There he learned everything he needed to build Microsoft’s empire

Microsoft is, without a doubt, the greater professional success of Bill Gates. However, not many people know that the secret of their success was based on some failures that the millionaire committed Before founding the technological.

In his autobiographical book, ‘Code Source: My beginnings’Gates reveals how this first business experience, when he was barely a teenager, was decisive to mold his vision about What Microsoft should be. This episode of Gates’s life shows that even the brightest and most successful businessmen have had to stumble learn from your mistakes.

Traf-o-Data: Gates and Allen’s first attempt

In the summer of 1972, Bill Gates was attended by his last year of high school, while Paul Allen was already in college. Both had met at the school computing club. They were inexperienced and have barely done a few programming projects for the school or to collaborate in projects with their teachers.

However, they were presented with the opportunity to code and process telemetry data of the Alburquerque traffic using perforated paper ribbons, so both friends joined for efforts and founded Traf-O-Data.

Gates himself is described in the book as a “spoiled know -allotodo” that often responded with sarcasm and disdain with a: “That is the most stupid thing I have heard.” A phrase that, who have worked with the tycoon At some point in his career at the head of Microsoft, he has surely heard on more than one occasion.

Having that in mind, the experience provided by Traf-O-Data, although failed, served as learning For someone who has defined himself as self -taught. Both schoolmates created a machine equipped with a Intel 8008 microprocessor of 360 dollars that allowed to automate the reading of the paper tapes that contained the traffic data to digitize that information.

Although the idea seemed promising, the company failed to be profitable. As Paul Allen remembered In an article De Newsweek, “Traf-O-Data was a good idea with a poor business model. We had not occurred to market studies and we did not know how difficult it would be to get financing from the municipalities.” In 1975, they managed to bill almost $ 17,000. Which was not bad in the case of an inexperienced young people. According to Paul Allen, he remained operational until 1980, when he already registered annual losses of $ 3,494.

This first business failure, far from discouraging them, served as a test laboratory where They learned important lessons on the marketproject management and the importance of constant innovation. “Traf-o-Data is still my favorite mistake because it confirmed that each failure contains the seed of the next success,” Allen recalled.

Gates assured in his book that he learned that it is not enough to have a good idea, but it is crucial to have a solid business model and a well -defined business objective. The experience with Traf-O-Data taught them to identify the real market needs (the digitalization of the data of the paper tapes) and to develop solutions that really made the difference (the machine that processed the information), skills that would forge the foundations on which Microsoft would be built.

Learning to be the boss

The adventure of Traf-O-Data, was also a personal level learning for Gates, somewhat awkward in terms of social skills. Before developing the machine with the processor, Gates and Allen They hired a group of students of lakeside younger than them to transcribe by hand the data of the tapes. They paid fifty cents for each tape.

Then, Gates and Allen went to the Library of the University of Washington and used The university computer to process this data and generate the traffic patterns graphics that the tapes had been recorded.

That He taught them to work as a teamto make quick decisions and adapt to the changes in the environment to stay in your target. Later, they created their own processing system, which allowed them to collect two dollars daily for the digitalization of the data, as well as expand their business area to other government agencies of the neighboring states to Seattle.

Gates himself explained to young peoplethat they were going to graduate at the University of Arizona del Norte that errors are a fundamental part of the learning process and that you should not be afraid to commit them. Traf-o-data was the seed of What is Microsoft today.

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Image | Flickr (World Economic Forum)