14 DAY TRIAL // Bill Gates was the ultimate geek in his younger years, and this video is living proof. Needless to say, being a geek is not at all a bad thing, and Microsoft’s co-founder knows this better than anyone else, as he ended up becoming the richest person on the planet thanks to his software empire.
But being a geek proved to be quite a super power during his school days. In an interview with BBC (via BI), Bill Gates has revealed that he and his friend Paul Allen (who later became his partner in founding Microsoft) used to hack the school’s computers in order to meet the “nice girls.”
Gates reckons that although turning to his digital power to get closer to these girls was super awesome, he still couldn’t do anything because he had a problem talking to them.
“At least they were there”
What he and Allen did was to break into the school’s computer and move Gates to classes where he was the only boy, thus having to study in a class full of girls. Moreover, he picked his seat near “the nice girls,” as he puts it.
“Paul did the computer scheduling with me. Unfortunately for him he was two years ahead of me and he was off to college by then. So I was the one who benefited by being able to have the nice girls at least sit near me,” he explains in the interview.
“It wasn't that I could talk to them or anything - but they were there. I think I was particularly inept at talking to girls, or thinking, ‘OK - do you ask them out, do you not?’ When I went off to Harvard I was a little bit more sociable. But I was below average on talking to girls.”
It all turned out very well for Bill Gates, however, as he finally met his wife Melinda when she was hired by the software empire he founded in 1986. The two married in 1994 in Lanai, Hawaii.