AkmalHussin.com: Bill Gates

Bill Gates

William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28th, 1955. He is an American business magnate, investor, programmer, inventor and philanthropist.Gates began to show an interest in computer programming at the age of 13 at the Lakeside School.In 1970, at the age of 15, Bill Gates went into business with his pal, Paul Allen. They developed "Traf-o-Data," a computer program that monitored traffic patterns in Seattle, and netted $20,000 for their efforts. Gates and Allen wanted to start their own company, but Gates' parents wanted him to finish school and go on to college where they hoped he would work to become a lawyer. In 1975, Gates and Allen formed a partnership they called Micro-Soft, a blend of "micro-computer" and "software."

Gates was number one on the Forbes 400 list from 1993 through to 2007 and number one on Forbes list of The World's Richest People from 1995 to 2007 and 2009. In 1999, his wealth briefly surpassed $101 billion, causing the media to call Gates a "centibillionaire". Despite his wealth and extensive business travel Gates usually flew coach until 1997, when he bought a private jet.

Since 2000, the nominal value of his Microsoft holdings has declined due to a fall in Microsoft's stock price after the dot-com bubble burst and the multi-billion dollar donations he has made to his charitable foundations. In a May 2006 interview, Gates commented that he wished that he were not the richest man in the world because he disliked the attention it brought. In March 2010, Gates was the second wealthiest person behind Carlos Slim, but regained the top position in 2013 according to the Bloomberg Billionaires List.Gates has several investments outside Microsoft, which in 2006 paid him a salary of $616,667 and $350,000 bonus totaling $966,667. He founded Corbis, a digital imaging company, in 1989. In 2004 he became a director of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company headed by long-time friend Warren Buffett.

Steve Wozniak

Stephen Gary “Woz” Wozniak, founded Apple Computer, Co. (now Apple Inc.) with co-founders, Steve Jobs, and Ronald Wayne. He has an estimated net worth of $100 million.
During his brief stint at the University of California at Berkeley, Steve Wozniak met Steve Jobs through a mutual friend. The two paired up to form Apple Computer on April 1, 1976, prompting Wozniak to quit his job at Hewlett-Packard.

Working out of a family garage, he and Jobs attempted to produce a user-friendly alternative to the computers that were being introduced by International Business Machines at that time. Wozniak worked on the invention of products and Jobs was responsible for marketing.

Not long after Apple was founded, Wozniak created the Apple I, a so-called "Homebrew" design built largely in Jobs's bedroom and garage. With Wozniak's knowledge of electronics and Jobs's marketing skills, the two were well-suited to do business together. Wozniak went on to conceive the Apple II as part of the company's personal-computer series, and by 1983, Apple had a stock value of $985 million.
Wozniak ended his employment with Apple in 1987.

In 1990 he joined Mitchell Kapor in establishing the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization which provides legal aid for computer hackers facing criminal prosecution.

Wozniak co-founded Wheels of Zeus in 2001, to create wireless GPS technology in order to help the average person on the street find everyday things more easily.

After Wheels of Zeus closed in 2006, Wozniak published his autobiography,iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. Three years later, he joined the Salt Lake City-based start-up Fusion-io as its chief scientist.

Larry Page

Larry Page is best known for the co-founder of Google, alongside Sergy Brin. He is the 6th richest person in America, and the 27th richest billionaire worldwide according to Forbes.

Page's father Carl was a pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence and his mother taught computer programming. After earning a bachelor of science degree in engineering from the University of Michigan, Page decided to concentrate on computer engineering at Stanford University, where he met Sergey Brin.

As a research project at Stanford University, Page and Brin created a search engine that listed results according to the popularity of the pages, after concluding that the most popular result would often be the most useful. They called the search engine Google after the mathematical term "Googol," which is a 1 followed by 100 zeros, to reflect their mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the Web.

After raising $1 million from family, friends and other investors, the pair launched the company in 1998. Google has since become the world's most popular search engine, receiving more than 200 million queries each day. Headquartered in the heart of California's Silicon Valley, Google held its initial public offering in August 2004, making Page and Brin billionaires. Page continues to share responsibility for Google's day-to-day operations with Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt. In 2006, Google purchased the most popular Web site for user-submitted streaming videos, YouTube, for $1.65 billion in stock.

Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg, is the founder and CEO of Facebook. He was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, Mark Zuckerberg co-founded the social-networking website Facebook out of his college dorm room. He left Harvard after his sophomore year to concentrate on the site, the user base of which has grown to more than 250 million people, making Zuckerberg a billionaire. The birth of Facebook was recently portrayed in the film The Social Network.Zuckerberg developed an interest in computers at an early age; when he was about 12, he used Atari BASIC to create a messaging program he named "Zucknet." His father used the program in his dental office, so that the receptionist could inform him of a new patient without yelling across the room. The family also used Zucknet to communicate within the house. Together with his friends, he also created computer games just for fun. "I had a bunch of friends who were artists," he said. "They'd come over, draw stuff, and I'd build a game out of it." To keep up with Mark's burgeoning interest in computers, his parents hired private computer tutor David Newman to come to the house once a week and work with Mark.

Kevin Systrom

Kevin Systrom is an American software engineer and entrepreneur with an estimated net worth of $400 million as of 2012. Kevin first dabbled with programming in the QBasic language. When he got AOL, Kevin made programs in Visual Basic to boot people offline. At high school, instead of biology, Kevin took Computer Science classes.

Kevin graduated from Stanford University in 2006 with a BS in Management Science & Engineering. He got his first taste of the startup world when he was an intern at Odeo that later became Twitter. He spent two years at Google - the first of which was working on Gmail, Google Reader, and other products and the latter where he worked on the Corporate Development team. Kevin has always had a passion for social products that enable people to communicate more easily, and combined with his passion for photography Instagram is a natural fit. Instagram was acquired by Facebook for $1 billlion less than 2 years after launch, and it has just hit 50M users, one of the fastest growing services of all time. Several reports claimed that he earned around $400 million for the said deal.

Mike Krieger

Mike Krieger has an estimated net worth of $100 million in 2013. He graduated from Stanford University where he studied Symbolic Systems with a focus in Human-Computer Interaction. During his undergrad, he interned at Microsoft's PowerPoint team as a PM and at Foxmarks (now Xmarks) as a software developer. He wrote his Master's thesis on how user interfaces can better support collaboration on a large scale. After graduating, he worked at Meebo for a year and a half as a user experience designer and as a front-end engineer before joining the Instagram team doing design & development.

Paul Buchheit

Paul Buchheit is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur with an estimated net worth of $600 million. He co-founded social network aggregator FriendFeed, along with three other former Google employees. He is also an investor in FriendFeed and participated in a $5 million Series A round in February 2008.He was the 23rd employee at Google, where he created Gmail and implemented many of its innovative features. He developed the original prototype of Google AdSense, and was responsible for Google’s famous “Don’t be evil” motto in a meeting.

Aaron Peckham

American computer scientist and programmer Aaron Peckham has an estimated net worth of $15 million as of 2012. He is known to be the founder of Urban Dictionary, a web-based dictionary containing over seven million definitions as of March 2013. Anita Hamilton of Time ranked Urban Dictionary as one of the 2008′s 50 best websites.

Aaron Peckham was a computer science student in 1999 when he launched a Web site to compare urban slang used by university students in different parts of California.As of April 2009, the site has been receiving 15 million unique monthly visitors and 80% of these visitors age less than 25. On the same period, the site has been adding approximate 2000 new words everyday.

Reichart Von Wolfsheild

Reichart Von Wolfsheild is an American inventor, technologist, and artist with an estimated net worth of $15 million dollars. Von Wolfsheild is the co-host on the reality series Invention USA on the History Channel. The show debuted on December 9, 2011 which features the two inventors and hosts as they travel around America to oversee the work of amateur inventors .Von Wolfsheild became interested in computers at a young age, and built his first CPU from scratch when he was in his early teens. He has since gone on to a long and successful career in both art and technology. He began working for MTV in the early 80s, helping develop the technology surrounding music videos. He launched his own company, devoted to Artificial Intelligence development soon after. He has worked on the development of multiple video games, and helped develop the first modern multi-player game. He has designed toys and weapons, as well. His clients have included Disney, Boeing, Dreamworks, and Mattel.

David Heinemeier Hansson

David Heinemeier Hansson has an estimated net worth of $30 million in 2012. Hansson is best recognized as the creator of Instiki wiki and Ruby on Rails web development framework. Ruby on Rails is an open-source web framework that's optimized for programmer happiness and beautiful code. He created Rails in 2003 and continue to lead the development.

Hundreds of thousands of programmers around the world have built amazing applications using Rails. Some of the more famous include Twitter, Shopify, 500px, and Github. His works on Ruby on Rails earned him a Hacker of the Year award by O’Reilly and Google.

He is also one of the partners at 37signals, a web-based software development firm.The company has been around since 1999. He run it together with his business partner, Jason Fried, and team of 36 programmers, designers, supporters, and sysops.

Adam D’Angelo

Adam D’Angelo is a Founder and CEO of Quora. He has an estimated net worth of $680 million. He previously served as Chief Technology Officer at Facebook. He founded his own company Quora after working on Facebook. His co-founder in Quora is Charlie Cheever whom he met while both were working at Facebook.
In 2002, while still at high school, he received the Silver medallist the International Olympics in Information.

In 2003, Adam was first in the North American team of 3 at the ACM International computer programming contest.

In 2004 he was second in an American team of 3 at the Association for Computing Machinery International computer programming contest. He was studying at Caltech at this time.

In 2005, Adam was in the top 24 finalists at Topcoder, an international collegiate competition while still studying at California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

In 2006 he completed a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from California Institute of Technology.

David Karp

Tumblr founder and Chief Executive Officer David Karp has an estimated net worth of $200 million. He was born and raised in New York City, attending the Bronx High School Science before dropping out at age 15. An internship at Frederator Studios led to a gig leading product at UrbanBaby. When CNET acquired the company in 2005, Karp started his own development agency, Davidville. In 2007 his team launched Tumblr, , a short-form blogging platform which now the home and platform for more than 100 million creators. As a top 15 US network, Tumblr serves an audience of more than 170 million people worldwide.In 2012, it reportedly had $15 million in revenues. It was announced on May 20, 2013 that Yahoo! and Tumblr have reached an agreement. Yahoo! will acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion while Karp will remain as the CEO of the company.

p/s: I am not yet rich.

Source:

This morning I turn on "mobile data" on my phone and got email notification from Gmail. One of the email is comed from Linkedin with subject "Mohd Akmal, learn what Warren Buffett taught Bill Gates"

I click to the link and here are three Bill Gates has learned from Warren over the years:

1. It’s not just about investing.

The first thing people learn from Warren, of course, is how to think about investing. That’s natural, given his amazing track record. Unfortunately, that’s where a lot of people stop, and they miss out on the fact that he has a whole framework for business thinking that is very powerful. For example, he talks about looking for a company’s moat—its competitive advantage—and whether the moat is shrinking or growing. He says a shareholder has to act as if he owns the entire business, looking at the future profit stream and deciding what it’s worth. And you have to be willing to ignore the market rather than follow it, because you want to take advantage of the market’s mistakes—the companies that have been underpriced.

2. Use your platform.

A lot of business leaders write letters to their shareholders, but Warren is justly famous for his. Partly that’s because his natural good humor shines through. Partly it’s because people think it will help them invest better (and they’re right). But it’s also because he’s been willing to speak frankly and criticize things like stock options and financial derivatives. He’s not afraid to take positions, like his stand on raising taxes on the rich, that run counter to his self-interest.

3. Know how valuable your time is.

No matter how much money you have, you can’t buy more time. There are only 24 hours in everyone’s day. Warren has a keen sense of this. He doesn’t let his calendar get filled up with useless meetings. On the other hand, he’s very generous with his time for the people he trusts. He gives his close advisers at Berkshire his phone number, and they can just call him up and he’ll answer the phone.

Read Bill Gates’ first post on LinkedIn. Click here

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