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When the Jeff Bezoses and Jack Dorsey of the world jump from the bow of the ships they sail, what will happen to them? Where will they go?
When Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, died this week at the age of 65, left the trade that he had created, he traveled the globe. He collected paintings and learned to dive. Scuba diving, he said at the time, "keeps me away from me".
Allen was right. Entrepreneurs who leave their businesses – whether they have sold the business, are ready to retire, or just retired – need to move away from themselves. Starting and running a business are tedious activities that hijack an entrepreneur's identity.
For the public, Allen's identity will always be tied to his role in creating Microsoft. In 1975, Allen convinced his childhood friend, Bill Gates, to develop a programming language to make computing more accessible to more people. Their broader goal of installing a computer on each desk took several years, but this initial project put the company on the road.
Gates and Allen became a kind of boy-prodigy duo that helped Microsoft become a major software company. But after a fight against cancer in 1982, Allen decided that the clashes with Gates haunted him emotionally and began his world tour.
He never came back to Microsoft. What followed has lessons and a cautionary tale for entrepreneurs who will leave their businesses at some point. Exit may lead to an identity crisis, separation anxiety and fear of failure, as well as often unrealistic expectations of success. These problems are not affordable for many people – the founders of extremely wealthy businesses are rare, although they develop it no less – and can lead to feelings of isolation and abandonment. In the case of Allen, Microsoft did not proceed with its IPO until three years after its departure, which delayed until 1986 some of the symptoms of sudden post-exit wealth, when its net worth increased by 134 millions of dollars in one night.
After his European tour in 1983, he returned home to Seattle, contracted a commercial loan based on his experience with Microsoft and embarked on what he hoped would be his own legitimate technological empire, separate from Gates and the co-founded company.
Not yet
His next move followed another common failure of the second act's journey, when one success does not guarantee the next. The beginnings of Microsoft were marked by circumstances specific to the founders, the personal computing environment and the state of technology of the time. Allen, "was looking to regain the feeling that he had created Microsoft," as I wrote in his 2003 biography, The Zillionaire Accidental. At Asymetrix, a software development store, he brought together people who made him feel more creative and inspired than at Microsoft. In the end, however, the company was not ambitious enough to become Allen's technological rival. Another attempt, Interval Research, addressed some of Allen's most daring concepts, including a service called SkyPix that would send television signals through broadband channels and a virtual reality platform called ePlanet. Again, a lack of commercial instinct has proven fatal.
Many successful entrepreneurs become investors after they leave, and Allen did the same, creating Vulcan Inc. and falling here too. The list of unsuccessful Vulcan investments is long and most of the time forgotten: Virtual Vision, Egghead, Lone Wolf Technologies, Trilobyte, Medio Multimedia. Allen's hopes of creating a "connected world" led to a major investment in AOL and a $ 4.5 billion contract to purchase Charter Communications in 1998 to break into in people and offer them services and entertainment.
Entrepreneurs are not always natural born investors; they invest in a business and use one. As with Allen, it's easy for them to be seduced by brilliant ideas, avoiding good financial sense. Allen's investments were not all bombs; Starwave, essentially a website development store, was sold to Disney for $ 200 million, yielding Allen $ 100 million. And the "wired world" approach to investment he finally adopted gave some idea of the order in which he put his money.
To summarize, Allen remained a powerful technologist but did not have the business sense of his former partner. He has never built the technological empire that he has imagined and has never developed a technological identity outside of Microsoft.
During the 1990s, Allen continues his quest for a next act. Now a billionaire thanks to Microsoft's continued success, he has begun to explore areas of interest other than technology. He bought the Portland Trail Blazers and the Seattle Seahawks, and built a tribute to his childhood guitarist, Jimi Hendrix, dubbed the Experience Music Project, in his hometown of Seattle.
In the 2000s, Allen finally seemed to have surpassed his technological ambitions by involving himself more in philanthropy around brain science, disease control, climate change, the arts and more. It has launched its own space efforts for the construction of rocket ships and aircraft carriers. The mix of sports, space, science and Hendrix was the last sentence for Allen. More than 20 years after leaving the company he had created, Allen had acquired an identity that far exceeded that of Microsoft.
How did it take him so long? It's easy to forget that Allen was only 30 when he left Microsoft, at a time when there were fewer and fewer millionaires in the technology field, let alone under 40 years old. Microsoft was not yet public and it was the real game changer for Allen. The source of its wealth was Microsoft and so it would still be "Microsoft".
Entrepreneurs today benefit from a culture of philanthropy that involves them in causes and activities outside their work. Marc Benioff of Salesforce has spent billions of dollars on healthcare, as has Mark Zuckerberg, who plans to cure all illnesses in his young daughter's life. Bezos has launched its own philanthropic business this year.
When these stars and other stars of the technological world move on to the next phase, they would do well to consider Allen after Microsoft as a peer in a similar trip. He wisely took time to separate his identity from his old business, but failed to separate the dreams of his first business from the reality of starting the next. And although with good intentions, he nevertheless first misunderstood the value of his money and how he could spend it.
We called Allen the "accidental Zillionaire". But he was doing just like any other entrepreneur looking for his next act.
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