Speculation

A post I wrote earlier today has me thinking about how little the public REALLY knows about the founders of a company and who did what. I think YC is in some sense really Jessica Livingston's company but Paul Graham was initially the face of the company. 

That's not to say he wasn't important. He had business acumen and it took two employees to replace a portion of what he did when he retired.

He likely remained extremely important to the success of the company even after he officially retired. He continued to do Office Hours and most likely Jessica Livingston -- his wife and the other primary co-founder -- likely continued to discuss important business decisions with him.

But that doesn't mean all companies operate that way.

Bill Gates has said that Paul Allen came to him and said "This is happening without us. WE are missing this."

Paul Allen had proposed them starting a company previously and that didn't happen. Then this little scene happened and Microsoft was born.

So in other words Paul Allen talked Bill Gates into it. Why? And what does that say about a company where Bill Gates has long been the face of the company?

Bill Gates inherited money. He funded the company with his money.

So perhaps Microsoft was really Paul Allen's brainchild and he needed financing. He asked a wealthy acquaintance to provide the capital for Allen's dream and got turned down.

Perhaps he tried to get financing elsewhere and couldn't pull it off or didn't like the terms. So he went back to Bill Gates with another offer. He somehow sweetened the pot in a way that got Gates to finally agree.

Perhaps the first offer was "You invest and if I succeed you get stinking rich." And Gates didn't care. He was already stinking rich.

More money didn't motivate him. He wanted something else.

Perhaps he wanted to be a co-founder, not an investor. He wanted a larger role in the company, a way to occupy himself, an identity to claim other than "rich brat of rich parents who inherited wealth."

So Paul Allen gave lip service to the idea that they were partners and Gates was important to and involved with the business. He wasn't just a source of capital. 

And then Allen let Gates be the face of the company to keep Gates out of his hair and occupied with mostly pointless activity that had relatively little impact on Allen's day-to-day running of the company while pretending to take Gates' ideas seriously and then routinely blowing him off with "Well, that didn't work..."

But now Gates is obscenely wealthy and is known as a co-founder of Microsoft, so he can toss out some shit idea, have people line up to pitch him on how they would implement it, someone else does the hiring and accountants pay for it all.

And he's a major stockholder in Microsoft and Allen is dead. Allen never told anyone that Gates was merely a figurehead who was there to finance the operation but shouldn't be listened to because he has no good ideas.

Allen isn't around anymore to politely run interference while continuing to give lip service to the fiction that Gates is seriously involved in the operation of Microsoft, so now Gates can make a phone call and actually get his shit ideas implemented. 

Wow, wouldn't that go a long ways towards explaining why Microsoft has gone to hell in recent years.