Inside The Deal That Made Bill Gates $350,000,000 [1986] | Hacker News Reader

Inside The Deal That Made Bill Gates $350,000,000 [1986]

features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com

48 pointsRexxar14 comments

This is one of the most interesting articles I've read in a while.

A few observations:

- The similarities between GOOG's IPO strategy and MSFT's IPO strategy surprised me. MSFT did it on their own terms over a decade before GOOG was even founded. I wonder if the GOOG guys referred to how MSFT did it to draft their own strategy. Also, it seems that MSFT and GOOG, (and also FBOOK) all treat going public as a very low priority and not a goal in and of itself but really just something that needs to be done. Almost as a nuisance.

- I admire the fact that Bill Gates granted this type of access to Fortune during the IPO process. I found it quite interesting and instructive. We're so used to CEOs blogging and tweeting about the startup process nowadays but BG was doing it back in the 80's.

So, with private stocks, who decides on the symbol?

Uninformed hn users decide, of course.

the parallels between Google and Microsoft go further in that prior to their own IPO, the Google founders granted an interview to Playboy that was not supposed to be published until after the IPO:

http://www.google-watch.org/playboy.html

It was published prior to the IPO (because of magazine lead times, etc.) and caused them a lot of problems - they were close to having to cancel the IPO

I am trying to find other IPO quiet period tech interviews to put them all together in a blog post - so if you know of any others, let me know

Posted a while back here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2319236

I thought that news.ycombinator.com detects duplicates. It's the same URL, character to character.

Only if it's in memory, that one was posted two months ago so the server wouldn't have been able to detect it. However I'm not sure why obtino linked to it as there's no comments on that story.

Maybe to prove it was previously posted?

Well yes, but I don't see how that's relevant in the discussion. The topic hadn't come up and since there was no fission on the other submission mention it doesnt add anything to the potential conversation, not to my mind anyway, perhaps I'm missing a use case.

I wonder if he regrets selling those $1.6 million of shares then, considering that they probably at least 100 times more valuable now?

you seriously think bill gates has any concern about his personal fortune at all now?

Enough so to go from robber baron to philanthropist.

He sells MSFT shares in blocks of 5,000,000 (~$125 million) regularly... including 4 times this month (~$500 million).

I very much doubt he regrets selling those shares.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=msft

"Bill Gates the software prodigy". Ha-ha. A PR-fuckup that unfortunately found its way into the minds of journalists who should know better.

In the 80's many books have been written that point out nicely that Microsoft is just a bunch of criminals. They didn't do anything to make our lifes better.

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