From Simi Valley to Silicon Valley by Stephen Gillett

Author:Stephen Gillett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2019-07-04T16:03:03+00:00

Working in Bill’s World

Since the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was also based in Seattle, I talked on occasion with the foundation’s COO and CIO to compare notes on how to talk to Bill and coordinate our technology decisions. An informal network formed between Corbis, Microsoft, and the foundation.

As we worked to fully digitize Corbis business into an online model with great search and e-commerce capabilities, I often found that many of the better technologies managing components like e-commerce, rights management, and financial services—like enterprise resource planning (ERP)—were not the technologies that Microsoft was strong at. We had a big project underway called “Project Alchemy,” which was designed to transform the business process and technology that supported it at Corbis. This put me in a situation where I had to talk to Bill about why Microsoft’s own solutions would not work for some of these business needs.

To prepare for this, I spoke with technology executives at both the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Microsoft. These people had experience with Bill on new technology or at Microsoft, and led the products I was going to call out as coming up short in our evaluation of all the technologies available to us. In the end, Corbis was allowed to purchase the right technology to support our business, despite the fact that those were not Microsoft products. In large part thanks to Bill’s ability to hear and digest an evaluation of his company’s products, he allowed Corbis to made some important and independent decisions and accomplish some remarkable technical feats. It was the dedication of the Corbis technology teams as well as the strong network between the foundation, Corbis, and Microsoft that allowed us to eventually land in the right place on the technology.

Even though my work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was somewhat peripheral, seeing as how the foundation operated in the world, working for the greater good of humanity, it still helped me begin to more deeply understand how I could connect my personal values and motivations for working with a company to the things that went beyond financial considerations. I also saw how mission, purpose, and values resonated with others who wanted to work for an organization that was trying to do good in the world. These more philosophical elements began to play a bigger role in steering my business decisions. I wanted to understand if the leaders I was working with were inspired by things and had convictions that went beyond just creating a high stock price and making a lot of money. I wanted to know that they were truly invested in the idea of doing good in the world. In the years since then, these ideas have become a core tenet of my leadership philosophy.

This point was further driven home by an article I read on GeekWire a few years later in which author Malcolm Gladwell asserted that, fifty years from now, no one will remember Steve Jobs. But they will remember Bill Gates—not

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