Bill Gates on Startups, Investing and Solving The World's Hardest Problems

Let's start right on time. My name is Ben Kaznyk. I'm a partner here at Village Global and on behalf of my partner Ross Fubini, Wayne and Eric Kornberg, welcome to another edition of luminaria lessons brought to you by Village. global, we are delighted to welcome you here to this

world

-famous Science Museum, the Exploratorium, in the stunning and beautiful town of San Francisco. Global, as many of you know, is an early-stage venture capital firm backed by some of the

world

's most successful entrepreneurs. like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sara Blakely and, indeed, Bill Gates, and I think the fact that Bill Gates is with us here this morning is a testament to how passionate these luminaries are about supporting the next generation of innovators, many of whom, of course, are in this room.

About 80 to 100 world-class founders are here with us this morning and I want to especially thank the founders of our network catalyst program next week. We will be announcing some special news about a new generation of network catalysis. Pay attention. which for this morning's event, of course, we have our LP Bill Gates in conversation with another extraordinary entrepreneur and friend of Village global. Julia Hearts, co-founder and CEO of Julia's Eventbrite, and recently took the company public on the New York Stock Exchange, but three-quarters of the way through the conversation, they will stop the conversation and people will be able to line up in front of these two fixed microphones to ask questions.

Please keep your question very brief and feel free to tweet anything from the conversation. You can tag us on Village Global at the end of your conversation. conversation I will return with a brief announcement and then we will go to the beautiful area outside for a reception without further ado please welcome Julia Hearts and Bill Gates thank you all for coming and this is a pretty epic place yes best view , Yeah. the bridge looks good, thank you Bill for taking the time this morning, you know, before this great opportunity and it's an honor to interview Bill Weave.

My team and I have spent a couple of weeks digging in and it's been just fascinating, it's really been. Helpful for my team as we've been thinking about planning for 2019, which I'm sure won't miss much but probably still will to some extent, and we've been thinking about issues around long-term value creation and really about the importance of sustainable business and philanthropy, so today we're going to take a little trip through the different parts of how they've made this world a better place and I wanted to start by really recognizing the entrepreneurs and founders of this room and how much collective blood, sweat and tears we have given to our companies as founder and chief operating officer for 25 years of one of the most prolific and invaluable

startups

.

I wanted to start with your perspective on the important decisions you need to make. made during his tenure at Microsoft and how he views those decisions in relation to the company's long-term growth story. Well, Microsoft was very lucky that we are not a capital-intensive company, so you know it was funded with money. I had done it in high school and I did school programming and there were all kinds of software things that you could do and make money quite easily in those days because there were a number of people who knew how to do software things, it was very small. .

We took an investment, we sold 5% of the company and a 20 million valuation received a million dollars from a venture firm from Dave Marquardt's banking firm just because we wanted to have it actually, it was more high-level people, but it ended up being him who advised us. about various decisions that we had to make and so in those early days we did it because we knew that the software was a magical thing and it was enabled because the chip was magical and interestingly people didn't understand that, you know, Moore's law essentially it said that computing power would be infinite and so the best way to think about it was to say that software would be the limiting factor for any type of digitally assisted activity and, you know, we considered ourselves a software company and we ended up competing with companies that were unique. product companies, so I'm wondering if anyone here has ever heard of astin tape or ashton-tate.

Okay, there was a great article where I gave an intense speech about our database. It's a door that says ashton-tate. They never existed, but I didn't actually say that, I just said they might cease to exist at some point, anyway, very competitive, there was a spreadsheet called one, two, three, a word processor called WordPerfect, so They were single product companies and in terms of actual construction. your engineering tools your international distribution sales consulting how you work with the corporate sales force if you considered yourself a software company and a platform company it was very different than saying well, I have one, two, three, which was a product of Lotus spreadsheet, so we didn't do it Failure Out of Ambition, but then the intensity of executing it was very, very difficult.

When you think about the people who helped you, you know, really take Microsoft to a zone of scale beyond your founding team, can you reflect on one of the most important ones? hires that you made that we may not know about, but they would give us an idea of ​​the early days, yes, so the one you probably do know is Steve Ballmer. Steve was with me at Harvard, he went and worked for him, he actually graduated. to Procter and Gamble and then he was going to Stanford Business School and I had overcommitted the company because I was always worried that we were, that a lot of clients were going out of business and I was hiring people who had kids, you know, moved to the city. .

So I always did this calculation: Do I have enough money? If no one pays me, can I pay employees for more than a year? So I need. I realized I needed someone who could hire people and maybe tell me not to. sell things that weren't made yet, so I came with Steve to drop out of Business School. He came in and was extremely good at hiring people, so we realized we needed someone who had been in a large corporation and we made a mistake. We hired someone from Tektronix who, when we interviewed him, embarrassed us so much that why would he want to come to our miserable little company?

We forgot to interview him, but then after six weeks, when he hadn't plugged in his computer, we decided yes. I wasn't the right person, but there was a person who worked at RadioShack, a guy named John Shirley that I wanted to hire and I couldn't even say it because I really respected John, he was a big customer at the time, so I had Mi, the guy with venture capital status, Marquart, he's on the board, go tell John I wanted to hire him and John was like Bill, of course, God, I'd love to come there, so I guess I underestimated our appeal at the time, but.

He came in and he was the adult who, you know, had financial planning, like when we made this peripheral mouse and we had a warehouse full of them because we made too many of them. I'm so stupid and I just completely controlled those things. he was around for nine years and then he was an adult who knew how to hire adults, so we ended up with a good mix of naive, overly optimistic young people who still controlled everything and then the adults who could tell us to think twice before. We, you know, did three crazy things a day, so it was a great combination of skills and we learned to accept the fact that they weren't as intense as us.

I mean, they had wives and kids and stuff like that. go, they would leave at some point during the day, which brings me to a question I had for you about the early days and you and your work ethic, you know, you were quoted saying that you already know and probably something that we can all identify with when you were in your 20s and 30s, you were in the Microsoft go-go years, you didn't take vacations, basically all you did was work when you look back on those years and what they produced and you. look at today's ad founders, would they give the same advice?

How would you even approach the concept of work-life balance or do you think that's not possible for early-stage founders? Well, I think he knows he can overcome my adoration and mythologize the idea of ​​working extremely hard for my particular composition. I mean, it's really true that I didn't believe in weekends. I didn't believe in vacations. I mean, you know, he knew everyone's license plates, so he could tell you over the last month when his car was. They come and go from the parking lot, so I don't recommend it. I don't think most people enjoyed it once I turned 30.

I couldn't even imagine how I did it because by then a natural behavior appeared and I loved weekends and you know my girlfriend liked vacations and That turned out to be a great thing. Now I take on a lot of big cases. My 20 year old self is so disgusted with my current self. You know, I was sure I would never do anything else. Ridin coach, you know, I have a plane now, so it's very contrary to the revelations that have taken place at high speed, but yes, it's good if during those first few years you have a team that has chosen to be quite manic with the company and to what extent that. says, you must have a mutual understanding, see or not see one person waiting for one thing, another person waiting for another thing and you will have people who know your health or relatives or things that distract me, yes, I have a rather harsh opinion that there should be a very big sacrifice during those first few years, especially if you're trying to do some engineering stuff, you have to get the feasibility and you know in the software world it's very particular to winner-take-all platforms. markets, so you know, the biggest mistake I have made is the mismanagement in which I participated and that caused Microsoft to not be what Android is, that is, Android is the standard telephone platform, a platform that is not Apple and which was a natural thing for Microsoft to win and you know it's really it's winner takes all, you know, if you're there with half the apps or 90% of the apps, you're on your way to complete doom, there's room for exactly one operating system other than Apple and you know which one it is. that's worth four hundred

bill

ion, that would be, you know, transferred from one company to another and it's amazing to me that I let you know what the biggest mistakes of all time are and there was this antitrust lawsuit, there are things that you know are our other asset windows.

We are still very strong so we are a leading company, if we do well we would be the company, but wow, there is this idea that just small differences can be magnified and it doesn't exist for many companies. We're a service business, it doesn't exist, but for software platforms it's absolutely gigantic and that's partly where you have the mentality that every night you think: Am I screwing this up? And eventually we ruin a super important one when you think about you know you've been I guess I'd bet on you finding the key to reversing aging it's a personal opinion when you find it and you could go back to your twenties what would you do?

What would you start well? AI the attic of the paradigm. The question for anyone who has ever written software is what is the software that controls a human being, their ability to write symphonies, play chess, engage in social activities, you know, read, you know, computers, we choose them and we would mainly define a certain sensory perception. understanding of speech and vision and that would be the frontier also in the game of chess, but that turned out to be really solvable, that is, to be better than humans through brute force techniques, so that took off about fifteen years ago, but you're always wondering.

When can I create a computer that can take, say, a textbook, read it, take the AP exam and get a five and you know it's completely unsolved? So the most interesting thing is that this guy Hilbert posed twenty-two

problems

for mathematicians in 1900, you know? think of the equivalent in software problem number one which in some ways includes most of the other

problems

, although there are things about simulating the environment that are also interesting in the way that problem number one is not solved and in that would work if his mind knew it. since the age of 11, let's say, you think about software and what it can do and what I can't do, and then you know you think you're really good at writing code and then you meet someone who's better and you're like, "Well, now I'm really good." Well".

You know someone who's better, you know, at 18 you might actually be pretty good, so the rest of your life you're going to think about the structure of software that can do the equivalent of what a human can do. , so I definitely would. attracted by that now it turns out that in this era that is not the only interesting problem. I mean, there are certain problems in biology, poor man's diseaseswhich I am obsessed with. I'm not making the test tubes myself, but I can help elect and fund the people who work on those things and there are also things in energy that have to do with inventions that would prevent climate change, so you know I would definitely do software because that's what my brain, you know, is like Bobby Fischer playing chess, I mean, your mind understands molded and molded in a pretty permanent way for the obsessive problems of the ages of 11 to 21, when do you think about the last decades and you know that you are such an iconic entrepreneur and founder, obviously, for this room and many others, but also?

Seeing how entrepreneurship has changed and evolved over the last few decades and then being today where you're spending more time with the next generation of founders, you learn about a lot of different topics, one of them being philanthropy, what have you observed? That has changed in the last few decades in terms of entrepreneurship and what are you learning from the next generation founders? Well, I'm sure it's nice that the idea of ​​being a founder is that you can meet other people who do it and the notion that if the first one isn't perfect, it's okay to do a second one and there are all these people who want to give you money now , now you have a real ecosystem along with that cool feature, it also means that the ease of entry and so unless you've come up with something really thought out, everyone there are a dozen other people saying, okay, let's design drugs with machine learning, you know, let's do radiology with machine learning so that you can move quickly and you can see the patterns, you don't have to invent many things, even many things that you don't even have to do within the company anymore.

You know, cloud computing simplifies the ability to scale at any time, but you get intense competition including from existing giants who, as you know, are scanning the world with almost infinite R&D resources, so I think There are many more ideas about what I want my company to be. You know you can look. on Netflix and I said, "Do you know what I want to do?" because he's a very innovative thinker about doing things slightly different than what other people have done and you know Reed Hoffman writes books that are fantastic, so which is a more understood field, whereas the idea of ​​"it's okay." you're 19 they don't let you rent a car you have a company it was so strange that people actually overreacted and once they realized that such a thing existed they expected you to understand and know things that you didn't have I have no idea because it was almost like a wild card that can write software better than my entire software engineering team, so I think it's great that it's well established and some of these practices about treating your workers well thinking about diversity, I mean, It also takes energy to do these things, but the field is much better in terms of making these companies good and the companies themselves, of course, you know the private sector and innovation in the private sector is the main reason why things are getting better.

Philanthropy has this. A very specialized role to play, so the companies themselves are more likely to do more good through their philanthropy than through the company they do. There may be cases like that, but especially if you are a Wat Fellini company that has huge benefits for the world. That brings me to a question that I think many founders these days are pondering: What is the social impact in creating a culture focused on social good? What you just mentioned is a central part of at least the expectations set in this part of the debate. world in our little bubble here, but I was wondering what you think about how early a company leader or a founder should think about giving back and I think you have a really interesting perspective on this that's pretty well informed, but I can Maybe you can't share that perspective with the audience about you know?

Should we give back as soon as possible? Should we increase the value of our companies? How do you think about the hybrid model? Well, I'm always trying. To convince companies that they should make employees give them half of the payroll deduction, nonprofits come and talk. It used to be that people structured that around the United Way campaign, now you can still do that, but a lot of people create their own, but I think the fact that the company you know has different parts competing to Be the most generous and sit back and learn that there are many people who find themselves in difficult situations that are easy to forget when you work at these companies.

I think that's good for the company, I also think that the founders, although you won't have a lot of liquidity, the idea of ​​choosing a local cause that you're committed to, you know, sometimes with your spouse, sometimes not necessarily, so you start going down that learning curve. Okay, you know, pick a charter school that you go to and get to know the people who are at that charter school and what their challenges are. Go to the local public school or you know there are dozens of other things. I don't think so. work well just to make your company and then think carefully about where these needs are now because you won't, the fact that it is so different, that there are no market signals and that the experience in measuring very different things, you will find it difficult.

By doing so, you know that like Mark Zuckerberg, he's starting to give at a much younger age, when he was in his early 30s, where I actually did my pilot giving when I was in my 40s and then moved on to serious giving in relation to the amount he had not made until he was fifty. you said that the most important speed issue is often not technical but cultural in an organization and is convincing everyone that the survival of the company depends on moving as quickly as possible and you touched on that a little bit this morning in the first days and in the I wonder if you think about the disciplines, lessons and approaches that you are bringing from your years and from Microsoft to the world of philanthropy and, in particular, to the current areas of focus.

Energy education for global health, do you know how you are? How are you seeing the effectiveness of those lessons, disciplines and approaches in this type of new area focus? Yes, of course, the word philanthropy, you know, entrepreneurship covers a wide variety of things. What my wife Melinda has chosen is to create an organization that takes responsibility for reducing and eliminating the diseases of the poor, which are infectious diseases, and, as you know, we spent five

bill

ion in total on a bid, more than two billion They are a kind of medicines and vaccines. R&D, and I get to when you know, I say, okay, we're going to build the TB drug team, we're going to build the TB vaccine team, we're going to build them, you know, we're going to kill all the mosquitoes of the world. gene drive CRISPR team In terms of how we fund that organization, how many locations do we wait until they have this result before we scale it up.

I can use the same or 80% the same type of thinking that I exercised in terms of "okay, let's go." go to Windows, we're going to make Excel to support the engineers, you get a sense of the team, you know what needs to be added to that team or the IQs of the team add up instead of subtracting from each other and it's very convenient because The most intense period for Microsoft was when these computers were about size 30 and for our diseases, you know, typhoid rotavirus, there are many diseases that you will hopefully never hear about again, most of which do not exist here in the US, but that's how it is.

Very very similar, it usually takes a decade from start to finish for the AIDS vaccine, in fact we are in year 14 and it will probably be another 8 to 10 years before it is completely finished, so some take up to 20 years because there are There are a lot of dead ends and you have kind of a portfolio of approaches, but yes, I feel that working with governments hiring smart people to manage teams prepared me well for this very operational organization that is a lot like a business, except that We are our profit. lives saved instead of a monetary measure so you know zero to five mortality, which was 11 million a year in 1990 and is now below 6 million.

Our metric is, you know, by 2030, can we get to 3 million a year? We did a good job and it's very doable, you know, there are comments there. Now we had to create a complete measurement system to make sure we understood not only the number of deaths but also the causes of deaths so that we can address the right things, so it compares to most of LAN 3, where you think that Alright. I'll write this nice check to this organization. It is something very practical because I like to use these skills that I am addicted to. numerical literacy in our society and, as an example, you see that people dramatically overestimate how much the United States spends on foreign aid, what's your best idea for how to make Americans better aware of where their taxes are going?

Yes, the idea that democracy involves studying the budget and knowing how much is spent and you know that the candidate proposes to change it this way and you can propose to change it that way and it's this very technocratic exercise where people really understand that those big numbers that you know the closer you get to the boring understanding, that's not what's going on here, you know, even members of Congress, the complexity of the budget and compensation, there are some who put those pieces together, the general idea that you know the foreign. aid is less than 1% in the sense that it basically saves lives for less than $500 for every life saved, that is a very difficult thing to convey and even if it could be conveyed to people, I don't know if they are shocked as they should be . that, oh, you mean, I write a check for $500, I buy more measles campaigns and I literally saved a child's life because you know we see lives and we behave and I think appropriately, like lives here in the US.

In the US, they were worth many millions of dollars, I mean, we will spend 10 million dollars on an acute situation, you know, saving a certain type of child with a cancer type situation, you know those are our values, so anyway there is this contrast with the idea that you could get people to decide to support this for something stupid, which is a big deal for our foundation from a numbers standpoint, we're still pushing that a little bit, but honestly, the only child story , you know, if you say to an audience, here's this kid's picture, are we going to save this kid?

You're more committed than if you said, "Hey, let's save a million kids," so there's definitely a 10 to 6 problem here somewhere that humans aren't programmed to do that in numerical terms, and you know it's that's why. we have people like Bono and many others who come from a more narrative world and then they let me include some graphs and numbers because I think that should be there once your heart tells you which direction to go to prove it. this is a very affordable, don't you know, no big deal, well-managed path to further afield when you think about your more domestic focus areas.

K-12 education is one of them, do you know how you think about the problems they face? Americans, do you find more energy around those issues when you talk to audiences in the United States? How do you think about the differences between yourselves, do you know the American dish and the rest of the world? Yeah, so we do two things, we do it globally. things with health at the center and that's about 80 percent and then we hear in the U.S. our centerpiece is education, which includes kindergarten through 12th grade and higher education, but from kindergarten Kindergarten through 12th grade is the most important piece, we thought that because US education is here and everyone is so rational and wants to do so well, we would have big victories in US education.

As you know, reduce the school dropout rate by half. The United States has the highest dropout rates in both high school and college, higher than any country in the world, so we actually have more people entering higher education than any other country. We have 12 countries that graduate more people from higher education than we do and you know, in terms of the cost of education, the person who is really bad off is the one who paid that cost and didn't get the degree. That's actually a bad deal if you get the degree you want. I know if it wasn't some for-profit culinary cooking school that was misleading you about job opportunities, so except in a few, maybe 10% of cases, it's actually not that bad of a situation in case our success in terms of macro numbers is high. school dropouts math test results verbal test results you know where the United States is also supports many otherscountries, particularly Asian countries, our success there is very small, you know, we invest a lot and yes, I can point to the charter schools that we have been involved in, which if you go and the visits will be very uplifting and that's great and that's mmm about a million kids a year, but there are 52 million kids in the US from kindergarten to 12, so if you help a million you won't see it, it's in the rounding error of mackerel measurements of that system, that's Ben's, you know, ignore philanthropy, $10,000 per student per year, so philanthropy, you have to have a theory why.

Could it be philanthropy? I mean, this is true for all of these things. Why is philanthropy like

investing

$1 to found Google? Why is it so impeccable in general? And the answer is that this is a company that does not have an R&D department, that is, it is studying why certain teachers can teach you two years of math, while that other teacher over there makes you think that Matt is not for you , you know what that person does, look and there are certainly people with incredible natural abilities who discovered it on their own, something that is not well understood nor is it there in an attempt to expand?

Do you know what that top 10% practice looks like? We started, we did 22 our thousand hours of elite videos, the best teachers and the other teachers, we analyzed it and you know, we figured it out. the key characteristics, but getting the training system to move them, you know, so that the top forty percent can be as good as the top ten percent anyway, that wasn't successful, so it's much more difficult. , partly because their money is small. Compared to this, people are also basically satisfied with the way they are. I mean, you can get a small group together and say “hey, let's make this better,” but then when you say “okay,” that means either your neighborhood schools are going to close or you're the teacher.

In your neighborhood they are going to feel some pressure on them, so people always say that their neighborhood school is good, but the school system as a whole is very bad anyway, in this case we underestimate how difficult it is and we are in our way. In sort of a third review of the strategies, we're still very committed to it and honestly, we probably helped more than four million out of 50 million, so it's starting to show a little bit in the numbers, so you know, the hope remains eternal and it's because we think with The difficult global health happened much bigger, you know, at least we, we know that we are not completely stupid, so it lets you know that it's good if at least some of your projects go well, really It helps you persevere in what appears. to be so, wait longer than I imagined, which sounds like you're exuding the characteristics, the characteristics of a possible list, which brings me to the next my next question about your book list, one of the books on your This year's list that Hans Rosling really spoke to me as if it were a fact, where he talks, but not about being optimistic, but about being a possible list.

I highly recommend you read the book starting today if I could say so myself, but your book list is a gift because not only is it a selection of books in a world where we are inundated with content, but it is also a window to the topics that you are learning more about and that can inform us about the work that you will do in the future, so when I look at last year's books I see themes of optimism, definitely, forward-looking energy for poverty building and I also see that in the areas of focus for you when you look, when you think about the books you're reading this year and what we wouldn't read, we can see it on the list next year, what themes you think will be noticed and what you're absorbing or reading today, well , the good thing now that I'm not so extreme when I'm 20 years old.

I couldn't read much at all and since all this is happening in biology and math, I just couldn't read it and then when I turned 30, that vacation was time to go back. because when I was a student and he could study all kinds of things anyway, now you know I read a lot of science and that consumes, you know, maybe half of the spaces that I have, I really understand how we are poverty and what is happening there, there are a few dozen books that try to give you a sense of that, which are very good, this book, facts about this, let me tell you it definitely creates a framework for what is happening in the world and the other one that is around height is any Pinker book.

Beginning with the better angels of our nature, the world is improving in all these incredible ways, and yet it is a human characteristic to look at where it is not improving or where it might not improve, and then we have this paradox that with all this improvement so much Arguably, rich countries and poor countries improve even faster, and in poor countries, although people tend to focus not on those that are improving but on those still left behind, there is adverse selection, unless they have the notion that this system of capitalism and this so-called Western democracy has worked very well the temptation to say oh no, this is not a good system, let's take a risk and try something very, very different, it is very high and that is why it is scary if we take into account tells the data in this book.

We are the group that is least aware of the improvements in the world, our professors in US universities, so when they have this proof of how many children are in poverty now, how many children are dying now, the people who are more below 50%, which is the chimpanzee level achievement that the people who managed to get down to 20% are professors at US universities, it is the lowest group ever tested anyway because they have a mentality that, oh, I go in and tell people about these problems and and they really don't know, take a step back and look at some of these key statistics so you know.

I worry that if you don't get a lot of people thinking about that, then you won't be able to continue with things like globalism, multilateralism. you know Abe Abe's generosity and working together because the really difficult problems like not having big pandemics or

solving

climate change or not having big wars are things that require countries to work together, there really are no super big problems that don't require that the countries work together and you, interestingly, and the last goalkeeper, a report with this, you know, you just do a great job of being very transparent about the winds and the challenges, you are making yourself quite bold, it is very, very clear What do you want people? know that the global slowdown in poverty is stalling and could actually be reversed.

Can you talk a little bit about what you're trying to accomplish beyond the obvious facts and why that was the headline? Yes So development in the world, you know, it starts with the West, sort of Europe, us, then comes post-war Japan and, let's say, in 1960, it was a very bimodal world, do you have rich countries and poor countries? and you don't have intermediate countries? low-income countries, well, very few so, as we move forward, what happens is that the vast majority of the world's population moves to a middle-income status in Brazil, Mexico, China, India, in particular, you know they represent 37% of the world between them and the countries with such poor companies. become an exception and rich countries have less than 20%, one of the measures used in that game is the highest measure of extreme poverty, ninety per day, as the World Bank does, so according to that measure we had 36 percent in 1990, now we have nine percent. that nine percent are increasingly on a continent increasingly in Africa and, on current trends, by 2050 ninety percent of the extremely poor will be in Africa and population dynamics are such that Asia has almost no more population growth, it has a little bit left because people are living longer, but you know, China is shrinking, India, you know, shrinking in a big us, none of the big countries are our high population growth, you still have Afghanistan and Yemen, but those are not large numbers, so the number of babies in the world decreases a little. each year of the century, but their combination goes from 25% in Africa to 50% in Africa and South Africa goes from one billion people to four billion people, so when we reach 11 billion we are at seven, the maximum increase is now.

In Africa, the rest are the aging, longer-living Asians who spend four to five anyway, so Africa is difficult, you know, the quality of governance, the burden of disease on infrastructure, and that's why in this report we say, look, this is great, we have to do it. 9%, but we could stay at 9% for the next 30 years unless we make a lot of really good investments in health, education and governance in Africa. A country in Africa. Nigeria is on track to be the third largest country in the world. 800 million in the future. By the end of the century China will have shrunk, but you have India anyway, China and Nigeria will be about the same size and Niger isn't very big, so it's discouraging for anyone who has spent time in the larger African countries. hard that will test this notion that we will be able to continue the mind-blowing improvement that we have had even in Africa, literacy goes from 20% to 75%, you know life is much longer, but until you get a certain quality Governments then can't get roads, can't get electricity, can't get schools, can't get basic healthcare, so their governance right now in many areas is below that threshold, so we like to give Good news, but we like to be really honest about this Mik change challenge we're facing.

Well, it's time for me to stop hogging the microphone and if you want to ask Phil a question, we have two microphones, one here and one here. there and we will alternate Hi, I'm Varsha Rao, I'm the CEO of Clover Health and I'm a friend of Village Global. Thanks everyone, thanks for having me and thanks guys, what's Bill? What is the most impactful specific unsolved problem that could be solved in your mind with technology that you would like someone to take well to this idea of ​​reading in general. If you can do it, then you can create an agent that helps a student as one. individual tutor, deanna? seeing those misconceptions and helping people solve problems that get very used to manipulations and visualization, so I would say there are some learning tutor things that I would love to see done, you know, I would love to see the Foundation ones .

The biggest quest is the one that people probably know, everyone knows to work on the HIV vaccine, but the biggest one that people don't really appreciate is that forty percent of children in poor countries their body and brain never develop, that is, during their early years, the disease and The nutritional characteristics are such that they have an IQ below eighty, so what happens there has to do with the microbiome and inflammation of the stomach, if We can intervene in that and it is not a question of macronutrition, it is its gross quantity. good food, your twin is doing well if we can solve the nutrition problem, which is very gigantic in terms of unlocking the human potential of the biggest promises of software and imagine that in ten years Microsoft of AI will develop what would be its business model. most of the so called personal agent that has permission to see all your information and helps you instead of running you, knows twenty applications and looks at the data in the ordered time, see it because it understands your preferences, your context, it is your portal to the world.

And that's a replacement for social media search, you know, productivity apps, you know, going to Amazon and picking something that you interact with and therefore it crashes, what are the current giants? You know, somewhat indisputable business models, each to their own. niche, you know the social network Facebook and Amazon buying the Google search beacon, so you have the opportunity to combine all those different elements, that is, an advertising element with a markup element, it will probably be done on a subscription basis for many people because this idea of ​​not asking what the tradeoffs are, the advertising model can still exist because there are win-win situations where your desire to learn about a new type of product is beneficial to you and the advertiser, so it would be a combination of subscription and advertising there are probably no transaction fees because you want to be neutral on who you end up doing business with so you don't want to have essentially own brands, products or distribution channels, but the personal agent is the penthouse of the paradigm that collapses the current order of the software industry and a company Google Microsoft someone will create that beautiful collapse Thank you, you mentioned the incredible benefits of Moore's law, unfortunately, it is finally over, at least ending sequential computing, we are making a lot of progress . with custom Asics for machine learning, such as processing unitstensors, but that is a more limited domain.

I'm curious to see some path in the next 40 to 50 years to regain that exponential scale in computing. Yes, this is a very good point, it's kind of a Pasta Ops Food like point, which is that plateaus are reached and in terms of clock speed, a single thread we reached a plateau actually quite a while ago, we were still able to reduce the design rules, but because of heat density problems we have. We haven't been able to speed up the clock now, the good thing is that we are using more area than you know, particularly in a cloud type computing environment, for problems that can be divided into many threads, which represents about 98 percent of all The problems are.

You get super smart, so we still feel like, oh God, we're getting a lot more confused. The two borders there is something called criminal computing where you can go back and increase your clock speed because you super drive the wires and there are some people like Microsoft who are very advanced in this, strangely some people who you think would work on it are working on it and then there is the quantum and the quantum. You know, I spend a lot of time studying quantum because it's interesting mathematics. Can we build a quantum computer? Can we build a quantum computer?

In quantum computers you are not interested in having at least ten thousand cubits, so that's fine, then it is interesting for a certain class of problems. How big is that kind of problem? The factorization of prime numbers is strangely due to the short run on that set. of things so that you can issue as many bitcoins as you want, among other things that can happen, so I want them even though Microsoft is

investing

billions and it is a very promising prediction that is not clear to predict the acquisition of computing and continue to expand the cloud, including taking the FPGA and GPU parts and integrating them in a much deeper way.

I mean, GPUs are very expensive today and they don't have to be inherent to mainstream ml training and printing things that we do, so there will be a generation that will come there. which you know, certainly another factor of 10, thanks, yeah Jay, I'm a little hesitant to reveal that. I'm a professor at Stanford, I teach computer science there, and I firmly believe that there is a huge opportunity for society around learning. computer science skills there is a huge need and then the other trend that we have been talking about among some of my colleagues is just the pressure with amazing tools icon Academy all the online learning that is available the pressure that comes in the traditional model of residential college what do you think is the right way to usher in a kind of evolution in which residential education that intellectual leading universities reduce and perhaps there are fewer college-level residential education opportunities for students what is the correct paper?

For those who think that leading universities do well, there is no doubt that you know that Stanford is not under pressure, that is, the philanthropy and science scholarships that are available to it. There is a question: should they try to grow their student body because it is a wonderful thing? So that the world has more students going there, the ski schools that are really at risk or the state level schools where the vast majority of college education in this country is done in four year state schools and that's where they still there are tuitions that are like, you know, between eleven thousand and seventeen thousand a year instead of say sixty thousand a year now that sixty have huge scholarships, so if Stanford wants you, you're not financially blocked from going there, which is fantastic, there are about five institutions that can afford to do that so you know if you are at the top, well point out one percent for merit and you can make them realize that, then that works great, These state level institutions are increasing enrollment because you know I haven't increased productivity that much.

I think a combination of using more online, you know, sharing more material, can still give us all this rift where you have Stanford and Harvard, but they're also contributing some of the material that's used. Because of those other levels, the other levels today don't like to just take a course from someone else and the number of students who can learn without a social environment around them is very, very small, you know, if you want to learn computing only you. I know Knuth wrote the book, okay, you know, read it and do the problems, if you really think you know this, if you want to learn physics, Fineman wrote the book, just read the damn book, it will all be there so that when we put things in line.

Honestly, it's a little easier to learn now. You know, the guy makes jokes every 20 minutes or at least he tries and does more demonstrations and things like that, so learning is a strange social phenomenon and you know our base, our big problem is that the group that does worse with the online learning are low-income students because their notion of why I'm learning their sense of self-confidence the ability to discover oh, I just got stuck because you know two disadvantages cancel each other out and I never saw that notation before I just They're going to hit dead ends all the time, that if you're sitting in your dorm at Stanford, you know that someone is coming and helping you through it, so we have The problem of how do we get a low-cost education for low-income students hasn't been solved. income where you actually complete it.

You know that most community colleges have a dropout rate of over fifty percent. Most four-year colleges have a dropout rate of over thirty percent. Now Stanford. it doesn't have a dropout rate because they don't let in people who would drop out you know they were successful the day the admissions department was done they didn't make those people hardworking they just picked hardworking people which is fine I don't disagree with that, but it means this notion of dropping out, you know, most people in this room don't know much about how that comes up and becomes daunting, so we have to solve just the issue of cost through digitalization . but also the motivational framework so that, yes, you know, a low-income person has just as much chance of graduating as an elite person and today we are further from that than we have ever been great.

Hi, Nick became CEO of Earn Site Billy throughout the talk talked about AI encapsulating human reasoning and what you can do about it. What is the algorithm or heuristic that he personally uses to think about which cause is most valuable, so not which solution is most effective but which cause? working on whether it's poverty or disease or anything else, yeah, there are people like Dustin Moskovitz who really went down this path of trying to do it. It's brilliant and worthwhile, and he can share how he took that path that he really chose. Global health is One of the things that also stops AI from taking over the world is another one he chose, but most people chose his philanthropy because of a more emotional story.

You know, my daughter had anorexia. Turns out you know. I only know one philanthropist whose daughter. She had anorexia and he funded the most amazing research. They are making really great progress. You know, that's phenomenal. There was a philanthropist who had some autism. He funded all the really excellent genetic understanding. In fact, they saw us get super genetics because that. It turned out to be much easier. The genetics of autism are very complicated, but they are finally getting to the bottom of it, which is why most people choose things for more emotional reasons. Now, once you enter that domain, you can go crazy. kids who drop out of school, do you know why our parents, least of all black men, have it so much harder in this school than others?

What particular things could we do for them so that you can bring your business sense to the table once you've chosen your topics? There are so many topics if you want. to save lives for the least amount of money, so you know, come to Seattle and let's work together, you know it's a job that will probably come up, but I didn't choose it for that, I chose it because of the injustice of letting the child die, you know ? They are literally two vaccines that were invented for diarrheal pneumonia and that were administered in rich, middle-income countries, where less than 5% of the deaths from these diseases occurred and the children who suffered from 95% of the deaths did not receive the corresponding vaccines. . the attic paradigm that made me realize, okay, although it's similar to what the Rockefeller Foundation did and I didn't want to do the same thing they did.

You know, to some extent, we're doing the same thing they did. Good musical background here. It's really so I apologize. We don't have any more time for questions right now, but I can ask you the last question. No founder can change the world alone. It takes a village around you to help you realize your full potential. Who is someone in your group? Village, which has been instrumental to its success and how well. There's no doubt he knows how to create a board with people like David Marquardt on there who weren't in the company. You know and we were so excited.

You know this is right. wrong, we ruined this, having people who are a little distant come and talk to us is good, you know, over the last 30 years or so, I have become friends with Warren Buffett and he is in Omaha, he is not in this world of technology you know and for him it's like hey, how would you know which one will rise and which one will fall? I'm not going to invest any money until Apple sells at a multiple of 12 and then decided it could invest 50 billion in that after asking all its friends, hey, you know, if someone had an iPhone that was half as expensive , you would change it, you know?

Regardless, the streams may not be removed anytime soon. Because he's not in this world, he has a definite way of looking at things, including this idea of ​​how work should be fun. He has made his job so fun that he works more hours than I do. He worked six days a week at 88 and likes to say he misses work every day he doesn't, but says when he was 83 he could still miss it, but now that it's over, he really can't, so having Someone so, you know, the

hardest

thing I went through was this antitrust lawsuit, where you know it didn't seem very predictable and he was a great lawyer through all of that, so getting someone who is successful in another domain but is still kind of business type mentality anyway for me it was a great gift, thank you very much, it is a great honor to be here with you and thanks to Village Global for giving everyone the opportunity to spend the morning with Bill Gates, thank you, good job, thank you.

Thank you Julia and Bill, what a stimulating conversation covered so much territory. Now we have some time for the reception outside, so it's a beautiful day. Those of you who have been to our events before know that we have some question cards on different tables around some. of the near and dear topics to bill and Julia's conversation giving back to the Gates Foundation about the future of Microsoft healthcare, so if you're intrigued to have a conversation about those topics, you can stay around those tables and take a question card; Otherwise, hang out and have some. food, there are some extraordinary people here to meet.

You can also see the science exhibits here for free because you are our guest at the Exploratorium, so on behalf of all of us, the global village, thank you for joining us, see you next. time