I grinned back. “Well, I’m willing to support the troops if you are. Let’s figure two weeks, not just one!”
“You always amaze me with the sacrifices you are willing to make. I’ll call her back later. They are six hours behind us, or something like that.”
We ended up making plans to fly out and visit them at the end of July. In the meantime, though, I had to go meet a man who was probably the smartest businessman in America since the end of the Second World War, and try to buy a piece of his baby. A baby he wasn’t overly thrilled about selling a piece of. Melissa had told me that from the sound of things on the phone, I was on a fool’s errand.
I flew out on Monday, so that I would be rested and fresh on Tuesday. I packed light, with just a few days of clothes in my hanging bag and my briefcase. I left my return trip date open. If things worked out, I would stay as long as I needed to make the deal. If Missy was right, I’d be flying home on Wednesday.
I rented a car at the airport, and headed out. Bellevue was east of Seattle, and I needed convenient, not fancy. I found a Holiday Inn that would meet my needs just outside of Seattle. I went inside, checked in, dumped my crap in the room, and went down to the restaurant for dinner and a drink. No, I wasn’t going to get lit up, not if I wanted to hold my own with the man who would one day be the richest man in America.
I recalled what I remembered about Gates from reading about him in what would be the future. We had relatively similar backgrounds, in that we grew up in wealthy suburbs. His family was definitely better off than mine. While my father was a successful engineer, his was a very successful lawyer. We had both gone to good schools, although I seemed to recall he went to a private school, but I just wasn’t sure about that. I do remember how he dropped out of college to start Microsoft.
It was very difficult to get any financial information on the company, which wasn’t at all surprising, since they were not a publicly traded firm. Further, in 1982, they were a very small fish, and not really on anybody’s radar. Melissa’s best guess was that they were somewhere in the low 20s in sales, that is to say, annual sales in the low $20 million range. Profits and cash flow were anybody’s guess, but they were profitable, that much I did know. In the DOS days, the coding was relatively simple, and their per unit costs were mostly the cost of packaging and shipping the diskettes. Until they had their IPO, they financed almost everything internally.
So, why would he sell? As I had told John, Gates was using the standard Silicon Valley startup tactic for hiring — pay a decent enough salary, but promise them the world with stock grants and options. Sooner or later his own people would begin looking for a big payout, and he would be forced to sell a piece to generate a market and let people cash in. Still, that was probably for a few years hence, not now.
I needed to convince the shrewdest businessman of our generation to sell me something he didn’t need to sell!
My appointment was for 10:30 on Tuesday. I left the motel around 10:00 and got there with a few minutes to spare. I was in his office at the agreed time.
Bill Gates looked just like his future press clippings and articles would depict him, a somewhat rumpled looking guy in glasses, wearing slacks and a button down dress shirt without a tie and with the top button undone. In other words, he looked like a nerd. I, on the other hand, had dressed neatly, in a charcoal suit and a white dress shirt, and shined shoes. I was going for the businessman look, which might or might not work out here. I even had my good cane, a nice ebony and brass gift from Marilyn for Father’s Day. I also had an old and beat up oak cane for around the house.
His office wasn’t all that glorious, but it did have a few armchairs and a coffee table to the side. “Thank you for seeing me, Mister Gates. I appreciate this.”
“You’re welcome, Mister Buckman.” He eyed my limp and the cane.
I smiled. “An old injury from my last job. I think flying aggravated it a bit. I get a little stiff at times.”
“What happened?”
“Well, I used to be a paratrooper, and I made one jump too many,” I answered.
He held his arm out, gesturing to the armchairs, and I selected one and sat down. He chose a chair opposite me. “Well, please have a seat. I’m curious why you’re here. It wasn’t quite clear over the telephone why you were coming.”
“Thank you.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out a silver business card holder and slipped out a card. When we started the company, I had business cards made up, crisp white with a slightly pebbled finish, lettering in a glossy black ink.
The Buckman Group
Private Equity and Capital
In one corner we had our address and phone number, diagonally across we had our names and titles. I had ordered two sets made for myself. Both of them listed me as Carl Buckman, President and CEO, but one set, what I called the ‘Nerd’ cards, had the letters ‘PhD’ after my name. I gave Gates one of the nerd cards.
He looked at it and said, “Excuse me, Doctor Buckman. What did you get your degree in?”
“My bachelors and masters I got in mathematics, my doctorate is in applied mathematics. I worked in Set Theory, mostly Information Theory and Topology, but really, I liked all aspects of the field,” I replied.
He looked at me oddly. “You have me curious. I was under the impression you were here to talk to me about an investment. Or are you looking for a job?”
I laughed at that. “Investment! Really! I have a very nice job back home, and a family and friends. I have no interest in moving across the country. Thank you for the offer, though, if that’s what that was.” I grinned as I said this.
He gave me a brief smile, but not much of one. He’d be a hell of a poker player, I suspected. I recalled at that moment that he didn’t play poker, but that he was a world class bridge player. “Well, it wasn’t, but it did make me curious. So, you are here about investing with us, in Microsoft? I don’t recall ever even hearing about your firm.”
“We’re a new company, only a few months old, really. We’ve just started in the private equity business, although I’ve been actively investing for a number of years now.”
“So, this is your business, then. Not family money, with you on the letterhead?”
I shook my head. “Roughly 98 % of the stock in the Buckman Group is in my name. I’ll be blunt about it. I’ve been investing on Wall Street since about the time you started playing with computers back in high school. Probably before then. I’ve had a brokerage account since I was 13. Now I’m doing it for real, just like you and computers and programming.”
Gates looked at me curiously. “Since you were 13? And how old are you now?”
“Your age. Maybe a bit younger. I was born in November of ’55, you were when? Earlier that year, right?”
“October. So what made you get degrees in math and not business?”
“Good question.” I smiled at that. More than a few of those late nights down at Amos Eat-Me had made me ask the same question. “I think I just wanted to prove I could do it. Same thing when I went into the army. I wanted to test myself, to see if I was good enough. Nothing good comes unless you push yourself.”
“So, you made enough money to come to me and invest, while going to school and being in the army? Just how much money?”
“Well, I’m certainly not planning on divulging our holdings, but let’s put it this way. We’re prepared to write a check for several million dollars, and we won’t be investing more than ten percent of our capital in doing so.”
Gates sat back in his chair and considered me for a second, but I couldn’t see what was going on in his mind. “I’m curious. Even if I wanted to do this, why should we choose you? I’ve probably had a half dozen investment companies in to see us this year alone, all of them with names and sizes much larger than yours.”