NDTV Exclusive - Bill Gates Was 19 When He Decided To Quit Harvard. He Explains Why

Bill Gates was 19 when he decided to quit Harvard, which has long been venerated as a space where only the best and brightest minds are granted access. Reason: he wanted to devote his time to Microsoft, which he founded in 1975 with his friend Paul Allen. 

In his letter to Harvard then, Mr Gates, now a tech mogul and philanthropist, said,"A friend and I have a partnership, Microsoft, which does consulting relating to microprocessor software. The new obligations we have just taken on require that I devote my full-time efforts to working at Microsoft."

Mr Gates, who turns 70 in October, was asked by NDTV if he was making a huge mistake in quitting Harvard, considering how happy his parents were when he first got into it. 

"Well, yes and no. I mean, let's say Microsoft had failed. It's not like they locked the door. I officially went on leave and even if it had been two or three years later, I could have gone back and I could have taken a job doing any type of software," Mr Gates told NDTV's Vishnu Som ahead of the release of his memoir.

"The point where I get scared is when I'm hiring people who have kids and they're literally moving their family first to Albuquerque later to Seattle. And I'm like, wow, what if my customers don't pay me? Early in the company, we had one time where because of a dispute with our first customer, we were short on cash. But I made sure thereafter to always have enough money in the bank to pay the payroll even if we weren't paid for the next year," said Mr Gates, who remains the 12th-richest person in the world, with personal wealth of over $100 billion, according to Forbes.

"Source Code: My Beginnings," the first of three projected volumes of memoirs by Mr Gates, releases February 4 and details his early years, from childhood through his decision to leave college and start Microsoft.

Reminiscing about his first year at Harvard, Mr Gates recounted a conversation with his freshman advisor who called him "precocious", which, in his mind, was a negative word.

"Well, it was so funny because this word precocious, the only time it had ever been used around me before, it was precocious brat. And so my mom would say that to me and I didn't understand specifically, but it was definitely a negative thing. And so I was sitting in this meeting with this advisor and probably talking too much. And then when he uses this word, I'm like, 'Oh, God, I must have really offended this guy'. And so I left that meeting and told my friends what happened. They're like, 'You're an idiot. That word is actually, you know, a nice word'. And I was like, 'Oh, gosh. So my advisor was was a super person'. But briefly, I thought he was attacking me," Mr Gates told NDTV.