Monday, July 1, 2019

Book review: "Idea Man" by Paul Allen

Paul Allen lived the dream.

As a college student in the 1970s, Allen teamed up with his former high school colleague Bill Gates to  create the first microcomputer operating system and found a company they originally called "Micro-Soft."

For eight intense years, Allen worked with Gates to build the business into a technology powerhouse that would soon rank as one of the largest companies in the world. And then he stepped away and essentially,retired at age 29. His shares in Microsoft would make him a multi-billionaire, and for the rest of his life -- he died at 65 in 2018 -- Allen had the special privilege to spend money on almost anything he wanted.

This is the story told in Allen's 2011 autobiography, "Idea Man," a book that is mostly fascinating, but sometimes dull.

"Idea Man" is almost two separate books. The first half, dedicated to Allen's early life, and the birth and growth of Microsoft, is the part most worth reading.

I like reading "origin" stories that show the steps that led to big things. For Allen, one of the biggest breaks he got was his parents' decision to stretch their budget and put him in the private Lakeside School in Seattle. This was the late 1960s and early '70s and the school had a computer club that introduced Allen to the primitive programming languages of the day.

Allen insists that he wasn't a nerd -- he was interested in the rock music of Jimi Hendrix, for example -- but as he describes his interest in computers, robotics, brain science and space exploration, you might conclude otherwise.

It was in Lakeside's computer club that Allen met Gates, two years his junior, and found that they shared a almost insatiable interest in programming. Through an arrangement between the school and a local business they got crucial time to spend crafting their skills on a mainframe computer, the only option in those pre-PC days.

The release of the Altair, the first personal computer (though incredibly crude by today's standards), sparked Allen and Gates to build their first operating system and soon Microsoft was off and running.

I was particularly intrigued by Allen's depictions of his relationship with Gates. While both were talented programmers, Allen was more fascinated with the technical aspects while Gates pushed to make money off their skills. Gates often could be a bully with an explosive temper, Allen writes.

Tensions between them built over the years. At one point, Gates told Allen that he because he had worked hard on one particular project he wanted to alter their 50-50 split to 60-40 in his favor. Allen agreed. Later, Gates pushed to make it 64-36. But when Allen completed a hard project and asked for a shift in his direction, Gates refused to budge.

"In that moment, something died for me," Allen wrote. "I'd thought that our partnership was based on fairness, but now I saw that Bill's self-interest overrode all other concerns."

In 1982, while Allen was being treated for Hodgkin's lymphoma, he said he caught Gates and company president Steve Ballmer conspiring to reduce his ownership of Microsoft. Soon after, Allen resigned.

The second half of the book is devoted to Allen's post-Microsoft life and it would be easy to become jealous here. Many of us, watching the latest lottery super-jackpot, have pondered what we would do if we were a zillionaire. Allen actually got to live that, investing his time and energy in a wide range of endeavors from technology to sports to brain science.

"Some people are motivated by a need for recognition, some by money, and some by a broad social goal," he wrote. "I start from a different place, from the love of ideas and the urge to put them into motion and see where they might lead."

This section of the book is less interesting than the first, in part because it's hard to match the intensity of the Microsoft creation story but also because Allen is less directly involved in the projects he describes. For example, he goes into much detail about SpaceShipOne, an effort he funded to send a plane-like vehicle into space. But he is mostly an observer, so the story is less engaging.

He also goes on too long with a dry story about a poor investment in Charter Cable.

Still, there are surprises here. He delights in his ownership of the Portland Trailblazers professional basketball team, even getting involved in the selection of particular players (he is more hands-off with his ownership of the football Seattle Seahawks).

Then there's his yacht. Despite his wealth, he said he long had no interest in acquiring a yacht, which he associated with "a society of snobs." But eventually he was persuaded to first rent, then buy, a large vessel to explore parts of the planet and indulge in his passion for scuba diving.

Later he ended up with a custom-built 414-foot yacht -- the fourth largest at that time in the world. The yacht even had an eight-person submarine that launched from an internal lagoon on the boat. Maybe you'd do the same if you were a zillionaire.







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