A Visionary In Search of a Vision : He Co-Founded Microsoft. He Just Paid for a Chunk of Hollywood. Paul Allen is Struggling to Create the Wired World, and if He Can’t Build It Himself, He’ll Buy It.
Seattle billionaire Paul G. Allen didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. When David Geffen called to ask if he wanted in on DreamWorks SKG, with its ambitious plans for a new studio, Allen had his investment bankers pore over the numbers. But he didn’t quibble over the stiff asking price. Allen was out to build a “wired world” and an opportunity to work with Hollywood’s all-star team on a new, technology-driven entertainment company seemed too good to pass up. So he agreed to plunk down nearly $500 million for an 18% share. The announcement was made one Sunday in March and reported with little fanfare. No big deal.
A few days later, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, Allen’s friend and former partner, announced that he, too, was getting on the DreamWorks bandwagon. Very big deal. At a heavily televised press conference, Gates sat on a high director’s chair beside DreamWorks founders Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg. The three Hollywood movers and shakers, who had never flown to Seattle to meet Allen, had made a pilgrimage to Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters to talk effusively about a new joint venture between DreamWorks and Microsoft. For just $15 million and what Katzenberg termed a “not substantial” investment in DreamWorks itself, Gates had just bought access to the impressive talents Allen had paid a fortune for.
The difference in business acumen and clout shouldn’t be all that surprising. Twenty years ago, when he and Gates founded Microsoft and changed the world, Allen was considered the quiet, creative member of the team, the thoughtful counterpoint to his savvy, can-do partner. Then, 12 years ago, they split, each to go their separate ways. And their ways have been very separate--Gates is on his way to being the Rockefeller of the information age; Allen is still an ideas man. But while his vision of the brave new world--one interconnected by computer and telephone and satellite--is clear, his blueprint for constructing it is not.
The DreamWorks investment is just the latest in Allen’s scattershot approach to becoming a chief architect of the information highway. For years he has been quietly spending money helter-skelter on projects and companies because they seemed fun or interesting; some have succeeded, many have failed and he is no nearer to realizing his vision now than he was 10 years and several million dollars ago.
That’s OK, though, because Allen, whom the Seattle Times recently called the Rodney Dangerfield of billionaires, admits that unlike Gates, or most other business leaders, he isn’t out for power or money--he simply wants to be a leader in the world of ideas. “At some point there is so much money. What do you do with it all?” he says. “The kinds of things you are going to look at are deals like DreamWorks, where you can get involved with other people to do exciting, new, creative things.”
There are many who believe that Allen, with his $4.8 billion in assets, will prove to be a visionary--a rich man with an unusual but insightful approach to building the technology empire of the future. “The beauty of what he is doing is in taking the very long-term view,” says Andrew J. Kessler, an investment banker in the multimedia industry with Unterberg Harris. “It’s this big puzzle. There are a million pieces. He has 10 or 20 of the pieces. Whether they are valuable pieces, time will tell.” says Kessler. “But those with short-term perspectives will miss the big picture.”
But there is a gulf between having money and ideas and transforming those assets into businesses or products that change the world. “It’s an entrepreneurial issue,” says a software industry analyst who has followed Allen’s career since Microsoft. “He doesn’t do a good job of building companies.”
It may be that building the future is not about collecting pieces to a jigsaw puzzle at all. It may be that no matter how much money or how many good intentions you have, without the powerful competitive drive and monomania of the most successful businessmen, you can’t build empires, or even highways.
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Paul Allen manages his nascent empire out of a nondescript office building in Bellevue, across Lake Washington from Seattle, with the help of a staff of about 40. Visitors are surprised to see the beefy billionaire arrive at work alone, wearing his trademark black leather jacket. Down the hall, which is decorated with large pictures and paintings of Jimi Hendrix, Allen’s corner office, too, is low key. A guitar case leans under a basketball net; snapshots from his last scuba diving trip are tacked to the wall.
Although he doesn’t sport a pocket protector full of pens or a slide rule, there is still a bit of the shy computer geek about Allen. For a man who commands a two-dozen company conglomerate, he seems uncomfortable discussing business, avoiding eye contact by gazing out the window toward the snowcapped Olympic Mountains. He stiffens when anything about his private life is mentioned, but never is he arrogant or pretentious.
An employee at one of Allen’s several dozen companies sums it up well: “Paul doesn’t have the presence, the entourage, that you usually associate with someone that rich,” he says. “You might easily mistake him for someone who wandered out of the computer room.”
He has his rich man’s toys: the six-acre lakefront estate on Mercer Island, a swanky neighborhood a few minutes from downtown Seattle; the 150-foot yacht; the cars--including four Ferraris, several Porsches, a Mercedes convertible and a Lamborghini. He enjoys collecting paintings by Impressionists and Dutch masters and when he wants to indulge his latest passion, scuba diving, he climbs onto his Challenger 601 jet and flies off to the clear, warm waters around New Guinea or Jamaica.
“He loves to mess with the latest and greatest products,” says his younger sister, Jody. His new home is wired with video and laser-disc jukeboxes that allow Allen to pick from a library of more than 1,000 films at the push of a few buttons. He also has his own a professional-class studio downtown where he practices every week with his band, the Threads, and where he can cut a compact disc of his performances on the spot.
What he doesn’t have are the eccentricities, the self-absorption often associated with the rich. The 42-year-old bachelor occasionally dates and says he is waiting for the right woman with whom to build a family. In spite of the fancy car collection, he usually drives a more modest four-door BMW. He treasures his privacy, preferring to conduct interviews at his office. If Allen wants to buy CDs, he will drive to Tower Records himself. He spends much of his time with his mother, for whom he built a home--with an 1,800-square-foot library--on his estate, and his sister Jody and her family, doting on his two nephews, 5-year-old Duncan and 10-month-old Gardner. It is his family, not his accountants, who help him decide where to allocate the millions he gives to charity.
Yet it would be wrong to think of Paul Allen as an amiable guy who happened to, say, win the lottery. Consider a recent trip to Los Angeles. He and Jody flew down on his jet to take in a basketball game between the Portland Trail Blazers, which he owns, and the Lakers. The following day he visited Frederic Rosen, the chief executive at Ticketmaster, of which he owns 80%, to talk about plans for a new television station. Then he dropped in at Storyopolis, a small Beverly Hills start-up that he recently put money into; it’s developing multimedia and film products with leading children’s books authors. Dinner was at Chasen’s with Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen, after which they all retired for drinks at the House of Blues, where Allen talked to club founder Isaac Tigrett about working together on Allen’s plans for a $50-million museum to honor Jimi Hendrix. This is, after all, a man who helped launch the personal computer revolution, a man who still owns 57 million shares--worth about $4 billion--of Microsoft, where he is also a member of the board of directors, a man whose vision changed the way the world thinks.
He has shown an uncanny sense for the direction technology is headed. In a trade magazine column in 1977, Allen predicted the personal computer would become “the kind of thing that people carry with them, a companion that takes notes, does accounting, gives reminders, handles a thousand personal tasks.” He was an early promoter of multimedia computers, on-line services and satellite television, and he now sees the convergence of all those technologies providing a wealth of new opportunities. Interactive television, he believes, will become widely available over the next decade; through it, DreamWorks could offer action-packed games, or movies whose plots twist and turn depending on viewer reactions.
“What if the hero made decision B rather than decision A,” says Allen. “Maybe it’s a dynamic virtual experience where you are in there with a bunch of other people who are representing other roles in the story and you are making rules in real time.”
Allen seems to brighten and relax as he discusses the endless possibilities technology offers. He pictures a day when a sports fan watching basketball on television will be able to download statistics on his favorite player and switch camera angles to follow his plays without leaving the BarcaLounger. Afterward, he might click on an icon to pull down a seating chart and order a ticket for the next game and buy a T-shirt on the side. “There is fertile ground for a whole lot of different products and concepts to spring from,” says Allen. “It’s a whole new platform on which to do things.”
To that end, Allen has already invested $1.2 billion in a constellation of two dozen or more high-tech companies that do everything from provide on-line sports statistics and investment information to satellite television and CD-ROM products. “I read pretty voraciously to try to keep up with what is going on in technology,” he says. “Sometimes something will click and I’ll see a potential trend developing or a potential product. That’s one area in which I have a unique ability.”
Certainly his early bet on America Online paid off--he sold the stake at a huge profit last fall after the company refused to let him expand his investment. William D. Savoy, head of Vulcan Ventures, Allen’s investment company, says he depends on Allen’s vision to determine what technologies will be key in the “wired world,” then hedges his bets by investing in a cluster of firms. Allen owns several companies that offer on-line information, for example, some focusing on sports, others on news or business. “When you are always on the leading edge, you have to make many investments with the same target so one of your group gets there,” Savoy says.
Once Savoy makes an investment, responsibility for overseeing the company is turned over to Vern Raburn, who was hired last fall to establish the Paul G. Allen Group, which coordinates the activities of the various companies.
Allen sees his own role as an overseer--although he regularly talks to presidents of companies he has a majority share in, offering ideas and sometimes even getting involved in the nitty-gritty. “I enjoy the detail things,” he says. “Sometimes the details are things that make something work or not work.”
There is a kid-in-a-candy-store quality to his investments, focusing as they do more on how they fit into Allen’s vision of the future than on whether or not they make good business sense. Consequently, the results are mixed.
Allen made a smart buy in USSB Hubbard, the hugely successful satellite television venture. And although he probably overpaid when he put down his $300-million stake in Ticketmaster, analysts say the company has great potential to use technology like television and on-line systems to expand its franchise. Also promising is his investment in cnet: the computer network, a San Francisco company that is producing a hip program on technology that will evolve next year into a 24-hour TV channel. Medio, a scrappy producer of CD-ROM documentaries that Allen invested in last fall, is experimenting with an intriguing news magazine that combines the pictures and sound of CD-ROMs with the up-to-date information of its on-line service, Medionet.
But Allen has had some important misses, particularly in companies where he was involved in management. Asymetrix, his first software venture sans Gates, lost $50 million or more during the past decade; SkyPix, a separate satellite venture, lost him another $10 million or so. An early investment in Layered, a Boston software company, also bombed. So did a modest bet on Virtual Vision, a company that made goggles with fingernail-sized video screens, but just about the only buyers were dentists interested in keeping their patients occupied.
“It’s like a kid in an arcade who has enough quarters to play games forever,” says a top executive at one of Allen’s far-flung companies. “Some (companies) will fail, some will succeed. But where is the score card? As long as he can underwrite it and it gives him pleasure, what’s the problem?”
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No one argues that Allen’s aggressive investments have made him a major player in this still young but rapidly growing cyberworld. But in a frothy business that is still generating more excitement than money, some suggest Allen is taking big risks. Certainly the $500 million he spent for less than one-fifth of DreamWorks was pricey considering that the founders are only putting in a combined $100 million for their two-thirds stake in the venture. The company would have to be worth about $8 billion in five years for Allen to make a reasonable return.
“You could start thousands of software companies for $500 million,” says Ann Winblad, a venture capitalist in the software industry who knew Allen when she dated Gates a decade ago. “It sounds like he was extraordinarily motivated to do the deal.”
“He’s got a wide range of things that interest him,” says Gates in defense of his friend. “Paul makes high-risk investments. He’d be the first to say some will do well, others will not. That’s a risk you take.”
Allen doesn’t seem worried. “These are people who have incredible histories of producing some of the most successful movies and albums of all time,” he says. “When I looked at the plan and analyzed it, it’s actually very conservative given these gentlemen’s history of success.”
He will be on the board of DreamWorks, where he says he will advise the company on uses of computer technology in its digital studios and in designing new forms of films that, for example, might have multiple endings depending on viewer input. “It’s more fun than coming up with a new version of a spreadsheet,” says Allen, in a subtle jab at Gates.
This is Allen’s larger agenda--the need to be a part of that heady world he once experienced at Microsoft, to be trading ideas with a small cadre of associates and watching those ideas change the world.
“Paul’s motivation isn’t to make tons more money. For that, he could be building power lines in China,” says Raburn, a former Microsoft colleague. “He wants to execute a vision, to have a positive impact on people. It’s rare that as an individual you can participate in stuff that writes a few pages in the history books. It’s intoxicating stuff.”
Allen works mostly out of the Seattle office, showing up every morning much as any other salaried worker. But his days are spent a little differently than his employees, a little differently from most other CEOs for that matter. He is preparing for a new techno-revolution in which myriad new ventures will spring up to take advantage of rapidly declining communications costs. And any company or inventor who can aid that quest has Allen’s immediate attention. A year ago, for instance, Allen proposed creating a 24-hour television channel to cover technology issues-the growth in television offerings would create markets for programs targeting narrow audiences. But when he learned that cnet: the computer network had come up with the same idea and moved faster to implement it, he bought a stake in cnet instead. Not that Allen has to look very far to see what’s on the bleeding edge. Vulcan Ventures is inundated with pitches and proposals; Bill Savoy weeds through them first, then passes the most interesting to Allen, who measures every product and proposal against his view of the wired world.
He frequently discusses his ideas with Raburn, with whom he socializes, relying on him to find synergies between the various investments. Some are obvious. Starwave, a CD-ROM and on-line service venture Allen founded in 1992, is developing software to put Ticketmaster on the Internet. Medio may offer customers high-speed modems to connect their computers to phone lines produced by another Allen Group company called Cardinal Technologies.
Although he spends a lot of time talking, in person or on the phone, about the huge and diverse number of innovations in their various stages of gestation, Allen rarely even brings up the issue of profit or marketability. Periodically, a team of executives from one or another of his companies will visit his office to make a presentation, but Allen seldom pushes them to get products out the door so they can improve bottom-line results.
This think-tank approach to investment peaked recently with the creation of Interval Research. To assure his access to the brightest minds in the industry, Allen approached David Liddle, the legendary software wizard of Xerox PARC, with an offer--Allen would put up $100 million if Liddle would staff and oversee a research facility dedicated to working on breakthrough technologies. “Technology was getting stale and Paul wanted to do something that would make an impact, break the logjam,” says Liddle.
Since then, Liddle has gathered together a group of leading programmers, writers, musicians and even anthropologists. Their mandate is to study things that interest them and might have applications in the next “interval,” or next generation of technology. Liddle says he is now closer to developing commercial products than he expected. While he has no idea whether or not the products will make money, at least, he says, they will make innovative use of new technology. Liddle’s group, for example, is working on a line of wearable multimedia devices, an idea that Allen originated but about which neither will elaborate.
In the race to command the information highway, Interval Research may be Allen’s ace in the hole, the cradle of the next Microsoft. “How do you make lightning hit twice?” asks Raburn. “We were doing this stuff out of the sheer love of it,” he recalls of the early days at Microsoft. “We are at the edge of being able to do it again.”
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Not everyone thinks so. Wired magazine, the chronicler of the world Allen wants so much to help create, dismissed Allen last summer as “the accidental zillionaire” whose fortune was largely the result of hitching his wagon to the Gates locomotive.
The contrasts between the two former partners may be unfair, but they’re inevitable. It was Allen who first expounded the concept of the “wired world,” but it is Gates who is emerging as the industry leader. It’s Gates who has built a booming CD-ROM business, who has announced plans to launch the Microsoft Network, an on-line service, this summer, who is developing software for interactive television and who has a major book on the impact of the information highway in the works. In fact, most of the growth in Allen’s wealth still comes from the rocketing value of Microsoft stock.
Despite the media’s best efforts to pit them against each other, Allen and Gates regard each other more as friends than competitors. They meet on a regular basis at board meetings, basketball games or simply to go to the movies. When Allen began to build his huge estate on Lake Washington, he suggested to Gates that he do the same and took him on a motorboat ride to look at some properties. Gates is now building a home nearby that will be even more costly than Allen’s (but it will be built largely underground to avoid the wrath of neighbors that Allen faced when he built his sprawling estate). When Allen considered investing in DreamWorks, he asked Gates for his opinion. When Gates announced his own deal with the company, Allen says, he was very pleased. The two frequently discuss investment ideas and have jointly invested in several start-ups. When it comes to technology, he says, “there is usually a quick meeting of the minds on most issues.”
Allen met Gates when he was a sophomore at a prep school near Seattle. The two would jockey for time on a Digital Equipment PDP-10 computer the school had access to. There was always a friendly rivalry between the younger kids, led by Gates, and the older kids, led by Allen, recalls Fred Wright, who was in charge of the school’s computer program. At one point, Allen hid some computer tapes that belonged to Gates. The one thing the two had in common was a passion for computers. “He (Allen) would rather spend time on computers than do his homework,” recalls Wright, whose last memory of Allen was chasing him down the hall before the high school graduation ceremony to get him to pay his computer bill.
Allen and Gates’ first venture together was in 1971, when Allen had just graduated from high school and was enrolled in computer sciences at Washington State University. The two youngsters had jerry-built a simple computer that could be used to analyze city traffic data--Allen’s sister, Jody, recalls being paid 50 cents an hour to help out. The venture never made money, but it convinced them that their time was better spent writing software than building computers. The two were among a small group of early hackers who gained a reputation for breaking into computer accounts and crashing large computers.
Allen and Gates’ big break came on a cold December day in 1974. Allen had dropped out of college and was working at Honeywell in Boston. He was visiting Gates at Harvard when he saw a Popular Electronics cover featuring a cheap, build-it-yourself personal computer kit called the Altair. He persuaded Gates to join him in writing a version of the programming language Basic for the Altair’s Intel chip and 4K memory--something some experts said couldn’t be done. But Gates and Allen, in a two-month programming marathon, pulled it off, though Allen ended up having to write a missing bit of code on scraps of paper on the plane on the way to Albuquerque to deliver the product to Altair’s manufacturer, MITS. It was the beginning of Microsoft. Allen went to work for MITS and Gates continued at Harvard, both running Microsoft as a part-time venture. But by early 1977, the company had enough business from MITS and other personal computer-makers that Gates dropped out of Harvard and Allen quit MITS to work at Microsoft fulltime.
Looking back on those heady days, says Allen: “ I think, ‘Wow, did we really know what we were doing?’ ”
As Microsoft grew, a natural division of labor developed. “I guess you could call me the doer and Paul the idea man,” said Gates once, describing the relationship. “I’m more aggressive and crazily competitive, the front man in running the business day-to-day, while Paul keeps us out front in research and development.” Allen is credited with backing a range of products including the Microsoft mouse and the Macintosh-style graphical interface that ultimately resulted in Microsoft’s hugely successful Windows program.
Their differences were obvious after work as well. Gates would seldom take time off, relaxing occasionally late at night by speeding around in his Porsche; Allen would leave early to go to a basketball game or would have friends over and play the guitar. Gates would read magazines like Business Week and Fortune and focus on the business; Allen read science fiction and novels. When the two played chess, Gates would often make aggressive opening moves and end up furious, when, more often than not, he would lose to Paul, who had spent more time studying the game.
In 1980, IBM turned to tiny Microsoft to provide the operating system for its new personal computer line. Microsoft bought QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from an even smaller Seattle company and upgraded it into MS-DOS for IBM. As the IBM PC--and its hundreds of imitators--took off, so did Microsoft. The little band of programmers became famous for the long hours they worked taking on the exploding market with an always short supply of programmers.
Everything changed in 1982, when Allen turned feverish at a business meeting in Paris. He boarded a Concorde and headed home, where he was found to have Hodgkin’s disease. He tried to keep working while he received radiation treatment, but ended up quitting Microsoft. “We were working 80-hour weeks and when you come home throwing up five days a week for a few months, you want to take time off and do different things.”
After the disease went into remission, he made a conscious decision to enjoy life more, says Jody. “He developed other interests. You can have long conversations about stuff other than the software industry.”
Allen decided to come back in 1985 and start a new company, Asymetrix, which would “redefine software for the 1990s.” Gates was so eager to have Allen as a partner rather than a competitor that he pressured in vain to get him to build Asymetrix within Microsoft. “I had pushed him pretty hard,” Gates said at the time of Allen’s decision to leave. “He wanted to go out and prove he could do his own thing.”
Asymetrix didn’t come up with its first product until 1990. It was a modestly successful package for writing multimedia software called ToolBook. But it soon lost out to newer competitors, many of them developed by Microsoft.
“They didn’t update it. They weren’t hard-core enough about cutting things to keep shipping (new versions),” says Steve Podradchik, who worked for Microsoft, where his job was to “annihilate” ToolBook. (Ironically, Podradchik is now the CEO of Medio.)
Asymetrix was a microcosm of Allen’s business style. The staff granted Allen’s every whim, conducting research in multimedia, speech recognition, computer learning, anything Allen wanted, and in the end, it was the company’s undoing. “Paul’s interests were so broad, if he wanted to pursue any opportunity, Asymetrix was the vehicle. It was hard to stay focused,” says Steve Wood, who worked with Allen at Microsoft and Asymetrix for many years.
All along, Allen has had no shortage of ideas, everybody agrees. But he lacks the ability to fight for his ideas in the marketplace.
“He loves to play and work with the products,” says Gates. “He has other people working for him that deal with the day-to-day operations.”
Some peers say Allen hires managers with the same shortcomings. “Paul surrounds himself with a mediocre bunch made up mostly of friends,” says one technology analyst, who, like those most critical of Allen, declined to be named. He notes that many are refugees of the same kinds of business failures that have beset Allen.
Allen denies he relies too much on friends. But Wood says the tendency may be natural. “Put yourself in the position of a Paul Allen or Bill Gates. It becomes difficult, if not impossible, to know who you can trust,” he says. “People try to leverage off of you. Somebody joins a jam session and you find out they want you to invest in something. He has necessarily gotten a little less trusting of people. There is no way to avoid that.”
Allen’s early failures have taught him to be more careful of whom he picks for certain jobs. His recent hires, including Raburn, have good reputations in the technology world. Raburn recently fired about a third of the employees at the money-losing Asymetrix and put a section of the company up for sale, certainly a sign that the Paul Allen Group is getting tougher. Of course, as part of the process, Allen bought back all the virtually worthless shares owned by employees--at the prices they paid for them.
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Paul Allen’s real bottom line may be that, despite his need to be on the techno vanguard, despite his desire to make a difference, his companies are only one slice of his life. Ever since he came close to dying, Allen has reserved an important part of his life to the pursuit of pleasure.
One of his most successful investments has nothing to do with the wired world. In 1988, he paid $70 million for the Trail Blazers for no other reason than to indulge his passion for basketball. The value of basketball franchises have since boomed and the Blazers are now estimated to be worth about $122 million.
Nevertheless, Allen’s interest in technology has come to permeate the organization. He went to considerable expense to give everybody PCs and to lease dedicated lines to connect the Blazers with his other companies by electronic mail. Allen is paying $46 million of the $262-million cost of a new arena in Portland that will be the nation’s most technologically advanced. Wired up with fiber optics, the new arena will even have movable acoustic “clouds” that can make it a boisterous sports stadium or a quiet, intimate concert setting.
“He keeps technology a priority so people don’t get lazy about it. He keeps people talking about the future,” says Blazers president Marshall Glickman.
Then there’s his obsession with rock ‘n’ roll. Allen’s band, the Threads, is made up mostly of software programmers. They’ve occasionally cut CDs for friends and relatives, but have never played in public. But at company parties, he has been known to make his large frame as supple as Jimi Hendrix when he jams with a hired band.
“When he plays guitar, he completely lets go,” says Liddle. “I’ve never seen him play with his teeth, but that is the only thing he doesn’t do.”
Allen’s love for Hendrix and his considerable collection of memorabilia led to the idea for a museum in his memory. Jody recalls a “to-do” list she got from Allen one morning that asked her to get his lawn cut and look into building a Jimi Hendrix museum.
“It’s going to be a unique blend of technology and exhibits for which the goal is really to show people that the barrier to making your own music is not very high,” says Allen. “Whether you are recording or playing the guitar, it can be very rewarding. Hendrix inspired me and he was self-taught.”
Ironically, this love of music may force him to choose between a hard-nosed business decision and his tendency toward geniality. Pearl Jam, a Seattle-based band of which he has been a fan, is currently crusading against Ticketmaster, saying it exploits its near-monopoly to keep service charges high.
Allen says he is not to be bothered. “If you look at Pearl Jam’s profitability worldwide, it probably exceeds the profitability of Ticketmaster,” says Allen. “I’ve been in business for a long time so I have a different perspective from the average fan, who just sees the service charge and doesn’t know how much it costs to make it possible to pick up a phone and buy a ticket.”
Friends say Allen was surprised and distressed by the widening conflict, which cannot be resolved without sharply undercutting Ticketmaster’s franchise and reducing, of course, its profitability. Although Ticketmaster shows no sign of backing down, the battle is a lesson in Allen’s apprenticeship with the heartless world of empire-building.
“There are lessons every time something isn’t what you’d like,” says Allen. “Some things will do great, some won’t. No one has a 100% batting average. You have to learn and move on.”
But how much does Paul Allen really have to learn? The week this story went to press, Microsoft stock rose 5.3%, raising Allen’s assets by $300 million.
