Beijing, 1 Jul (ZXS) -- Rational optimist Bill Gates
China Newsweek reporter Li Jing
In May, Bill Gates gave a speech to graduates and gave five life tips after receiving an honorary doctorate from Northern Arizona University. This is the image that the former richest man in the world has often appeared since he left Microsoft in 2008 to become a full-time employee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (hereinafter referred to as the Gates Foundation) - an advocate.
Resigning from his full-time executive position at Microsoft, Gates seems to have a broader perspective to participate in more diverse fields. He prefers to focus on his feet than looking up at the stars, and his behavior patterns come from his unchanging way of thinking—making decisions based on facts, not emotions. This makes him a rational optimist.
Bill Gates Photo courtesy of interviewee
Are there problems that innovation can't solve?
Since starting the foundation more than 20 years ago, Gates has focused on global health, an area where he believes there are the most serious inequalities.
There are many diseases to be tackled, and Gates has not chosen cancers that attract more attention and have high market returns, but have invested in diseases that do not have sufficient market incentives and lack government funding, especially infectious diseases that affect the poor the most.
One of his earlier targets was diarrhea. In 1997, Gates read a report that water sources in many poor African countries were severely polluted, resulting in widespread diarrhoea and the death of 3.1 million children every year. At that time, Gates was a new father, and so many children died because of it, which he could not accept and imagine. Due to the lack of sewage treatment systems, 673 million people worldwide still defecated in the open in 2017. Some countries cannot afford to build adequate sewage systems for slums, as well as to provide supporting energy and water sources.
As a result, Gates and his team began the "Next Generation Toilet Project" – redesigning toilet systems for low-income countries, soliciting design proposals, and finding suitable business partners and markets around the world to address cost issues. China has considerable advantages, and the rural living environment improvement and rapid development of high-speed rail are all potential market opportunities for the "new generation toilet plan", which will form a virtuous circle and reduce costs greatly under market incentives.
Another issue Gates wanted to address was polio, commonly known as polio. The most effective way to prevent polio is through vaccination. In Nigeria, the Foundation team used high-resolution satellite imagery and algorithms to create a true map of polio distribution. In 2010, to eliminate vaccine bias, Gates went deep into Nigeria to visit religious leaders to listen to ideas and answer questions, so that local leaders agreed to help with vaccination.
Between 2008 and 2010, the number of children living with polio in Nigeria plummeted from 798 to 21. In 2013, the Gates Foundation launched the End Polio Initiative, announcing nearly $6 billion in a consortium to eradicate the polio virus within six years. In 2018, the number of cases fell to 33 globally, and many countries, including Nigeria, were certified polio-free by the World Health Organization. But the number and scope of cases increased during the "last mile", and the coronavirus outbreak forced many regions to suspend vaccinations and disease surveillance.
In an interview, Gates lamented: "This business is more challenging than expected. Even so, he remains a firm believer in the power of innovation and collaboration. In 2022, the Gates Foundation announced at the World Health Assembly that it would increase its funding by US$1.2 billion to support the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI). "Polio eradication is a goal at our fingertips... Working together, we can eradicate polio once and for all, ensuring that no one is paralyzed by polio. ”
In 2002, Gates donated $100 million to the Naz Fund in New Delhi, India, as a special fund to fight AIDS. Image source: IC/cnsphoto
Innovation maniacs
Gates' belief and optimism about technological innovation is not without reason, and he has always sought how to use innovation to solve difficult problems.
In October 1955, Gates was born into a middle-class family in Seattle, Washington, USA. At that time, the United States was in the process of post-industrialization, its economic power grew sharply, and some large enterprises and units began to try to use the most cutting-edge technology products - computers.
In 1968, Gates' Lakeside Middle School rented a computer. Students interested in computers formed a computer group, and Gates was one of them. Among them, a student named Paul Allen, who was two years older than Gates, made Gates feel at first sight, and they quickly became good friends who talked about everything, studying programming together.
The program Gates and Allen quickly gained practical value, and Lakeside Middle School invited them to write a curriculum program for the school. In 1973, they tried to develop a program that would enable machines to read and automatically analyze traffic flow data.
Gates firmly believes that the future is the world of computers, and he had the idea of dropping out of school to focus on computers, but he still completed high school at the request of his parents and was admitted to Harvard University, a top university in the United States, majoring in applied mathematics.
One day in 1974, Allen handed Gates a magazine with a world-changing message that Edward Roberts, later known as the father of the PC, had developed the first mini personal computer, the Altair 8800, but lacked a program that could be used by more people.
After a few sleepless weeks, they wrote a program that led to a pioneering feat in the history of computing and $180,000 in founding funding.
Then Gates dropped out of school to start a business, Microsoft was born, and the following year it worked with top customers: Data Technology Group, National Radio, Citibank, General Electric...
In the early days of his business, Gates' diligence could be described as crazy, staying in the office day and night to write programs, and Microsoft gradually developed into a "star" in the field of personal computer language development. In 1980, Microsoft won the Blue Giant IBM's PC development operating system order, and in 1986, Microsoft went public, and then Gates led the team to successfully develop the landmark Windows system. In the 90s of the 20th century, Microsoft has firmly occupied the top position in software companies.
Gates led the team to successfully develop the landmark Windows system. Image source: IC/cnsphoto
Gates in China
Gates is more of an industry prognosticator than an entrepreneur, and his vision and insight have been key to Microsoft's success. In 1991, under Gates' leadership, Microsoft founded Microsoft Research (MSR) to support long-term computer science research regardless of product cycles.
It is this kind of insight and foresight that helped Microsoft open its research institute to China in 1998, realizing the importance of the Chinese market earlier than most American technology giants.
In 1994, Gates visited China for the first time, visiting the computer equipment of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and believed that China's software engineering has great potential. In 1997, Gates gave a speech at Tsinghua University, "I am deeply impressed by the talent and creativity of Chinese college students. The visit was crucial to Microsoft's decision to set up a research lab in Beijing in 1998. Gates recalled.
In 1998, Gates commissioned speech recognition expert Kai-Fu Lee to establish Microsoft Research China, which was upgraded to "Microsoft Research Asia" three years later. This decision has had a profound impact on China's internet industry. If you pull out a list of "graduates" of the institute, it can cover almost half of China's Internet industry: Zhang Yaqin, former president of Baidu, Zhang Hongjiang, former CEO of Kingsoft, Wang Jian, father of Alibaba Cloud, and Lin Bin, co-founder of Xiaomi...
Microsoft Research Asia did not disappoint Gates, giving Microsoft strong technical support, such as Microsoft Cloud Azure, Office, Windows, Bing, Xbox, HoloLens... The technology born out of this was transferred to Microsoft's product matrix, and even when artificial intelligence was only a vague concept, the Asian Institute has regarded it as the future basic research direction.
In 2007, Gates (right) and Shen Xiangyang, then dean of Microsoft Research Asia, held a discussion with students at Tsinghua University. Photo by Xu Xiyi
Gates has visited China no less than ten times to witness and participate in the evolution of China's Internet technology. In his eyes, China is a unique example of how to address the challenges faced by low- and middle-income countries, and its success is an opportunity to advance the world's development.
In November 2017, the Chinese Academy of Engineering announced the list of new academicians, and he was elected as a foreign academician. A year later, when Gates was met by then State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, he was called "an old friend of the Chinese people." Before Gates, few people became "old friends of the Chinese" as entrepreneurs and philanthropic leaders. Gates told the media that this was a great compliment to him.
In the field of philanthropy, Gates is also bullish on China's potential. The Gates Foundation, Tsinghua University and the Beijing Municipal Government established the Global Health Drug R&D Center, China's first non-profit new drug research and development institution in the form of a "public-private partnership" model, to develop new drugs for major infectious disease threats in developing countries such as tuberculosis and malaria. He also co-funded the establishment of Shenzhen International Philanthropy College with Rui Dalio and others, which became China's first charity talent training institution founded by social forces.
Why do charity?
Since the foundation's inception in 2000, Gates has continued to donate more than $59 billion. In 2022, he publicly announced that "in the future, I plan to give almost all my wealth to the foundation", with the goal of "falling and eventually falling off the list of the richest people in the world".
Gates has said many times that the great inequality in global health and development has deeply stung him and prompted him to pursue philanthropy. To date, the Gates Foundation has funded projects in more than 140 countries around the world, with a total donation of more than $70 billion, committed to reducing global inequality.
Outside of philanthropy, energy is another topic that Gates is most concerned about. As early as the 2015 Paris Climate Summit, Gates launched the "Breakthrough Energy Alliance" with Jack Ma, Zuckerberg, Bezos and others, hoping to use their own funds to help promote the commercialization of low-emission technologies on the basis of government research and build a bridge between potential concepts and viable products.
Gates (left) talks to Jack Ma. Photo by Yin Liqin
This divide has been dubbed the "near-insurmountable valley of death," and investing in clean energy is far more difficult than investing in information technology. In 2016, Gates-led the Breakthrough Energy Venture Capital Fund was established, raising more than $1 billion in initial capital to focus on clean energy innovation projects, hoping to solve this problem through large-scale, long-term private investment.
There are many qualifiers in Gates, technical genius, richest man, forecaster, philanthropist... In addition to the aura, he also has problems that cannot be solved, but he believes that innovation can be solved: "I have a hammer, so I look at a lot of problems, like nails, and I am good at this, that is how I deal with everything." With this philosophy, he founded Microsoft, became the world's richest man, and threw himself into philanthropy.
Gates, who is 68 years old this year, began to feel that time was running out. His greatest fear is that his brain stops working, but his rational way of thinking focused on solving problems gives him rational optimism. In the documentary about him, Gates repeatedly: "It's too hard, it's really hard." The host asked: "After taking on so much, give up?" Gates pondered for a moment and replied, "Sometimes, you really have to say, let's give up." But sometimes, you have to say, I need to work harder. (End)