Speaker 1: Steve Bomber and Bill Gates have a lot in common.
Speaker 1: They were both CEOs of Microsoft. There are two of
Speaker 1: the wealthiest people in the world, and they both dropped
Speaker 1: out of prestigious universities to work at the computer company
Speaker 1: founded by Gates and Paul Allen in ninety five. But
Speaker 1: when Bomber joined Microsoft in nine eighty as the company's
Speaker 1: thirtieth employee, Microsoft had yet to dominate the personal computer market.
Speaker 1: It eventually created three billionaires and an estimated twelve thousand
Speaker 1: millionaires out of its employees. After seating control of the
Speaker 1: company to such an Adela in Bomber purchased the Los
Speaker 1: Angeles Clippers for two billion dollars, joining Microsoft co founder
Speaker 1: Paul Allen as a fellow NBA owner. He recently sat
Speaker 1: down with Carlisle Group co founder David Rubinstein. They spoke
Speaker 1: on David Rubinstein's Bloomberg television program Peer to Peer Conversations.
Speaker 1: As we sit here today, you were the owner of
Speaker 1: the l A Clippers. Let's talk about how you became
Speaker 1: an owner of the Clipper. So you retired in two
Speaker 1: thousand fourteen from Microsoft as a CEO, and the Clippers
Speaker 1: were more or less going to be available. You paid
Speaker 1: two billion dollars for the team at the highest price
Speaker 1: than ever paid for a sports team in basketball, where
Speaker 1: all the other owners happy with you because you elevated
Speaker 1: the value of all their franchises. And I assume they've
Speaker 1: pat you on the back whenever they see you. Now,
Speaker 1: when I bought that, I think there were two reactions
Speaker 1: about the team. Number One, yes, as you described, yes,
Speaker 1: our teams, Well, this has been a great investment. The
Speaker 1: second was, oh, my god, I wonder if this guy's
Speaker 1: gonna throw over ound money in a way in a
Speaker 1: way that's gonna and the league has plenty of rules
Speaker 1: so you can only it's it's hard to outspend anybody else.
Speaker 1: But I think there was a little concerned about that. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you were living in Seattle area. Now you have
Speaker 1: a team in the l A. Do you go down
Speaker 1: there and yell and scream like all the other fans.
Speaker 1: I do. In fact, we have forty one home games.
Speaker 1: I've probably made thirty eight this year and maybe another
Speaker 1: seven away games. So I make it to a lot
Speaker 1: of games, and uh, it's fun to be enthusiastic. I
Speaker 1: enjoy it. Uh, you know, things are most fun when
Speaker 1: it's your kid playing. Uh. Second, most, you know this
Speaker 1: owner thing is pretty good because you have a sense
Speaker 1: of the dynamics of the guys. So you go into
Speaker 1: the locker rooms and say, well, you know, guys could
Speaker 1: do this better, or that you tell them anything in
Speaker 1: the locker room, or you give any tips. I got
Speaker 1: three principles. Number one, don't talk to anybody after a loss.
Speaker 1: That's number one. Coach, yes, but not players. Number two, Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, pump guys up, which I do usually with
Speaker 1: texts after a game, or sometimes I go talk to
Speaker 1: somebody after big games in the locker room when we
Speaker 1: lose or win our last game of the season in
Speaker 1: the locker room, and I go to training camp at
Speaker 1: the beginning of the year, give a little speech, um,
Speaker 1: a little bit of a pump up. I guess you'd say,
Speaker 1: But you have coached um young children in basketball. Do
Speaker 1: you ever take any of the tips and give them
Speaker 1: give them to your l a Clippers coach. No. I
Speaker 1: hear their owners to do that, and I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: be that guy. Well, you're famous when you were Microsoft
Speaker 1: for pumping up people. You have a voice that projects
Speaker 1: and when you're watching the game, do you yell and
Speaker 1: scream like everybody else, I yell and scream. I've become
Speaker 1: a little more moderate, so I preserve my vocal cords
Speaker 1: because you know, it certainly can be a problem when
Speaker 1: you're let's go, let's get these goods. You know, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: it can be an issue. So what's more fun running
Speaker 1: Microsoft or running the l A Clippers? Running the l
Speaker 1: A Clippers, I mean, running Microsoft was a ton of fun,
Speaker 1: and it was you know, it's kind of inspirational because
Speaker 1: we were working on stuff that literally transformed the world.
Speaker 1: And I got a lot out of that, and the
Speaker 1: intellectual challenges were strong, and I loved that, and I
Speaker 1: thought a unique value to add. But just for fun,
Speaker 1: fun fun. There's really no stress running a basketball team,
Speaker 1: except you really want to win. Let's talk about your background.
Speaker 1: If you grew up in the Detroit area, your parents
Speaker 1: were immigrants. Where were they from? My dad was an
Speaker 1: immigrant from Switzerland. He let Switzerland after World War Two,
Speaker 1: worked for the U. S Military as an interpreter at
Speaker 1: the war trials at Nuremberg because they were looking for
Speaker 1: German speakers who were not German citizens because they were
Speaker 1: afraid of that. And then he met his sponsor. Uh
Speaker 1: was one of the g I s dad who he
Speaker 1: had worked with as an interpreter. I don't think he
Speaker 1: finished high school. He's never precisely and that certainly didn't
Speaker 1: go to college, but he worked at Ford. My mom
Speaker 1: actually not an immigrant, her parents were and they came
Speaker 1: from I guess it was probably Russia at the time. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you did pretty well in high school. Your validatornamor class. Yes,
Speaker 1: he went to Harvard. And then when you're at Harvard
Speaker 1: you have a classmate that's down the hall name Bill Gates.
Speaker 1: It was interesting because the guy who introduced and says,
Speaker 1: you guys are both kind of weird, energetic guys you
Speaker 1: should meet. So we did. And the time we met
Speaker 1: was just about the time he was starting Microsoft plus
Speaker 1: or minus a month, I want to say. And that
Speaker 1: clearly was more than this is just going to be
Speaker 1: another random guy. I mean, a guy starting his own company.
Speaker 1: It was the second company A done one in high school. Uh.
Speaker 1: He was clearly a special, a special guy, and I
Speaker 1: got to know him pretty well. You graduated Magna Cloudy
Speaker 1: and then you decided to go to Procter and Gamble.
Speaker 1: I did Procter and Gamble now very often Procter and
Speaker 1: Gamble gets a lot of very talented people in their
Speaker 1: young trading programs. Did anybody famous work alongside you? Well, Bunny,
Speaker 1: you should mention that a number of people did when
Speaker 1: I was there. Scott Cook, who started into it, was there.
Speaker 1: Jeff Immelt who ran Ge and I worked together on
Speaker 1: Duncan Hind's Brownie Blueberry Muffin and Moist and Easy Snack
Speaker 1: Cake Mix. We were the dynamic drivers of brownie mix sales.
Speaker 1: Um so he was. He was around. Meg Whitman came
Speaker 1: right after I left. It really was a great, a
Speaker 1: great place. Go to Stanford and you're gonna get your
Speaker 1: m b A. And then you decide to leave and
Speaker 1: drop out of Stanford to go to this tiny startup
Speaker 1: in Seattle are called Microsoft. What did your father saying
Speaker 1: about that? Oh? He he was apoplectic in a way.
Speaker 1: I mean, he didn't try to stop me. But I
Speaker 1: remember when I called home and my dad said, what
Speaker 1: the heck is software? Uh, he'd actually been involved installing
Speaker 1: Wang systems old word processors. But what software? And then
Speaker 1: my mom said, why would a person ever need a computer?
Speaker 1: Now today you'd say that's crazy but wasn't crazy in night.
Speaker 1: But they said, okay, okay, we hear you, we hear you.
Speaker 1: If it doesn't work out, you go back to business school, right,
Speaker 1: I said, right, And then never came back. So the
Speaker 1: summer ends and you stay there, and you're the thirtieth
Speaker 1: employee of Microsoft, and ultimately you become I guess next
Speaker 1: to Bill Gates and Paul I on the biggest shareholder.
Speaker 1: What were the jobs you had as you work your
Speaker 1: way up? Well? I started out as assistant to the president.
Speaker 1: I was Bill's assistant, basically chief cook and bottle washershire
Speaker 1: So I set up the accounting, which there was some,
Speaker 1: but we needed a professionalize. I was the HR department.
Speaker 1: I hired everybody. When IBM came the first time about
Speaker 1: their personal computer, I became the kind of salesman on IBM.
Speaker 1: Why I knew how to wear a tie. I was
Speaker 1: about the only guy around the place, and Bill said,
Speaker 1: you have a diet in a suit? Why did you
Speaker 1: come to the meeting? So when did you realize this
Speaker 1: isn't a little startup that's gonna be a nice little
Speaker 1: company in in one part of the software world. It's
Speaker 1: going to be a dominant company in the world. By
Speaker 1: the late eighties, I would say, for sure, I knew
Speaker 1: the company is going to be something. I remember when
Speaker 1: Andy Grove, who went who ran Intel, said someday there'll
Speaker 1: be a hundred million computers a year or sold. Bill
Speaker 1: and I looked at each other and said, he's nuts.
Speaker 1: There's never gonna be a hundred million. These days, there's
Speaker 1: three hundred million plus computer sold a year. And your
Speaker 1: father and mother, what did they say at this point? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And then they got they got comfortable when we went public.
Speaker 1: They knew I wasn't gonna be brokeh Will actually offered
Speaker 1: me a decent starting salary. It was either forty or
Speaker 1: fifty grand I can't remember which looked good in that
Speaker 1: in that day and age. So they knew that was
Speaker 1: a good choice. Now, my dad still had a little skepticism.
Speaker 1: There were all these people and there was nothing physical
Speaker 1: you could get your What do all these people do?
Speaker 1: There's no there's no product. What did they all do?
Speaker 1: So that that that was a confusing point. I mean's
Speaker 1: a smart guy, but he'd always asked me that every
Speaker 1: time we went through the campus. So and near two thousand,
Speaker 1: you become the CEO. Bill decides to sort of sort
Speaker 1: of retired, became the chief software architect, but no longer CEO,
Speaker 1: so you now can run the place where you were
Speaker 1: surprised that Bill decided to retire. I was surprised. I
Speaker 1: was surprised. Bill had asked me to be president. Said fine,
Speaker 1: and that was a another number two position and I
Speaker 1: was fine with that. And then Bill came to me
Speaker 1: and said, hey, will you be CEO? And I asked him,
Speaker 1: do you really want me to be CEO or do
Speaker 1: you really kind of want me to be a figurehead? Um,
Speaker 1: just just tell me. He says, no, I really want
Speaker 1: you to be CEO. And I would say, was I CEO? Well,
Speaker 1: because Bill, you know, stayed working every day, told about
Speaker 1: two thousand eight, and I would say I didn't feel
Speaker 1: like a total CEO probably until Bill wasn't working there
Speaker 1: every day in two thousand and eight, because there was
Speaker 1: a lot of shared responsibility. Talk about some of the
Speaker 1: things that happened while you were CEO. You moved into
Speaker 1: video gaming, I guess Xbox. Yeah. We were saying, what's
Speaker 1: the path for uh software if you will, into the
Speaker 1: living room, and the only path that was really clear
Speaker 1: at the time was the video gaming systems. There was
Speaker 1: no way to be in the video game business and
Speaker 1: not build the hardware. We had been in the hardware
Speaker 1: business in a small way. We'd had our mouse product,
Speaker 1: a few other products along the way, and frankly, I
Speaker 1: think we probably in many ways have done more hardware sooner. Well,
Speaker 1: you've made another investment at the time that was actually criticized.
Speaker 1: It was an investment in a company called Facebook. I
Speaker 1: think you invested about three hundred million dollars or so.
Speaker 1: And why did you do that and did you regret
Speaker 1: not trying to buy the whole company. I did try
Speaker 1: to buy the whole thing. Uh. Zuckerberg came up to Seattle,
Speaker 1: we met down there. I put a concrete financial offer
Speaker 1: on the table, but it's a little ross. Pero tried
Speaker 1: to buy Microsoft from Bill Gates in like seventy nine,
Speaker 1: and Bill said, no, founders really have a lot of
Speaker 1: love and passion around their stuff. And even though Facebook
Speaker 1: was tiny I think it was two thousand nine and
Speaker 1: I offered twenty plus billion dollars something like that and
Speaker 1: market absolutely no interest. Wow. Okay, So a couple other businesses,
Speaker 1: they think the smartphone business that Apple is now more
Speaker 1: or less perfected, at least the United States. Uh, you
Speaker 1: were skeptical that that would be a great business. Do
Speaker 1: you think Microsoft could have gotten into that business or earlier? Yes,
Speaker 1: we could have and should have. We should have done
Speaker 1: in my opinion, we should have gotten in the harbor business.
Speaker 1: And that's my I blew that. One of the other
Speaker 1: things that happened during this period of time when you
Speaker 1: were the CEO was cloud computing. Your own neighbor, Amazon
Speaker 1: built this big business under your own nose. Were you
Speaker 1: surprised that they have become so big in cloud? They've
Speaker 1: had more success than I anticipated. I didn't sell them short,
Speaker 1: but they have had more success. Here's here's why I'm
Speaker 1: not saying I was completely dubious. It is very hard
Speaker 1: sometimes for big companies to do something very different. I
Speaker 1: call it doing a second trick. At the time, I
Speaker 1: would call Amazon a one trick pony. It was doing
Speaker 1: this retail stuff. It was doing an awesome job. But
Speaker 1: to do a second trick, you don't get a lot
Speaker 1: of companies who do that. That doesn't mean Microsoft's out
Speaker 1: of the game, are you know? We started this thing
Speaker 1: called Azure and Office three and my successor, Sata has
Speaker 1: taken the thing too very much New Heights, and right
Speaker 1: before you left you tried to buy and you did.
Speaker 1: Ultimately after you left, I think they completed the Nokia
Speaker 1: acquisition and that was an effort to get into smartphones
Speaker 1: that didn't work out. Why do you think it didn't
Speaker 1: work out? I think out. I think there were probably
Speaker 1: two reasons. Number one, maybe it was late, and number two,
Speaker 1: after I left, while the company went ahead and bought
Speaker 1: it um, I don't think there was the same level
Speaker 1: of enthusiasm at the board level and management level for
Speaker 1: scaling up and investing there. Okay, so you ultimately decided
Speaker 1: to leave and your successor UH is such an Adela
Speaker 1: or your surprise when he was selected? No? No, he
Speaker 1: was the recommendation that I made. He's the recommendation that
Speaker 1: Bill Gates made. I thought he was a candidate to
Speaker 1: replace me, which is why we moved him into his
Speaker 1: last job, which was running one of the big divisions.
Speaker 1: And I was glad he got the job because he's
Speaker 1: done a great job. Now, when you were there, you
Speaker 1: dramatically increase sales UH, and earnings were dramatically higher. The
Speaker 1: stock price didn't go up. Why do you think there
Speaker 1: wasn't a correlation between the stock price and earnings and revenue.
Speaker 1: Probably two factors. Number One, I took over at least
Speaker 1: at the worst time if you want your stock price
Speaker 1: to go up. I came in right at the heart
Speaker 1: of the dot com bubble. Everything was sky high. The
Speaker 1: bubble breaks, and by the way Judge orders the breakup
Speaker 1: of Microsoft, that happens, you know, within several months of
Speaker 1: me taking over, and things fall down and then you
Speaker 1: have to build back up. That's number one. By the
Speaker 1: end of my tenure, I had a certain kind of
Speaker 1: reputation with Wall Street and and not not that favorable,
Speaker 1: not about my performance, but certainly people, Hey, the guys
Speaker 1: a grinder's gonna keep doing this thing, but are all
Speaker 1: these new things gonna actually break through profit wise? And
Speaker 1: number two, I think mostly people on Wall Street would
Speaker 1: have said I overinvested. I was spending too much money. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the only chance to position the company really came
Speaker 1: when Sacha started. And you know, he's done a good
Speaker 1: job of repositioning the company and investor's minds. So since
Speaker 1: you've left, the stock has gone up a fair bit
Speaker 1: and your net worth is going up a fair bit.
Speaker 1: As a result, you're the biggest individual shareholder of Microsoft.
Speaker 1: Is that right? Yeah, that's right. So how come you
Speaker 1: didn't sell more shares because Bill Gates and Paul Ellend
Speaker 1: have sold a large part of their shares well. When
Speaker 1: I was CEO, I just didn't think it was right.
Speaker 1: Somehow didn't feel right to me. And it's not like
Speaker 1: I'm even with what I had done to diversify at
Speaker 1: that time. It's not like I'm going to go broke
Speaker 1: if the Microsoft stock does poorly. Uh, And it wasn't
Speaker 1: doing poorly, and I ran the company. If I didn't believe,
Speaker 1: and people knew I already had enough money, I should
Speaker 1: stay invested. I should stay there. When I left, I
Speaker 1: still loved the company. I did a little bit of
Speaker 1: of stuff to diversify slightly. I put some money aside
Speaker 1: for charity, but I still you know, I'm a loyal
Speaker 1: loil dude. I still drive Forwards. My dad worked at Forward,
Speaker 1: and I still own Microsoft stock. So you retire off
Speaker 1: as the CEO at the age of fifty seven. What
Speaker 1: did you decide you wanted to do when you left?
Speaker 1: I had not really given it a ton of thought
Speaker 1: until I left. I again had this sort of hardcore notion.
Speaker 1: I was supposed to just give give it all from
Speaker 1: Microsoft until they leave. So I leave, and what am
Speaker 1: I gonna do? Well? Owning a sports team was attractive,
Speaker 1: so within a few weeks I went and visited Roger
Speaker 1: Goodell and Adam Silver, the NBA and NFL commissioners. I
Speaker 1: thought that would be a fun thing to do. Uh,
Speaker 1: and my wife, who had been involved in philanthropic stuff,
Speaker 1: really focused in on foster kids and disadvantaged kids and
Speaker 1: state of Washington. She said, come on, dude, time you
Speaker 1: gotta get involved. Uh So I did. Um At first,
Speaker 1: I said, come on, government takes care of these problems,
Speaker 1: and she said, no, Philanthropy's got her role. But it
Speaker 1: did intrigue me to what degree government really does help
Speaker 1: disadvantage kids. I had a hard time finding the numbers,
Speaker 1: which led to me starting this thing called USA Facts
Speaker 1: and between USA Facts or philanthropy, the clippers and having
Speaker 1: a good time, which in my case means exercising and
Speaker 1: playing golf. Um, my life's pretty full. Okay, I don't
Speaker 1: play golf because my theory was, if I had a
Speaker 1: meeting with you and you thought I was competent, intelligent,
Speaker 1: and you saw me in the golf course. It would
Speaker 1: destroy the illusion of competence. So I guess why I
Speaker 1: don't play um, But you're probably right and I still play.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about the organization you started USA Facts.
Speaker 1: How did you get involved in this idea and what
Speaker 1: is it now doing? So I said, I really want
Speaker 1: a consolidated view of what government does. Where does the
Speaker 1: money come from, where does it go? And oh, by
Speaker 1: the way, also, what are the impacts? You know, if
Speaker 1: we're transferring wealth, what does quality of life look like?
Speaker 1: We're investing in education, It is the quality of the outcome.
Speaker 1: How how good are or how well are our kids doing?
Speaker 1: What are your philanthropic goals? Would you say in terms
Speaker 1: of areas you want to focus on with the wealth
Speaker 1: that you have, Yeah, we're single purpose. What can we
Speaker 1: do to improve the chances that kids born at the
Speaker 1: bottom of the economic total poll their parents are move
Speaker 1: up economically. You're always going to have some people who
Speaker 1: are at the bottom of the economic total poll. It
Speaker 1: shouldn't just be the same people all the time. People
Speaker 1: should be moving up. People should have a shot at
Speaker 1: the American dream, which is the chance to do whatever
Speaker 1: you want to do and that's not true. For a
Speaker 1: lot of kids when they're born, their probability of staying
Speaker 1: where they are economically is very, very high. I don't
Speaker 1: think that's okay. There are a lot of reasons people
Speaker 1: point to education. Education is a part of it, but
Speaker 1: there are a lot of reasons why kids can't get
Speaker 1: an education. And I think it's important to take a
Speaker 1: look at that chain and then try to find not
Speaker 1: only the not for profits to invest in. We think
Speaker 1: it's very important to try to stimulate the right behaviors
Speaker 1: by government and the right spending by government because it
Speaker 1: can make a huge difference. So if you look back
Speaker 1: at your extraordinary career at Microsoft and now what you're doing,
Speaker 1: any regrets or you're happy with everything the way it
Speaker 1: worked out. I'm pretty happy with the way things worked out.
Speaker 1: I mean, I can go back and there's decisions I'd
Speaker 1: make differently if I was at Microsoft. But you know,
Speaker 1: if I look at the span of work, we went
Speaker 1: from a company that had two and a half million
Speaker 1: in sales and thirty people to a company that had
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand people and eighty billion roughly of sales
Speaker 1: and lots of profit. I can feel good about that.
Speaker 1: Even though, uh, there were mistakes. I started out the
Speaker 1: process with a lot of friends. I still have mostly
Speaker 1: the same friends as I did, which I feel very
Speaker 1: good about that. I'm in a very good place in
Speaker 1: my life now, probably you know, in a way, the
Speaker 1: best ever. Although I wouldn't trade out anything I did
Speaker 1: in the past, at least at this age. I like
Speaker 1: being a little less busy. That's good for me. I'm
Speaker 1: pretty pleased. So as a leader, uh, you are well
Speaker 1: known for very visible and vocal expressions of your thoughts.
Speaker 1: Is that a style you consciously adopted or it just
Speaker 1: happened that way. I was a very very shy kid,
Speaker 1: very shy kid. I was a shy kid when I
Speaker 1: got to Harvard. And then I built my confidence as
Speaker 1: my as I built it because I was doing things
Speaker 1: and being successful. I was shy when I got to
Speaker 1: business school. When I got to Procter and Gamble. First
Speaker 1: day I started a guy who wind up my roommate.
Speaker 1: He said it was like this, Hi, my name is
Speaker 1: Steve Bohmer. My palms sweaty because I'm so nervous, UM,
Speaker 1: so shy kid. And then I got better and better
Speaker 1: and I developed some confidence in public speaking. And and
Speaker 1: it turns out I have something of a knack and
Speaker 1: part of that is getting in front of your troops
Speaker 1: and pumping them up and tell his story and um,
Speaker 1: I will do and bestball. It's a weird environment because
Speaker 1: of course I don't have a lot of credible why
Speaker 1: I'm an owner for that, sax, I'm not an expert.
Speaker 1: But you know, at the end of the day, at
Speaker 1: least I can I can get into the game and
Speaker 1: be verbal and vocal. Okay, what would you say is
Speaker 1: the most important characteristic to be a good leader. Commitment.
Speaker 1: You really have to have your head in the game
Speaker 1: and be committed to be a good leader. There's two
Speaker 1: parts of leadership. One is leading people, and that's about
Speaker 1: commitment and people understanding you have commitment. The other part
Speaker 1: of leadership, which doesn't get talked about much because you
Speaker 1: have to be a leader of ideas. The worst thing
Speaker 1: you can do both for your people in generals to
Speaker 1: say let's go and you point that way, and the
Speaker 1: truth is you should have gone that way. So leaders
Speaker 1: have to be leaders of ideas. The ideas compelled the people,
Speaker 1: but then the ideas have to be right and you
Speaker 1: have to stay committed. If twenty years from today or
Speaker 1: twenty five years today, you're looking back on your life,
Speaker 1: What would you want people to say was your legacy,
Speaker 1: what you contributed to our country? Well, you asked the
Speaker 1: very specific question, what would I would I contribute to
Speaker 1: our country? What I hope we do is make some
Speaker 1: difference in the lives of kids. That's number two. Number one. Hey,
Speaker 1: we democratized computing and putting that kind of power and
Speaker 1: capability for people to to thrive, to investigate, to be smarter,
Speaker 1: to to create more. I feel immense pride about that.
Speaker 1: I put that number one. I think that was not
Speaker 1: only something that affected this country, but the world. Whatever
Speaker 1: we do philanthropically, I hope makes a big, big difference.
Speaker 1: It's hard to make a bigger difference than being involved
Speaker 1: in the popularization of computing and the five NBA championships.
Speaker 1: You will have one that will be important as well, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's kind of a zero sum game. When we
Speaker 1: win them, somebody else doesn't win them, So it's a
Speaker 1: little harder to say it's a broad contribution. But in
Speaker 1: l a that would be a big contribution.