The Ridiculously Lucky Story of Steve Ballmer

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LA Lakers owner
Steve Ballmer is one of the most interesting figures that I have ever come across in the tech industry, What interested me the most about him was the fact that he doesn’t fit any stereotype or traditional profile of a Tech CEO he is insanely extroverted, he is not a programmer and he says whatever is on his mind as passionately as he possibly can without a second thought, even going as far as saying in an interview in 2013 that he was quote “big, bald & loud.”
His Meteoric rise is just as fascinating as his personality, Steve Baller went from being a manager or essentially Bill Gates’ assistant to being the head of the largest Software company in the world after retiring like any causally super rich Billionaire he bought himself a big sports team, well I use the term “big” there very loosely because the LA Clippers have never been NBA Champions in their entire 52-year history, it must be tough to support them but what do you expect from the other team in LA?
I don’t know if its luck, skill, timing, having the right friend, or a combination of all 4 that is responsible for the success of Steve Ballmer but what is clear is that he has a unique place in tech history as the man who laughed at the iPhone when first come out and being the second person in U.S. history to become a billionaire through stock options received as an employee of a corporation in which he was neither a founder nor a relative of a founder, so in our second episode of the man, the meme, the legend series we will be taking a look at Steve Ballmer, in our 1st episode we looked at Craig Federighi you guys seemed to have enjoyed that video given that it is my 3rd most watched video of all time at the time of recording, so today we are continuing the series with perhaps the most bizarrely energetic and passionate figure in the tech industry Steve Ballmer.
Ballmer was born in Detroit, Michigan on March 24th, 1956. He was a gifted child having been a National Merit Scholar and also scoring a perfect 800 on the Mathematics section of the SAT. This resulted in his admission to Harvard University where he lived down the hall from Bill Gates. While at Harvard he scored highly in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, an exam sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America, scoring higher than Bill Gates. Steve Ballmer was athletic too; he was captain of his high school basketball team and was also a part of the Harvard Football Team, from an early age he was very competitive. He graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in applied mathematics and economics in 1977. After University Ballmer worked as an assistant product manager at Procter & Gamble for two years but didn’t find the Job interesting enough so he left. After briefly trying to write screenplays in Hollywood, he started attending the Stanford Graduate School of Business for his MBA but dropped out in 1980 to join Microsoft after Bill Gates persuaded him.
Ballmer was Microsoft's 30th employee and the first business manager hired by Bill Gates. Ballmer was offered a salary of $50 000 as well as 5-10% of the company. When Microsoft was incorporated in 1981, Ballmer owned 8% of the company. In 1985 Ballmer became the operating system development head at Microsoft although not a programmer himself he headed the team of developers working on MS-DOS and Windows 1.0, In 1986 one of the earliest viral videos of Steve Ballmer was produced promoting windows 1.0 in the style of a Crazy Eddie commercial. (play commercial)From his early days at Microsoft he has had a fiery energetic personality so much so that in 1991 in Japan during a meeting, he was recorded screaming “Windows!” with such force that he injured his vocal cords he really took his passion to a whole new level. From February 1992 onwards he was executive Vice President of Sales and Support. As the Vice President of Sales Steve Ballmer was featured on stage during the iconic release of Windows 95, it was the most consumer-friendly OS Microsoft had ever released, and because of the massive excitement around Windows 95 Steve Ballmer just had to show his excitement in his own unique way(play video) and of course, the marketing of Windows 98 would also feature Steve Balmer this time it was an ad he made with Bill Gates which was a play on the song “What is love.”(play ad) In 1998 Ballmer was promoted to President of Microsoft, a title that he held from July 1998 to February 2001, making him the de facto number two in the company to the chairman and CEO, Bill Gates. In just 20 years Balmer had gone from being a manager to the head of the world’s largest software company it was a rapid and meteoric rise.
On January 13th, 2000, Steve Ballmer was officially named the Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft.