Steve Ballmer

Steve Ballmer joined Microsoft in June 1980 as its thirtieth employee and the first business manager Bill Gates ever hired, after a childhood he has described as so shy that he would hyperventilate before Hebrew school. He compensated by treating shyness as a solvable problem rather than a fixed trait, on arriving at Harvard in 1973 he memorized his entire class's names and faces from the registry before classes even started. He graduated magna cum laude in applied mathematics and economics in 1977, tried Procter & Gamble and a stint attempting to write screenplays in Hollywood, and was partway through his first year at Stanford's business school when Gates called and asked him to drop out and join Microsoft.¹

His original deal was a $50,000 salary plus ten percent of the profit he generated, with no equity, restructured into an eight percent stake when Microsoft incorporated in 1981, with Gates giving up part of his own stake to make the numbers work. Ballmer's first major assignment was leading Microsoft's side of the 1980 negotiation with IBM that produced MS-DOS, a room where, in Gates's telling, someone was needed who knew how to wear a tie and had never programmed a line of code.¹ Ballmer became president in 1998 and chief executive in January 2000, a role he held until January 2014.

He brought a physical intensity to the job that became part of Microsoft's folklore: in 1991 he tore his vocal cords screaming "Windows!" at a Japan sales meeting and needed surgery to recover.¹ He held onto his Microsoft stake through his entire tenure as chief executive, later describing himself simply as a loyal, loyal dude who still drives Fords. Since leaving Microsoft he has owned the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers, purchased for two billion dollars in 2014.

Ballmer is also remembered for calling Linux a cancer that would prove destructive to the software industry, a prediction that podcaster David Senra's guest David Heinemeier Hansson treats as the clearest case in his own experience of an incumbent underestimating non-commercial competition: Linux now runs on billions of devices and dominates embedded and server computing, falling short only on the desktop, the one gap Heinemeier Hansson's own operating system project was built to close.²