It took Bill Gates just 1 sentence to share the most important thing about how to build an amazing business

Business

Imagine Bill Gates in seventh grade. Scrawny, nerdy - and destined for greatness, whether he knows it or not.

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He had a million things for him. But the main ingredient of his eventual success was the person he met during this school year: his future co-founder at Microsoft, Paul Allen, who died this week at the age of 65.

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Entrepreneurship is incredibly lonely - a lonely soul sometimes. The best way to fight the loneliness of the smartest and most successful entrepreneurs is to team up with a trusted co-founder.

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In remembering Allen, Gates just explained the most important thing that a founder can do if he wants to build something really great. This is visible from the first sentence of a tribute he wrote to Allen yesterday in The Wall Street Journal:

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"I met Paul Allen when I was in 7th grade and that changed my life."

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Find a co-founder (at the school if you can)

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The co-founders meet in all kinds of places: old workplaces, friends, colleagues, community groups. But there's another story you'll hear about some of the founding teams of fantastic entrepreneurs - whom they met at school.

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Think of some of the founding teams that we venerate practically:

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• Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak met in high school.

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• Larry Page and Sergei Brin met at the university.

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• Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard (founders of HP) were classmates at Stanford.

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• Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the ice cream guys Ben and Jerry & apos; s, met at high school gymnastics class.

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• Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Fleiss, co-founders of Rent the Runway, met at Harvard Business School

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• Vinit Bharara and Marc Lore, co-founders of Quidsi (Diapers.com, among other brands, sold to Amazon for $ 545 million) met at elementary school.

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And it continues, again and again. Gates clearly recognizes that, although Allen is not the only person he has ever worked with.

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But if you want to build something really great, and maybe even do it many times in your life, the people you work with are probably more important than almost anything else.

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So, if you meet this key future co-founder and meet him early enough in life to develop a key relationship, it can affect everything that happens.

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The story of Gates and Allen

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Long retired from the seventh year, Gates' article is a tribute to a dear deceased friend, but it also bears witness to the importance of this relationship.

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He says that he immediately watched Allen, who was in ninth grade while Gates was in seventh. And Allen was a computer genius, whom Gates greatly admired.

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They were fascinated by their shared fascination for a school ticker, plugged into phone lines with a timeshare computer owned by GE. As Gates reminded:

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Finally, we spent just about all our free time tinkering with a machine we could put our hands on. At an age when other high school students sneaked out of the house to party, Paul and I would go out at night to use computers from a University of Washington lab.

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It's a little geek, it was, but it was also a formative experience and I'm not sure I would have had the courage to do it without Paul.

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You may already know how the story told by Gates resumes from there. By the time he arrived at Harvard, Allen had already left the University of Washington State and was working as a programmer in Boston.

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That's how Allen ran in December 1974, when he saw a magazine article on the new Altair 8800 computer, and urged Gates to join him immediately in the business world.

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"This moment marked the end of my academic career and the beginning of our new company, Microsoft," writes Gates.

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Fascinating. While Gates tells the story, the founding of the company that became Microsoft was not even his idea. That was Allen & amp; s.

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Oh God, if you did not meet a co-founder at school?

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It's not like you can not start a business without a co-founder. Or that the only place where you can meet a good co-founder is at school.

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This certainly helps if you have ever had a work or personal relationship before. You do not want the first time you had a disagreement to be when you face a critical problem in your startup.

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So, the real lesson? Build your relationships. Work on small projects with other people, and maybe they will turn into larger projects.

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And maybe one day you'll come back to that relationship, as Gates did, and you'll find that it changed your life.

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