The entrepreneur that I admire the most is Mr. William Henry ‘Bill’ Gates, the co-founder and chairman of Microsoft Corporation- a brand that revolutionized Personal Computing and present on almost every computer. I admire him because of the following four abilities:
- Vision: A true visionary, Mr. Gates has a vision for the emerging demand of products. Microsoft was thus among the first ‘purely software products’ companies that were launched. He realized that with the advent of personal computing, a range of computer programs would be required to automate and streamline various tasks.
- Determination: A very determined individual, Mr. Gates has seen his corporation through a number of challenges (competition, risk, apt timing) on its road to market leadership.
- A shrewd and swift Marketer: The metamorphosis of Microsoft from a start-up/small company to a corporation occurred due to the swift capture of a single opportunity by Mr. Gates: Microsoft licensed its MS-DOS computer operating system to IBM. Gates also set about protecting the royalties that he could acquire from computer software by aggressively fighting against all forms of software piracy, thus creating the retail software market that now exists today
- Philanthropy: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has an endowment in excess of $33.5 billion, with donations totaling more than $1.5 billion every year. Mr. Gates has thus created one of the largest charitable foundations in the world.