Bill Gates calls Steve Jobs a 'wizard' who saved Apple

When you started at Microsoft, you were so young. This was something that was just a passion. You once said to me, which I thought was a fascinating point, you never thought of yourself as an entrepreneur. If you hadn't been doing computers, it's not like you would have started a chain of restaurants. This was about computers and your passion. Did you ever think to yourself, this is the kind of manager I want to be? Over time, as you're writing less code, and you're hiring people who write code, and then you're hiring people who manage people who write code, and you're explaining to the world why the magic of the personal computer and the magic of software can help them get things done, you really are forced to say, do I enjoy this? Am I good at this? Should I have someone else do it? In most cases, the founder doesn't stick around for 25 years and end up managing 50,000 people. That's a fairly unusual case, but it's a nice case because you have a certain continuity. Nobody ever wondered, okay, who's in charge here? Bill wrote this in a memo. I wonder what somebody else thinks. No, if I wrote it, then hey, let's just go do it. You were famously a very demanding person who suffered fools not very gladly. You pushed people very hard. Do you think that was the best way to motivate people? Well, I think it's important to separate out. I never, I didn't, other than a DOJ deposition I gave, no one ever said that when I went out and talked to the press or customers that I was rude or abrupt or commanding or anything like that. Inside Microsoft, we had to some degree a self-selected set of people who were mostly males, I'll admit, and yes, we were pretty tough on each other. I think sometimes that went too far. It was very intense. We counted on each other to work very long hours, and I always wanted to set the best example of that. I think that intensity, even though a little bit it went too far, was great for my 20s, 30s, 40s. Now, where I'm a bit more mellow and I'm not pushing quite as insanely, but I'm still clear about, hey, that toilet design is too expensive. It's a dead end. We're not going to put more money into that. That works for being the co-head of the foundation. Do you think there are leadership rules, principles? Because I sometimes wonder, if you were to ask somebody what's a good way to run a company, they would probably put down a list of 10 things, and Steve Jobs would have violated all 10 of those in the way he, or at least a vast majority of those in the way he ran Apple, and yet, I mean, it's the largest company in the world today. Is it just too specific or varied for there to be general lessons? Well, Steve, that's a good example of don't do this at home. That is, it's really easy to imitate the bad parts of Steve, of at times being an a**hole, and it is, I have yet to meet any person who in terms of picking talent, hyper-motivating that talent, and having a sense of design of, oh, this is good, this is not good. So he brought some incredibly positive things along with that toughness, and I always said that I was like a minor wizard because he would be casting spells, and I would see people mesmerized, but because I'm a minor wizard, the spells don't work on me. I could not cast those spells, but I see them, and I would say, hey, wait, don't, don't. You're going to work even more than I would ask you to. This is, no, this is crazy. Or, you know, like when he did the next introduction, which is a computer that completely failed, it was such nonsense, and yet he mesmerized those people. Oh, yes, million by a million, and black cube, and all this stuff, and I was like, wait a minute, that spell should not work at all. It doesn't have any reality to it. So Steve is a very singular case where the company really was on a path to die, and it goes and becomes the most valuable company in the world with some products that are really quite amazing. There aren't going to be many stories like that.