There's been some great coverage of D: All Things Digital--Wall Street Journal's awesome digital conference. You can see the official coverage here.
The technology is awesome, of course. As Bill Gates and Steve Jobs agreed, it's a great time to be in the industry right now. So much is happening. Technology aside, though, this Q&A session with the two titans struck me. The transcript below is just a snippet of a video session called "Gates and Jobs Take Questions." You can see the whole clip here.
Q [Audience]: [I’m] Rob Kelly, here with my business partner. We’ve got a hundred-person
Internet media business. I’m wondering: What would be the single most-valuable
piece of advice you’d give us to even attempt to create some of the value that
you guys have done in both of your very impressive companies?
A
[Gates]: Well, I think, actually, it may be in both cases—correct me if I’m
wrong—the excitement wasn’t really seeing the economic value. You know, even
when we wrote down at Microsoft in 1975, “A computer on every desk and in every
home,” we didn’t realize: “Oh, and we’ll have to be a big company.” [Audience
laughter and Jobs nods in agreement]
Every
time I thought, oh God, can we double in size? Jeez, can we manage that many
people? Will that feel fun still? You know, and so every doubling was like, OK,
this is the last one. And so the economic thing wasn’t at the forefront. The
idea of being at the forefront and seeing new things, and things we wanted to do—and
being able to bring in different people who were fun to work with, eventually,
with a broad set of skills...and figuring out how to get those people with
those broad skills to work well together has been one of the greatest
challenges. You know, I’ve made more of my mistakes in that area, maybe, than anywhere.
But eventually [we were successful at] getting some of those teams to work well
together. So, you know, I think it’s a lot about the people and the passion,
and it’s amazing that the business worked out the way that it did.
A
[Jobs]: Yeah. People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you’re
doing and it’s totally true. And the reason is because it’s so hard, that if
you don’t, any rational person would give up. It’s really hard. And you have to
do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don’t love it—if you’re not
having fun doing it and you don’t really love it—you’re going to give up. And
that’s what happens to most people actually. If you really look at the ones
that ended up being, quote, successful, in the eyes of society, and the ones
that didn’t, often times it’s [that] the ones that were successful loved what
they were doing so they could persevere, you know, when it got really tough.
And the ones that didn’t love it quit, ‘cause they’re sane. Right? Who would
want to put up with this stuff if you don’t love it? So it’s a lot of hard
work, and it’s a lot of worrying, constantly. And if you don’t love it, you’re
going to fail, so you gotta love it and you gotta have passion. And I think that’s
the high-order bit.
The
second thing is: You’ve got to be a really good talent scout, because no matter
how smart you are, you need a team of great people. And you’ve got to figure
out how to size people up fairly quickly, make decisions without knowing people
too well, and hire them. You know, see how you do and refine your intuition,
and be able to help build an organization that can eventually just built itself—because
you need great people around you.
