What Did Bill Gates Worry About? Lean or Fat?

I found this from the transcript of a Charlie Rose interview with Ken Auletta, right after "Googled" was published. It is interesting to hear about what Bill Gates worried about back in 1998, near the all time peak of his power (and the peak of the fat startup era). 

CHARLIE ROSE: And are they on the cutting edge of exciting stuff or are there two more kids in a dormitory room at Stanford that are about ready to come up with something that’s going to blaze new trails? 

KEN AULETTA: Well, we don’t know that. That’s the great thing. I mean, I think I may have told the story when I was on your show, I tell in my book that Bill Gates in ‘98, when I asked him what he worried about, he didn’t say the obvious, which is "My competitors, Netscape, or Oracle or Apple." He said "I worry about someone in a garage inventing something that I haven’t thought of." 

(LAUGHTER)

That year there were two guys in a garage. 

CHARLIE ROSE: Sergey and Larry in a dorm, yes.

KEN AULETTA: Google has the same reason to worry. What is that new technology? One thing they are conscious of is social networking and that could pose a problem for search. 

 

Now, I should also point out that Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in a dorm room while Kleiner Perkins and Benchmark funded Friendster and Sequoia funded Plaxo during the very early days of social networking.

I feel like a broken record but this is something I wrote in 2006 in Venture Lotto:

The most sought after deals are led by proven managers. Especially popular are entrepreneurs who have made money before - they get investors lining up like sheep.

Ironically, the people who end up creating the blockbusters are usually unproven managers. They emerge from the fringes, and start small, in niche or overlooked markets. They take time to learn and iterate and burn very little capital before turning profitable. They follow a slower, but lower-risk path. In our own portfolio, the companies which raised less funding not only performed far, far better but had much lower failure rates.

Entrepreneurs can't count on a portfolio. The best ones we know are much more risk-averse than conventional wisdom might suggest. They don't take foolish chances. They spend money as if it were their own. They observe, listen and adapt; but fundamentally, they strive to control their own destinies, which is best done by generating profits. They do need a little capital, but they want help and advice even more.