This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, April 25, 2011 - The first hint of serious friction between Paul Allen and Bill Gates, co-founders of Microsoft, surfaces early on, when the two longtime collaborators have just signed a contract to sell their new computer language worldwide.
As Allen relates it in his new memoir, "Idea Man," they had just come up with the company's name -- at first, it was hyphenated as Micro-Soft -- when Gates startled him with an immodest proposal.
"From the time we'd started together in Massachusetts," Allen writes, "I'd assumed that our partnership would be a fifty-fifty proposition. But Bill had another idea. 'It's not right for you to get half,' he said. 'You had your salary at MITS while I did almost everything on BASIC without one back in Boston. I should get more. I think it should be sixty-forty.'"
In what proves to become a recurring pattern, Allen writes that "at first I was taken aback. But as I pondered it, Bill's position didn't seem unreasonable. ... All in all, I thought, a sixty-forty split might be fair."
It didn't take too long before the proportion didn't seem fair to Gates. One day he asked Allen to join him on a walk; along the way, he said he did most of the work on BASIC, "and I gave up a lot to leave Harvard. I deserve more than 60 percent." He wanted the ratio now to be 64-36.
Again, Allen looked at the issue dispassionately, and concluded that "I might have haggled and offered Bill two points instead of four, but my heart wasn't in it. So I agreed. At last now we can put this to bed, I thought."
He thought wrong. When Allen brought up to Gates that his own contributions to a particular project were dominant and he wanted to rethink the 64-36 deal, "Bill would have none of it. 'I don't ever want to talk about this again,' he said. 'Do not bring it up.'"
So Allen didn't -- until Gates brought Steve Ballmer in to run the business side of the growing company and offered him 8.75 percent of the business, more than Allen had agreed on. Later, Allen's share shrank to 30 percent, while Gates retained 51 percent. Eventually, Allen left the company that today most people think was started by Gates alone.
Even though the pair had met when Allen was in 10th grade and Gates was in eighth at Lakeside School in Seattle, and even though they had fantasized about owning their own company while chowing down at the Harvard House of Pizza, the pair's entrepreneurial chemistry couldn't last.
Much of the first part of "Idea Man" is about how that chemistry made both men billionaires many times over. Here is how Allen describes their groove:
"I was the idea man, the one who'd conceive of things out of whole cloth. Bill listened and challenged me, and then homed in on my best ideas to help make them a reality. Our collaboration had a natural tension, but mostly it worked productively and well."
Gates was what Allen's mother called an "edge walker," someone who "would court risk for the thrill of it." He would drive himself to exhaustion, recharge, then start right up again.
"I'd occasionally catch Bill grabbing naps at his terminal during our late-nighters," Allen writes. " He'd be in the middle of a line of code when he'd gradually tilt forward until his nose touched the keyboard. After dozing an hour or two, he'd open his eyes, squint at the screen, blink twice, and resume precisely where he'd left off -- a prodigious feat of concentration."
If "Idea Man" is Allen's memoir, why is this review so much about Gates? Probably because Allen says so little about himself as a person, choosing to write much more in a style of 'I did this, then I did this, then I did this' but revealing much less about why.
Readers will learn about his relationship with his parents and his sister, about the bouts of illness that make him look at life differently and about his loves of music, science and diving. But they won't necessarily come away feeling that they know as much about the man as about his ideas. Early on, he talks of putting off plans to get married, but he never returns to the subject again.
Allen's post-Microsoft life includes ownership of the Portland Trail Blazers, the Seattle Seahawks and a major league soccer franchise; the Experience Music Project, a monument to his guitar hero, Jimi Hendrix; sponsorship of SpaceShipOne, the winner of the X-Prize; investments in DreamWorks and the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence; and the Allen Brain Atlas, a tool that helps scientists map the body's most complex organ. Jamming with Mick Jagger and Bono are among the highlights he relates.
St. Louis readers will find his chapter on Charter Communications illuminating. Allen was fascinated by the notion of what he terms the Wired World, and he lost $8 billion investing in Charter to try to help make his dream a reality. But Charter slammed him smack into other realities, including incompetent management, allegations of fraud, crushing debt and the Great Recession. What he calls his "headlong pursuit of the Wired World" was a costly enterprise.
But Allen could afford it. He can even afford to speak fondly of Gates toward the end of the book, when his old collaborator provides moral support during Allen's bout with non-Hodgin's lymphoma, a more lethal variety of a disease that had struck him decades earlier.
"He was everything you'd want from a friend, caring and concerned," he wrote of Gates. "I was reminded of the complexity of our relationship and how we always rooted for each other, even when we were barely speaking. It seemed that we'd be stuck with one another for as long as we lasted."
Summing up, Allen says his role has been the one of the man who was "the source of seminal ideas. These days, my role is often to listen to smart people and recognize when something special has emerged. Then I try to place the thought into a new context or extend it into something more powerful."
What moves him?
"Some people are motivated by a need for recognition," Allen concludes, "some by money, and some by a broad social goal. I start from a different place, from the love of ideas and the urge to put them into motion and see where they might lead. The creative path is rocky, with the risk of failure ever present and no guarantees. But even with its detours and blind alleys, it's the only road that I find fulfilling."