One day while Gates was still a college student, he and his friend Paul Allen saw an article about a computer called the Altair 8800. Intrigued, they wrote code for the computer and then Allen flew out to Albuquerque to show that code to the creator of the computer – and to ask if he and Gates could work as software programers for the computer. Allen got an offer to be the vice-president of software, and Gates left Harvard University to go work with Allen in Albuquerque, calling their team "Micro-Soft." Gates says the company's secret has always been in who they hired. "The key for us, number one, has always been hiring very smart people," he said. "There is no way of getting around that, in terms of IQ, you've got to be very elitist in picking the people who deserve to write software ... and using small teams helps a lot."
By World Economic Forum
