Believe it or not, it was one of Microsoft’s top executives who, in a fit of rage, snapped at Gabe Newell, who was unknown at the time.
Valve co-founder Gabe Newell, a yacht-loving billionaire, gave an interview to Zalkar Saliev. It turns out young Newell loved programming, but never thought it would be a viable career. The world of medicine lost what could have been an excellent doctor (it’s hard to picture Gaben in scrubs with a stethoscope), but Newell’s passion for programming led him to the Raytheon 703 at the University of California, the first computer he ever programmed, before heading to Harvard and starting programming classes. But how did he end up at Microsoft…?
“I started programming in high school. At the time, programming wasn’t really a career path. There were probably only a couple thousand programmers in the United States, mainly working on mainframe accounting software, and maybe a few at NASA. But there wasn’t this idea that software was a huge industry. Video games didn’t even exist. I was 10 when Pong came out, so as a kid I thought I’d be a doctor, and programming was just something I did when I should’ve been doing something else. There were no courses for it, and my first programmable device was a Texas Instruments calculator…”
It still hadn’t occurred to me that programming could be a career. For Thanksgiving, I visited my brother, who had just started working at Microsoft. Back then, they weren’t the world’s biggest software developer—not even in the US, or even in Washington State. At the time, they were only the third largest in suburban Washington. No one could have imagined the reputation they’d have a decade later. I thought I’d just hang out with my brother, but it turned out he was working on a C compiler all the time. So I hung out at his office, and Steve Ballmer got mad because I was distracting Dan from his work and said, ‘If you’re going to hang out here, why don’t you do something useful?’ So I said, fine, I’ll work a little. I decided to take a quarter off and just work at Microsoft.”
I kept telling myself I’d go back and finish my degree, but 13 years later I still hadn’t done it. That’s where I really learned to be a developer. It was amazing how much faster I learned at Microsoft. At the time, it was the best place in the world to learn programming. The company was proud of how quickly and well they could write code, and how they could solve programming problems no one else could. There were a lot of great people to learn from. When I got there, it was clear that, in terms of doing valuable work, working at Microsoft was much better than going back to finish my education. I spent 13 years there and then decided to start Valve,” Newell said.
Newell’s obvious respect for early Microsoft and the cultural elements he admired are now woven into Valve’s DNA. The core ideas are simple: surround yourself with smart people, learn by doing, focus on problems others don’t, and achieve radical results within the context of advancing computing.
Asked whether there’s any difference between extremely wealthy entrepreneurs and everyone else, Newell said the only reason people think so is due to flawed analysis. He didn’t attribute his success to a special personality trait or a secret, forbidden LinkedIn posting technique. Instead, he credits luck throughout his career—like being able to work with Neil Konzen, Doug Klunder, and Jeff Harbers (early Microsoft employees) during the PC revolution.
“There’s this thing called survivor bias. If you study people in a certain category, you miss that just because they share a trait doesn’t mean there’s causality. I think I’m where I am because I’ve been lucky enough to be around people like Konzen, Klunder, and Harbers, and the dice kept rolling my way. Of course, it would be great to say I’m an awesome person who earned all this and deserved it and that it shows how fantastic I am, but there was a lot of luck involved,” Newell added.
He admitted that luck played a huge part in Valve becoming as successful as it is today.
Leave a Reply