health and
education taken the incredible population growth that will be there and make that
a positive asset for that continent. These are very tough problems and you
know they've eluded being solved. So obviously the easy problems are not the
ones you'll you'll get to work on so whether it's you know, health costs, or
climate change, or you know robots that do good things and not bad things or
the policies around those things; this is a fascinating time to be alive you know.
I don't know what it'll be like 50 or 60 years from now or what the problems will be but
in your generation you know cancer, infectious disease so many things will
be solved and the societal framework of how you avoid polarization and how you
maintain trust, those things will also need some brilliant breakthroughs.
Terrific, good, I hope you're all inspired. I could sit here and ask him questions
all day but we've got some really inquisitive folks out here in the
audience so I know Shirley has some questions. Let me remind you of some of
the Harvard ground rules here, so first of all introduce yourself, say what
school or what concentration you're coming from
second keep your question brief, third make it a question, it's something that
ends with a question mark as opposed to a statement. Okay we've got some mic
runners we're going to go around and I'm going to start with this person right
here we could get a mic halfway up right at the aisle there yeah.
Thank you very much Mr. Gates so I'm a 3L and Harvard Law School and my name
is David and I'm from China. I also went to a University of
Washington for my graduate studies I got my PhD there so my question is uh so
University of Washington is a great public school and you also you and Mr. Paul
Allen helped us grow so much but to be honest in the U.S. the public
schools have a hard time competing with private schools especially for
undergraduate studies so I wonder how you see this problem and is there going to
be any change in the future? Thank you very much.
Yeah our Foundation has two things that we work on one which is global in
nature; improving health and we now complement that with agriculture and a
few other things, and then here in the US about 20% of what we do is U.S. education.
So we did a thing called the Millennium Scholarship which was 20,000 diverse
kids who got scholarships but a lot of what we do is try to be the R&D funding.
You can look at industry by industry you know pharmaceutical, software and say
'okay how much do they work on their next breakthrough?' if your thought 'okay
what are the returns to society?' you'd probably want education to have the
highest R&D percentage, in fact, it effectively has a zero percent R&D, you
know public schools don't do R&D, Department of Education essentially
doesn't, there's a little bit of money. So we thought 'okay that's a market failure
a systems failure' we can go in and, there's a professor here Tom Kane, who we
supported a lot he came to us early on and said, "Hey there are some teachers are
super good and if you could just move people, the average teacher, to be at the
boundary of the top quartile, then US education would be as good as Singapore.
Which is- Singapore, Korea, and Shanghai are the three best in the world, and so
that was very intriguing. So we went around and did 20,000 hours of video of
the really good teachers, and then we did 20,000 hours of the
other teachers and compared and learned a lot about how good teachers interact.
They were way more interactive with their class than the others and we
thought 'ok we'll put this online, people will watch this they'll all learn how to
teach like those people.' Well so far we haven't managed to move the the needle
on that in a big way. But you know we're working hard. There
are very good schools, you know maintenance schools that sort
of cheat by picking their student body, there are charter schools that even in
the inner city some of them like Kipp do extremely well
by creating a culture and the cost of those schools is not as high as the
nearby public school which can often have 50 percent type dropout rates so at
the micro level it feels like we understand some tactics. Some of the
tactics involve the use of computers and software but that may be less
profound than you might think at the early grades because it's all about this
motivational stuff and just computerizing it a little bit in math
you can get to somebody's level and therefore they're feeling more positive
feedback so that that is working but that's not the whole equation. So in
education we're spending 800 million a year and our goal which was to move the
average quality of the US education up into that top 3 we have had no noticeable
impact after almost 20 years of working in that space but we we're committed
we're going to keep keep doing it. Frustratingly inertial system.
There was a hand up here earlier, the young lady and the black sweater.
Hi I'm Danica Gutierrez, I am a sophomore at the college studying
economics and I'm a Gates Millennium scholar and I just
I just wanted to personally thank you for supporting my education and the
ambitions of other students like me and my question for you is, "what is something
that you regret doing or maybe not doing while you were here at Harvard? Thank you.
Well, I wish I'd been more sociable. [Laughter]
I think they got rid of them, but there were these things called Men's Clubs and I was so anti social I would
have even known they existed but Steve Ballmer decided I needed to have some
exposure to I guess drinking so he got me punched for the Fox Club so I'd go to
those events and that that was highly educational but that I think they shut
them down or something cuz they couldn't cure...that's' sensitive... so anyway I'm no
I'm not trying...it's fine, there's lots of places to drink. So you know I wish I'd
mixed around a bit more you know. I just, it was a fun time though because you
know you had people around you could talk 24 hours a day and you know the
classes were so so interesting and they fed you. I lived up a career because she
could get hamburger and for every meal you could have a hamburger for breakfast or
lunch or dinner and the the male-female ratio was one-to-one which that was an
unusual thing at the time. It didn't help me but [laughter]
it was a visual improvement for me so yeah I wish I'd gotten to know more people. I
was just so into being good at the classes and taking lots of classes, it
you know it worked out in the end but I missed a lot of well. I never went
to a football game or a basketball game or whatever other sports teams Harvard
might happen to have just a few right? So maybe from this side of the room this
time right over here. Hi my name is Angelina Yee I'm from Sycamore Illinois
and I'm a sophomore at the College so as someone as famous and has like, has done
so much in society, outside of your family, I was wondering what something
what is something that you're most proud of and you feel like is your biggest
accomplishment? Well in work you know the saw the Microsoft work I'm very
proud of, the magic of software, and how software's empowering people. You know
the Foundation,the fact that we took a field of helping, you know, the poor
countries, the developing countries, really improve their health systems in a
dramatic way I'd say the statistic that I'd be most proud of is that when we got
started there are 11 million children a year under the age of 5 would die every
year and now that number has been cut more than in half so it's little over 5
million. Now and that's because we've gotten new vaccines and drugs out in you
know India, Africa, all of these developing countries and so you know
having it be in half, that's pretty amazing and we did not expect to
do that. I thought improving the U.S. education
system would be way easier than that. We're on a path by 2030 to cut it in
half again so it'll go to less than two and a half million
which will mean that only at that point only about two percent of children will
died before the age of five, that's pretty incredible because for a variety
factors it's hard even for a rich country to get much full of 1% so it
means the risk of death in a poor country is only about a factor of 2
higher. There are a few places left in the world where 15% of the kids die
that's sort of central Africa including northern Nigeria historically before
medicine came along that number was about 35% no matter what your wealth was
but then as countries got richer you've got this huge gap particularly because
you had diseases like malaria that nobody once the rich world solved their
malaria problem then there was zero dollars going into it there was no
market incentive if it's only very poor people who have a disease.
So I hope that, so I feel good about where we are. I hope that we get polio
done we're very close that would be a big day to have polio be fully
eradicated. [Applause]
And you know then that would give the world the energy and hopefully the
commitment to go get malaria which would be about a 20-year quest and requires a
lot of breakthroughs you know. I I'm also trying to be a good
parent which is harder to measure and like twice as good a parent as I was ten
years ago or anything like that but I put a lot of effort in into that.
Fantastic, alright how about in the middle of the back there yeah exactly.
Hi my name is Shanti Scott Norman I am an arts and education student at the
Graduate School of Education I'm a middle school art teacher and I commend
you for the work that you do in public education and I'm curious to know about
your thoughts on teacher pay especially these days. I don't
think education public education is going to get much better if teachers
don't get paid more. Yeah absolutely the
you know education in the U.S., the way K through 12 is funded is very different
than the way higher education is funded. So let me just talk about the biggest
part which is the K through 12. We definitely want more resources to go
into that sector but at the state level the trends unfortunately are not
favorable because the amount of money that's raised at the state level as a
percentage of GDP is is quite flat often slightly down because they tax
goods and not services and often are fairly regressive as you look at the demands on
that resource pool: the pension costs which have been approximately mis-
accounted, and the medical costs, the prison system, current
employees, retired employees, Medicaid, those are all going up very
dramatically and so unless a state is willing to increase its tax level what
happens is; first they start cutting all the maintenance of everything then they
start cutting the higher ed piece and so you've seen state university tuition
triple over the the last decade and then K through 12. is a priority but so many
states have cut so much that they're actually in some cases cutting it and
you've seen recently to some teacher strikes that came out of the fact that
they had quote 'reformed the tax system' had not have enough money to pay for K
through 12 and so I'm hopeful that the percentage of GDP we put into the K
through 12 system can go up but it won't go up by a factor of two you know even
if we raise taxes in an appropriate progressive way because of those other
liabilities if we were really smart we put another 20 or 30 percent in, most of
which would go to increase salaries so that it's attractive to be in that
profession. It is a profession that has an unusual salary structure that the
younger teachers are relatively paid less than they should - anyway - and you
know so - this is all decided state by state and there's a factor of three
variation. Massachusetts actually spends a lot of money on K through 12 I
wouldn't suggest it needs to spend more but there's only about eight states that
you can say that for the rest of them are at about ten thousand per student
per year and it's it's it's not enough. As these systems get squeezed right now
what they're doing is they're taking out a lot of elective activities which have
extremely high returns relative to the amount of money put into them but you
know all the music, after school athletics, those things get squeezed so
the system actually is when you see a funding cut say you see a negative 4%
cut your image should be that that system is working twenty percent worse
because they're not actually very rational
about how they do things, but you know it's going to be a political fight.
You know being pro tax, you know not many people, you know I've been
fighting for the estate tax to be bigger and higher you know a higher percentage
and it's a lonely thing to be a pro tax person especially much my peers.
The gentleman in the salmon colored shirt. Hi my name is
Peter Jankowski, freshmen here at the college studying applied math and I am from California, San Fransisco.
I just wanted to ask you if you think there's a lack of scientific
literacy in U.S. politics right now and if so how do you go about tackling that
challenge. Well definitely there are several topics
like climate change or reducing medical costs or using the latest techniques to
make food productivity and nutrition better, so-called GMO techniques, the
understanding of that is very limited. But it's not just the politicians, if you
take an issue like GMOs and you ask the general public or you ask about, you know
evolution, so the electorate, the problem is when you get issues climate change
maybe the best example, where the science and understanding is fairly
important because the sacrifices have to be made now in order to get the benefits
later. You know if the effect of climate change your neighbor
you were seeing it today you would it would be politically different. HIV is like
that, where you get infected and you go almost eight years before you start to
get sick. So motivating people to behave so they protect themselves particularly
in a very poor country where your time horizon, that you think about trade-offs,
is much shorter than we would typically have, so yes we you
know in the same way that, the women's movement is doing a great
job of identifying candidates and they have more candidates we're gonna run for
office in this midterm election cycle than ever before you know there's other
attributes like being good at managing things and understanding science and we
don't need you know half the politicians but enough and you know if they can
specialize in push in those areas.It's the anti science that's a problem.
It's not there was a book that was written called Physics for Future
Presidents and it's great. You know explains why fear of radiation is kind
of insane and why getting rid of gasoline because it's so energy dence and
might be a lot harder than we might think.
We we need to push back right now, we're sort of in a dip in
terms of that science being an argument for good policies. So can I pick it up on
that for a minute and just say even with what was happening in Washington three
weeks ago four weeks ago with Mark Zuckerberg the question of data privacy
and technology the kind of questions they're near and dear to your heart
again seem to be something that is sorely lacking in understanding and
experience in the Congress, how do we close that gap? I realize I'm not going
to train a bunch of computer scientists to be elected officers but how can we
bridge the divide between the current state of knowledge and what they really
should know to do effective regulation? Well the they there are some very
cutting-edge issues that even if I think if we took this audience and say 'okay
what do we think the solutions these problems are the ideas would be, you know
hundred times better than asking the Congress, but the boundary is even so
though the boundary between hate speech and free speech is super complicated the
idea that people like to listen to things that that are agreeable to them
even if they're not true that reinforce their biases and that society is
becoming more polarized in terms of what we read where we live and the digital
tools are sort of the ultimate accelerator of this polarization.
What do you do do you force people to see things they disagree
Should Facebook sign up to the 'hey you know 25% of articles will
piss you off' pledge ? Yyou know so that we're reading
the same headlines and that we can see that some of the facts are are not facts
I think those are super tough things. It was kind of nice for Mark that at least
a few of the questions were malformed enough they did get a little bit of a
break. Refreshing way of looking at it but if we swing back here maybe down
near the front with the HLS jacket we get a mic right over down front in the
middle here.
Hi my name's Lawrence David I'm from Harvard Law School LLM student from
Canada. So you've mentioned a few issues that are currently plaguing American
society whether its scientific illiteracy, education things of that
nature. I know your foundation focuses a lot on improving educational outcomes,
what do you regard as the most significant challenge facing the United
States today and moving forwards in the coming decades? Well you had to pick one
I'd say the quality the education system I mean there's a country that has
essentially a credo of equal opportunity more than anything else and the only way
you really execute equal opportunity is by having a great education system. There
are a few other issues like, staying out of wars would be a good thing, and making
sure that some negative events like a pandemic, either naturally caused or from
bioterrorism that were prepared for those things, which are fairly low
probability things. Tomorrow I give the thing called the
Shattuck lecture which is about how we should get organized for pandemics and
it it won't take you know 0.2% of society's resources to be more ready for
those things. So overall I'm quite optimistic and my general framework is a
very optimistic framework you know the there's a book by Hans Rolsing that just
came out that I super recommend it's called FAQ from us very easy to read
that kind of creates a framework okay of what problems have we solved and why
when asked questions about the state of the world do people pick the wrong
answers? Not at a random level but a way worse than random level and actually,
university professors were the worst group they polled you know, so they'd say
like what's happened to poverty in the last 25 years? It's you know gone up
stayed the same been cut in half, four percent of university professors picked
the right answer. Which is kind of weird because you'd
think they would have this notion of okay this country did it well.
I've seen what Vietnam did I've seen what China did their whole framework
would be in the frame of how time has improved things so you know we have the
innovation on our side the US has one problem that it won't be as unique a
country in the future despite percent two people in terms of
political power and scientific discovery won't be as much at the center as the
other ninety five percent which is a good thing by most ways of looking at it.
Getting us used to the fact that we're in a multilateral world
particularly given current attitudes is is an adjustment problem but education
is if I out of wand if I don't want for the world I fix malnutrition and want
for the u.s. I fix education. How about the gentleman sitting right there.
Hello I'm Michael Chang I'm a junior at the college studying physics and
electrical engineering and I admire you because you did what you love, you
seized the right opportunities and you gave back to society when you succeeded.
So my question for you is besides dropping out of Harvard what was; what
were some of the best things that you did looking back and what at the time
made you think of doing these things? Well I've been you know so lucky in
terms of my progression you know I had parents who read a lot and came and
shared even at the dinner table like my dad was working on lawsuits and my mom
was working on various social service type things and so I had an exposure to
that and they gave me an arbitrary budget to buy books so I got to just
just read a lot. They sent me to a super nice school for high school then they
sent me into a super nice school for college and you know they basically paid
for it so it the idea that computers were going to be a change agent you know
I was lucky enough to meet Paul Allen and early on we brainstormed about this
chip and the chip changed the rules I mean most things don't get a
million times better not you know engine efficiency or you know most things have
theoretical minimums. Computation is something that we're not even close to
the theoretical minimum and yet we've improved so much; so seeing that that was
going to come and weirdly that most people didn't see that was going to come
so, you know, even people at IBM were still thinking in terms of big computers
you know now all the the software and service turbine companies are worth even
more than IBM. When I was growing up IBM was the monolith and it was always 'okay
are we going to beat them are we gonna join him those bastards?'
Actually there were very nice people but we always thought of them and they, they
sort of stood for these big computers that only big companies and governments
could get the benefit for so actually we played off of that,
power to the people personal computing type thing of course now we're a big
company and somebody can play off of us. You know it's hard to say what the
benches are I mean being able to concentrate on something in an extreme
way you know is that nature is it nurture? Maintaining curiosity a lot of
people lose curiosity in their 20s or 30s so if you hand them a big thick book
they're like "what am I gonna read that?'. I used to tell everybody to read Steven
Pinker but i think it which is if if you want to it's the it's even as an
intellectual framework even better than Rosling but I'm afraid a lot of people
don't make time to read what's a fairly academic and super profound, both Better
Angels of our Nature and Enlightenment. Now and then you know I was born at a
time where I can go out and learn all these things and then I have friends you
know if I'm trying to understand quantum computing a lot of times I get confused
so it helps to have friends who can come and say try to straighten you out and it
makes your willingness to try to learn something even trying to understand poor
Nadeau's which are this funny 3d thing you know having somebody could show me
where the visualization was and okay what are the unique conditions I don't
think I would have done that if I didn't have a group of people that had stayed
in electric curious and that we had the internet to kind of feed us access to
the the latest thing so I think you know the time I was born in a meeting Paul
seeing the microprocessor. The idea that a young person could start a company
here is a super nice thing because although people at first are skeptical
as soon as they realized their normal model of what I knew and what I could do
that I didn't fit that normal model then they assumed I knew way more than I did
and I could solve all sorts of problems I had no clue you know how to solve but
you know it was nice that people were kind of a gog that we had built this
company and done these things from a young age. So I think the culture of
America that you know almost the American Dream type success story worked
out and then you know not being in Silicon Valley but not being far from
Silicon that ended up I think working for the
company in a great way but way. In the back there and gentlemen yeah right
there you still have your hand up yep you.
[Inaudible] Yeah if you want to have impact usually delegation is important although you
know individual contributors in terms of inventing a drug or a new approach to
things that's phenomenal so when Microsoft first got started I
wrote most of code and everybody else's code I read and kind of rewrote [laughter] and that
got us up to ten people and then I had to say to myself okay we were gonna ship
code that I didn't edit and that was hard for me but I you know I kinda got
over that then I still said okay I'm gonna interview everyone and I'm at
least look at samples of their code well that got us up to about forty people and
that was at a point where I had sold way more software than we could write
because everybody was so impressed and I thought well I need to keep enough
collect enough money to you know keep hiring all these people but the demand
was so high that you know we were actually falling behind. That's when I
hired Steve and Steve figured out a how to control what promises I made to
people and B how to hire lots of people and good really good people and create
organizations and teams. So I delegated to Steve that and he was constantly
saying to me okay we're gonna hire programmers that you've never met and
I'd say 'no we're not' and then he would show me numerically that the constraint
wasn't gonna work you know so then I said okay then I
would you know know all the man interests of the people and so over time
and of course you know I could say the quality per person was falling
monotonically [laughter]
according to me but you know large problems if you want to know right the
most popular office productivity software that one person absolutely
can't do that you can write pretty code so everyone has to decide what scale of
organization they want to work in eventually you know my role was very
much as a leader and a reviewer of managers but the top people and I hired
some super experienced people I would make sure they were pursuing a common
vision and they were well coordinated but in terms of a lot of management
stuff they were way better than I was and I had to have the framework to know
what mix of skills that we needed and you know when they were working well
enough together but a lot of you know my value added was picking say to do
graphics user interface or to do an integrated office type thing or to go
global and not use agents to have Microsoft be present all over the world
and so yeah picking what you're good at and how you find the other people to
fill in those things that's super important and most founders don't aren't
able to scale that up and kind of give up the hands-on things that they used to
get a lot of pleasure and comfort from. Careful balance - by the way if people are
interested in seeing a piece of code there's a piece of bills code from 1975
that adorns the wall at Maxwell Dworkin so...That is a great piece of code! [laughter] How
about over here in the the red sweater about half way up yeah. Hi I'm Venteen
I'm a PhD student in chemistry and I really admire your work your effort, in
training, improving the education overall so I wonder what is your general
parenting philosophy say if your daughter wants to drop out of college as
well?
Mmm thank you for example if your daughter wanted to drop out of college?
well she my eldest graduates from Stanford in June so I'm I'm optimistic.
she won't follow in my footsteps they there's a group of writings that all
come under the heading Love and Logic which is my philosophy of parenting and
it's basically a view that no matter what you say your kid will look at how
you deal with the world and they'll end up dealing with it like you do and so if
you're calm and predictable you set rules you enforce those rules in a
non-emotional very straightforward way then their whole sense of the world the
world is not chaotic the world can be predictable they and if they you know
behave in certain fashions it'll work out that way I was not raised that way.
So I decided okay this is how I'm gonna do it so far so good I have to say I've
delegated 80% of not delegated but my wife does 80 percent of and she is way
better parent than I am she's not a perfect love and logic person so every
once in a while a certain emotional will come into her tone that she just looks
at me and you know she knows I'm like hey can you get rid of the emotion but
you can't totally do it but that there's some brilliant books and online courses
about this I think partnering was the word you were
looking for. Yeah absolutely! How about right here? Young lady
so can we get a mic over
[Inaudable]
Well when I was in high school I thought "hey I'm a good student and therefore I
should go be like a professor mathematics' and those are the hardest
problems to solve and you know I like hard problems and you know there's a
certain purity to it and then the computer came along and it was actually
my original partner Paul Allen who said to me 'oh you think you're so smart can
you figure out this computer' and I was like 'well yes I can' and you know it was
very actually then together he and I went on this journey that even when I
was here at Harvard he got a job when was out here and we were brainstorming
and then decided that because we saw in Harvard Square this first computer of
the microprocessor it was time to drop out and go really build Microsoft to be
the first in that business so you know that idea of a being an academic to
being a CEO manager, leader type that sort of developed over time. Even the
idea that Microsoft would be a big company I never would admit that to
myself because I was always so into cost control that I always thought okay we'll
double in size but that's it and I didn't want to get ahead of myself
that I couldn't pay people someday because we had a lot of customers that
would go out of business and not pay us so that you know I didn't want to be-
well Digital Equipment and Wang were two companies I grew up, you know
thinking those were Godlike companies and Wayne went bankrupt fairly early on
even though they had great innovation and later Dec essentially goes bankrupt
and that that was the coolest company ever and boom it's gone so at least it
does create a model that hey things are risky you better not miss a turn in the
road. Then you know as Microsoft was becoming super successful the idea of
okay what am I going to do with this money you know I could spend a little
bit on myself you know and I could give some to kids
and you know make sure they got a good education whatever but it's a percentage
even the max and under those two outlets you know became tiny and so then it was
ok what do philanthropist do and studying Rockefeller and all sorts of
people who done all that stuff I thought oh well this is interesting
are there research topics that aren't getting enough money and that's where I
started to learn about global health and realized that like malaria
nobody was putting any money into malaria. The US Army historically had put
money in because troops were exposed to malaria but then they got these drugs
prophylactic drugs like math laQuan Laurium larium ah and so they didn't
need to put him for money into it and so our first 30 million we became the
biggest funder in a disease that kills a million children a year at that at that
time we're down to 400,000 now so it was a progression you know meeting working
with Paul Allen and high school working with Steve Ballmer at Microsoft then
meeting and marrying Melinda each of those you know were very very important
in getting my mind you know shaping whatever abilities I have toward
something worthwhile. Terrific well I know the hour is almost up we've got
time for one more question how about the gentlemen here in the white shirt yeah.
Hi thank you Bill for coming I really appreciate your letter to the... annual
letter..I literally forgot the name okay well anyway my name is Jerry I'm a
freshman at the college studying stem cell biology and my question to you is,
if you suddenly found yourself to be say a sophomore in college at Harvard what
do you think you would study and how do you think you spend your time engaging
activities? Well the thing that you're likely to be world-class at is whatever
you obsessed over from say age 12 to 18 you know in my case it was writing
software. Where I would think I was good and then I would meet somebody who would
tell me I wasn't and I would look at their code
and I went through four sort of comeuppance --is of oh that's what a
really good programmer looks like and part of the reason I worship Digital
Equipment was eventually it was a couple of their very best programmers who came
and shared with me how they thought about how they did thing and I had
studied their code and and that and there there were several people who are
so key am i doing that so today I would go into you know software which today
that means going into artificial intelligence you know computers still
can't read they they cannot take a book of information and say pass an AP test
on that book and that's a solvable problem but it's a knowledge
representation problem and you know I've always want me to solve that problem I'm
jealous that maybe one of you gets to work on that I'm you know unlikely to go
back and be hands-on in that in that way but it's the juiciest problem ever I've
thought about it for a long time so I I would go into AI. Well Bill it has
been a privilege to have you here for the hour please join me in thanking Bill
- come back and visit anytime. [Applause]
Thank You good luck good luck on your finals you have to send it to me
alright thank you.
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