by Alex Banayan
“Ah, Dean Kamen,” he said. “We know him well.
“Larry King,” he went on. “That must have been an interesting one.”
As he was about to say the next name, an unexpected sensation overtook me and I cut him off.
“It’s not about the names,” I said, my voice louder than I’d anticipated.
He turned his head to me, bewildered.
“It’s not about the names,” I repeated. “It’s not about the interviews. It’s about, well, I just believe that if all these leaders come together for one purpose—not to promote anything, not for press, but really, just to come together to share their wisdom with the next generation, I believe young people could do so much more—”
“All right,” he said, slicing his hand up. “I’ve heard enough…”
My whole body tensed.
He looked at me, swung his hand down, and said, “…We’re in!”
STEP 5
TAKE THE THIRD DOOR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Holy Grail: Part I
Bill Gates.
Nearly everyone knows the name, but most don’t know the whole story. Behind the nerdy glasses and magazine covers, there’s the boy who read the entire World Book Encyclopedia at age nine. At thirteen, his hero wasn’t a rock star or basketball player, but the French emperor Napoléon. One night at dinnertime he hadn’t left his room, so his mom yelled, “Bill, what are you doing?”
“I’m thinking!” he shouted.
“You’re thinking?”
“Yes, Mom, I’m thinking. Have you ever tried thinking?”
While that might sound obnoxious, for some reason, I found it a bit endearing. As I dug deeper into Gates’ life, I started to see him as the most relatable unrelatable person in the world.
On one hand, in eighth grade he spent his free time in the computer room with his friend Paul Allen, teaching himself how to code on the ASR-33 Teletype. That’s totally unrelatable. While most kids in high school were sneaking out of the house at night to go to parties, Gates was sneaking out to go code at the University of Washington computer lab. That’s even more unrelatable. On the other hand, he used his computer skills to help his high school automate the class schedules—and rigged the system to put himself in the classes with the best-looking girls. Now, that’s relatable.
After high school, he majored in applied math at Harvard. Why did he choose that major? Because he’d found a loophole. He figured out a way to get priority registration in whatever classes he wanted because he claimed he was “applying math” to economics or “applying math” to history. Bill liked to rebel just for the sake of it, so he ditched classes he was signed up for and went to ones he wasn’t.
The man the media portrays as an awkward, uncool geek was famous in college for staying up hours past midnight playing high-stakes poker. In his twenties, he blew off steam by sneaking onto construction sites in the middle of the night and racing bulldozers across the dirt. While he was starting Microsoft, he would take breaks from coding by climbing into his Porsche, flooring the gas pedal, and racing on the highway.
And his love for speed wasn’t limited to driving. As I read stories about him closing major software deals, I felt like I was watching a chess prodigy play ten opponents at once, jumping from board to board, making dozens of moves a minute without blinking, beating them all. At an age when his friends were just graduating college, he was battling in the conference rooms of some of the world’s biggest companies—IBM, Apple, HP—and negotiating contracts with people twice his age. With the chess prodigy metaphor in my mind, I realized that Gates has played the coding game, the sales game, the negotiating game, the CEO game, the public figure game, the philanthropy game—all at the highest levels—and has won each one.
He grew Microsoft into the world’s most valuable company in 1998, making him the wealthiest person on the planet. To put that in perspective, Oprah Winfrey is incredibly rich; so are Mark Zuckerberg, Howard Schultz, Mark Cuban, Jack Dorsey, and Elon Musk. Well, at the time I was preparing for my interview, Bill Gates’ assets were worth more than all of theirs combined.
After stepping down as CEO of Microsoft, Gates could have retired, lounged on a yacht, and enjoyed every material pleasure the world has to offer. Instead, he jumped over to new chessboards to take on even harder challenges—feeding the world’s poor, revolutionizing clean energy, stopping the spread of infectious disease, and bringing quality education to students in need. I already knew that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was the largest philanthropic foundation in the world, but I had no idea its efforts have helped save the lives of more than five million people. Because of how Bill Gates has chosen to spend his fortune, he’s helped cut the rate of infant mortality in half. In the next five years, it’s projected his programs will save the lives of another seven million children. If there was ever a real-life superhero, it was Bill Gates.
I used everything I learned about him to plan my interview. I wrote dozens of questions on my notepad and color-coded them by subject. From sales to negotiating, I felt like I was creating my own treasure map.
A week before my meeting with Gates, I went to breakfast with Larry King and Cal Fussman and asked for advice on handling the interview.
“Just remember what I told you before,” Larry said, pointing a finger. “The secret is: there is no secret. Just be yourself.”
“And be just as relaxed as when you were here interviewing Larry,” Cal added.
When I left breakfast, I felt they didn’t understand the kind of pressure I was under. I didn’t have the luxury to relax. This wasn’t just another interview. For the past three years, I’d gone out of my way to stake the entire mission on this moment. I’d sworn to my publisher, agent, and family, that when I finally got the chance to interview Gates, I would draw out a piece of advice from him that would change my generation. Something that would radically transform people’s careers forever. The Holy Grail.
I needed help from someone who had done something similar. I’d heard that for his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell had interviewed Gates for the “10,000 Hour Rule” chapter. If anyone could relate to what I was up against, it had to be Gladwell. So I used the Tim Ferris cold-email template and Gladwell responded a day later.
From: Malcolm Gladwell
To: Alex Banayan
Subject: RE: Mr. Gladwell—advice on Bill Gates interview?
my advice? bill gates is the easiest person you will ever interview because he is exceedingly smart and direct and perceptive. make sure you have read widely and deeply about his life so you don’t waste his time. and then let him talk. he will take you in surprising directions if you let him.
good luck!
As much as I was grateful for Gladwell’s encouragement, it didn’t calm me down. The stakes in my head were too high and I was too intimidated by Gates to relax. I needed something to move him off the pedestal in my mind.
I tried visualizing what he looked like when he was my age. I imagined him in a worn-in T-shirt and jeans, lying on his dorm room bed. A story I’d read came to mind. It took place during his sophomore year at Harvard. Gates was nineteen years old when Paul Allen barged into his dorm room and threw a magazine on the desk.
“Bill, it’s happening without us!” Paul yelled.
On the cover of the magazine was a smooth, pale-blue box with lights, switches, and ports. It was the Altair 8800, the world’s first minicomputer kit. Bill tore through the article and realized that although MITS, the company that invented the Altair, had already created the hardware, it still needed software. Microsoft wasn’t even an idea at the time, but Bill and Paul wrote a letter to Ed Roberts, the founder of MITS, and offered to sell software to run it. Bill and Paul wanted to seem more legitimate, so they wrote the note on letterhead stationery from a company they had started in high school called Traf-O-Data.
A few weeks passed with no response and Bill had to be wondering, Did the founder of MITS throw the letter in the trash? Did he find out I’m a teenager?
Years later, Bill learned that the founder of MITS not only read the letter, but also liked it so much he wanted to buy the software. He called the phone number on the letterhead and a random woman answered—Bill and Paul forgot their letterhead still had the phone number of their friend’s house from high school.
They didn’t know that though, so back in Bill’s dorm room they debated how to follow up. Bill handed the phone to Paul.
“No, you do it!” Paul said. “You’re better at this kind of thing.”
“I’m not going to call,” Bill shot back. “You call!”
I guess even the person destined to be the world’s richest man suffered from The Flinch. Eventually, they came up with a compromise—Bill would call, but say he was Paul.
“Hello, this is Paul Allen from Boston,” Bill said in his deepest voice. MITS was a small company, so he didn’t have trouble getting through to the founder. “We’ve got some software for the Altair that’s just about finished, and we’d like to come out and show it to you.”
The founder was receptive and said they could come out to their office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to demo the software. Bill was overjoyed. He had only one problem—he didn’t actually have any software.
In the weeks that followed, Bill spent every minute he could coding. Some nights he didn’t go to bed at all. One evening, Paul walked in and found Bill asleep on the floor by the computer terminals, curled up like a cat. Another night, Paul saw Bill passed out in his chair, using the keyboard as a pillow.
After eight long weeks, Bill and Paul finished the software for the Altair. When deciding who should fly out to Albuquerque to make the pitch, they used simple logic: Paul should go—he had a beard.
Paul boarded a plane with the software safely in his hands. As the plane took off, he mentally went over the demo and realized, Oh, my God. I didn’t write a loader for this thing. A loader is the code that tells the computer, “This is software.” Without it, the code would be useless.
Hunched over a foldout table, Paul scribbled all the code on a notepad from brute memory, finishing just before the plane’s wheels hit the ground. He didn’t even have a way to test it.
The following day, Paul arrived at MITS headquarters and the founder gave him a tour. They stopped at a desk with an Altair 8800 on top. It was the first time Paul had seen one in person.
“All right,” the founder said. “Let’s do it.”
Paul took a breath, loaded the software, and…it worked. Paul and Bill closed the deal, signed the contract, and that’s how they sold their first piece of software.
For me, a single lesson stood out among the rest. Although his talent for coding was remarkable, none of this would have happened if Gates hadn’t pushed through his fears in his dorm room, picked up the phone, and called MITS. It was his ability to do the hard, uncomfortable thing that made this opportunity possible. The potential to unlock your future is in your hands—but first you have to pick up the damn phone.
Although that was a good lesson, I felt it was far from the Holy Grail. When I sat down with Gates, I would need to dig up an insight that was surprising, powerful, and life-changing—something no interviewer had gotten before.
To me, the Holy Grail was a living, breathing truth. It’s what motivated me to trudge through the mud the past two years. And now that I was so close, I was even more adamant I was going to get it.
The morning before the interview, I packed my duffel bag, placed my notepad in my backpack, and headed to Seattle.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Holy Grail: Part II
I stepped down a golden-lit hallway, a single door at the end.
An assistant asked me to stay put as she disappeared behind it, leaving me to stare at the towering, frosted glass door. I looked closer at the dark leather handle with silver trim, studying it as if it held a clue. Even the slightest detail could lead me to the Holy Grail, and because I didn’t know where it was buried, no detail could be overlooked.
After all, I couldn’t just walk in there and say, “Yo, Bill. What’s the Holy Grail?” You can’t do that. And you can’t just hope Bill Gates will give you a clue. He’s not going to point to a Buddha statue on his desk and say, “Ah…you see that Buddha? I keep it there to remind me of the secret to business…” I would have to find the clues myself and I wouldn’t have much time. Because I would need to be fully present when our conversation began, my only chance to find visual clues would be right when I walked in.
And then, in what felt like slow motion, the frosted glass door cracked open. Directly in front of me was Bill Gates, sipping a Diet Coke. He smiled and lifted the can as if to say cheers.
“Hey, there,” he said. “Come on in…”
The moment I stepped through the doorway I felt like I was on the ’90s game show Supermarket Sweep—the one where the contestants have to sprint through a grocery store, find the most expensive items, throw them in their cart, and then race to the checkout before the buzzer goes off. Except I had to spot all the details I could, memorize them as fast as possible, figure out which ones were clues that would help me find the Holy Grail, and do it all before we began talking. As Gates walked over to the sitting area of his office, all I heard in my head was, “ON YOUR MARK…GET SET…GO!”
Gates’ desk was made of wood; it was tidy; there were two monitors on top; behind his desk was a tall leather chair the color of malt whiskey; sunlight streamed through floor-to-ceiling windows, illuminating the glass of five picture frames on the wall. One was a photo of Gates laughing with Warren Buffett, another of Gates with Bono, and a third was a close-up of a mother cradling an infant in what appeared to be a third-world country. Below the picture frames was a polished oval coffee table with two books stacked on top. One of the books was by Steven Pinker and I made a mental note: “buy books by Steven Pinker.” At either end of the sitting area were two ivory-gray armchairs, a brown couch in between. Gates sat in an armchair and I noticed his loafers were black and round-toed, with tassels on top. I made another mental note: “buy loafers with tassels.” He had on dark slacks and his socks bunched low. He wore a golf polo: relaxed fit; dark gold, almost mustard-brown. His—
My mental buzzer went off.
“So, is this your first book?” Gates asked.
Gates’ signature high-pitched voice was even higher pitched in person, making me feel like he was genuinely excited to meet me. He congratulated me, saying he was impressed by the people I’d interviewed. Then he asked how I met Qi Lu.
Gates’ Chief of Staff entered the room, greeted me, and took a seat beside me on the couch. “I figure with forty-five minutes,” he said, “we should probably get right into it to maximize our time.”
I placed my audio recorder on the table and glanced at my notepad. I thought I’d begin by taking Gates back to when he started his first business.
“I was reading about your Traf-O-Data days from high school,” I said. “What did you learn from that experience that later helped you with Microsoft?”
“Well,” Gates said, “Paul Allen and I worked together on that. It actually was good for us because that was a very limited microprocessor…”
Gates started slowly, and then, as if with a flick of a switch, he shifted in his chair, fixed his gaze at the wall, and turned into an audio version of the World Book Encyclopedia in double-time.
“…The very first microprocessor comes out in ’71. It’s the 4004, which could hardly do anything. Paul saw that and showed it to me and he knew we couldn’t do much. Then the 8008 comes out in ’73 and he asked if I could write a BASIC for that and I said no—no, no, I had those dates wrong—’72 was 8008 and ’74 is 8080…”
I’d come searching for details a
nd now I was buried under an avalanche of them.
“…we decided we can only do special purpose stuff, so we got a third partner who knew how to wire wrap stuff up, and it all came out of the fact that we knew people had those tubes that measure traffic on the ground and punch these funny paper tapes. We’d always thought there must be a way to do that by computer. We’d actually been getting people to process them by hand; we’d look at them and write numbers down, then card punch them, put them in a batch computer and…”
The avalanche kept coming and I couldn’t keep my head above the snow.
“…so I went off to college, Paul got a job back there, and we kept discussing whether we should do hardware or software, when we should start it, and then eventually we started as a pure software company in 1979. No, no—we started the software company in ’75. Yeah, sorry, ’75. We moved up to Seattle in ’79…”
Ten minutes sped by, but it felt like ten seconds. A pulsating fear spread through my body. What if the entire interview flashes by in what feels like forty-five seconds?
Right then, the office door opened.
“Sorry to interrupt,” a woman said, poking her head in. “But I have Jenn on the line. She asked if I could get you.”
“Okay,” Gates said, pushing himself out of his armchair.
“I’ll be back,” he said to me. “One sec.”
The Chief of Staff leaned over. “Family,” he whispered.
It was like a rescue helicopter had arrived.
The door shut.
I slouched on the couch, letting out a breath.
* * *
I frantically flipped through my notepad, looking over my questions.
“Is this…is this helpful?” the Chief of Staff asked me. “This angle for the stories?”
I’d asked the Chief of Staff to sit in on the interview in case I needed help, and now he was offering it. My first question wasn’t thoughtful at all. At this point, I should’ve said, “Yeah, I could use some help,” but I was too afraid the truth would make me look like an amateur.
