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Introduction to Entrepreneur: Bill Gates of Microsoft

Introduction to Entrepreneur: Bill Gates of Microsoft

Introduction

Entrepreneurs do not become successfully suddenly, rather the process of becoming a successful business man or developing one of the biggest business venture around the world involves many factors. Such factors also include risk taking, motivation, and rewards to continue and never look back. Among many successful entrepreneurs, Bill Gates is the youngest to become billionaire through his efforts, innovations, and risk taking behavior. A man of action, Bill Gates is known to be a risk taker, and now occupies the position of unparalleled richest person in the world.

Discussion

Risks

At age 14, he and his future business partner Paul Allen created Traf-O-Data, making traffic counters based on Intel's 8008 processor. Business slowed after people discovered how old Gates and Allen really were. Together Bill Gates and Paul Allen took some risks at very young age in the process of founding Microsoft. One huge risk Gates took was to be dropped out of Harvard. In 1973 Gates entered Harvard University as a fresh man where he resided near Steve Ballmer, the current chairman of Microsoft (Gates, 1998, pp. 21-35). However, he suddenly abandoned Harvard to give his complete energy to Microsoft which he established with his friend Paul Allen in 1975. Guided by the motivation to make personal computer a useful tool they began developing software.

Although, taking admission in Harvard was not difficult for him as je belonged to a wealthy and prestigious family, his drop out could ruin his professional life in coming years. He could have stayed in there to learn more but he was more interested in practical knowledge (Bolton and Thompson, 2004, pp. 114-156). Owing to his passion, he took the risk to drop out and pursue his dream of founding Microsoft.

He also took risk of beginning a business on a vision of making personal computer a useful tool for every household and every working place. However, he often says that by dropping out of Harvard, he did nit take any risk but took “leaves of absence” so he could get back if the venture fails (Gates, 1998, pp. 21-35). This shows that rather being called a risk take, it will be more accurate to call Bill Gates as one of the world's intelligent risk mitigator.

Motivation

Gates came into the business of Microsoft and computer software programming through school and his childhood friend Paul Allen. The two founded Microsoft after Gates dropped out of Harvard University on a vision from Gates that computers would be a useful tool in every office and home around the world (Lesinski, 2009, pp. 22-49). Thus, Microsoft Corporation was born and Bill Gates was now an Entrepreneur.

The young company moved to Bellevue and was able to compete in the rapidly growing computer market. Her customers included companies such as Commodore, Tandy or Apple. Microsoft also offered application software for the operating system, such as the word processing program, as well as additional programs for the Apple ...