Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…All that said, even Bill and Paul know the AD08. It's not there yet. It's not powerful enough to really be a general-purpose computer on a chip, but they know it's coming. In the fall of 1973, Bill goes off to college at Harvard famously. It's funny, at Harvard, like Jim Simons that we talked about at MIT on the RenTech episode. Bill thinks he's going to be a world-class mathematician and set the world on fire. It's literally a quote from Paul Allen. Bill was the number one math student in the state of Washington. He gets there, and he does this theoretical math class, math 55 and gets a B. Paul says, when it came to higher mathematics, he might've been one in a hundred thousand or better, but there were people who were one in a million or one in 10 million. And some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in the room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math. Yes. While Bill's at Harvard, he's also doing a bunch of the typical college kid stuff. He's playing poker, he's cutting classes, he's making friends. One of the friends he makes there is a kid down the hall from him named Steve Ballmer. Everybody knows Ballmer. He's everything that Bill is not. He's super social, he's super outgoing. He's in a final club, which is a big thing in the social scene at Harvard.…

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