Melinda Gates reveals the ‘career advice’ that made her quit IBM to join Microsoft in its startup days

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates' ex-wife Melinda French Gates revealed an important piece of advice she received early in her career. During a recent interview, she said that this advice —which was to forgo a stable job at IBM for a small startup that later became Microsoft — helped in her journey to becoming a billionaire. Gates mentioned that she got this advice from an IBM supervisor who made this suggestion despite the company’s interest. This made Gates leave a senior position at IBM to join the then-nascent Microsoft, where she spent nine years and played an important role in the company’s growth. She rose to the position of general manager of information products at Microsoft, which is now a $3.1 trillion tech giant.

In an interview with LinkedIn (shared by Fortune), which is available only to the professional networking platform’s premium subscribers, Gates said: “My hiring manager at IBM, a female, said to me, ‘Okay, are you ready to accept the job offer?’ And I said, ‘Well, I have one more company to go interview—this little company, Microsoft. It was tiny. She said, ‘If they give you an offer, you should take it.’ And it dumbfounded me. Here's this woman who's supposed to be my manager, giving me a piece of career advice.”
While the move to Microsoft on the West Coast required uprooting her life, the appeal of being part of something potentially groundbreaking was irresistible, Gates added.
“I didn't know anybody in Seattle. It was moving to the West Coast, but I was so excited about what they were doing. I was like, ‘I want to be part of that,’” she continued.
During the interview she even encouraged others to embrace similar leaps of faith in their careers, emphasising that taking risks can lead to exceptional achievements.
“I remind them all the time you can pivot careers. You can change. You can go over here. It's not like one or two paths that carry you forward, even though you had plans before this,” Gates added.
Gates is now among the top ten richest women in the US with a net worth of $15.2 billion. She also noted that this outcome may not have been the same had she not acted on the advice to choose a startup over IBM, which was an established corporation at that time.