Melinda Gates recounts meeting Bill Gates at a Microsoft conference dinner (she sat in the second-to-last seat; he arrived 15 minutes later and sat beside her), describes their early courtship (including a memorable parking-lot conversation and a prompt phone call that led to a first date), and explains that during their engagement — after a formative first trip to Africa where they were moved by the people — they agreed most of their Microsoft-derived resources should be given back to society. The transcript notes they had been dating about five and a half years before marriage.
Questions this video answers
About five and a half years.
Chapters
So I arrive in New York. I have this female roommate from Microsoft, and she says, well, a bunch of us are here, 30 of us, for this computer show. You're here by yourself. Why don't you, after you go do this business, come join us for this conference dinner tonight. It'll be just Microsoft people, and there'll be 30 of us, three dozen. I said, great. I came across town. I came in late. There were two open seats, and I took the second to last open seat. And about 15 minutes later, Bill came in and sat in the last open seat. And so that's when we first met. I could sense that he was a bit interested. Oh, it took him quite a few months before he finally asked me out.
And he said, you played hard to get.
A little.
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, there was a lot going on.
Back then, I'm sure. So it's a Saturday, because everybody worked on a Saturday at Microsoft. You're in the parking lot, and what.
Does it say to you a couple months later? So it turned out his mom knew somebody who was on the board at Microsoft. It was on the board, sorry, at Duke. And so I guess he'd been asking for kind of some information about me. He knew I had worked at Duke. I had gone to Duke and then came to work at Microsoft. So anyway, we were working on a Saturday. I worked in a different building, but I guess we'd parked somewhere near each other, and I was coming out of the building, and so was he out of his building. And he struck up a conversation, and we started talking, and then this was on a Saturday. And he said he finally kind of got around. He said, well, would you go out with me? You know, two weeks from Friday night? And I'm like, two weeks from Friday night. Who knows their calendar that far out? Like I said, that wasn't really that spontaneous enough for me. Maybe call me closer to the date. That would be interesting, but call me a couple days ahead. And so I gave him my phone number, and he called me two hours later at home. He said, well, I have two things I have to go to tonight. A user group dinner and something else. But then could you go out with me for a drink? And I said, well, I guess that's a little more spontaneous. So I ended up going out with him.
And the rest, as they say, is history. Is history. Even before you got married, you all determined that you were going to contribute a great deal of your wealth to others. How did that conversation come about, and why did you all decide to do that?
Well, we both had been from families who really believed in volunteerism, believed in community service and giving back. And that was embedded deeply in both of our family structures. If you go back. And so we'd been dating for about five and a half years and during the time we were engaged, we took our first trip to Africa. Neither of us had ever been to the continent of Africa. We went, yeah, a little bit younger then. We went to see the animals and the savannah. We went on a safari. We took other couples with us. It was beautiful. We fell in love with everything we saw. But it's really not at all trite to say that we really fell in love with the people. And we just. It started us on this series of questions of sort of saying to ourselves, what is going on here? You know, why is it we can be in a Land Rover or Jeep and you know, but there aren't many great roads? And how is it that, you know, we could. That we see all these people walking along the road to an open air market, you know, men in flip flops, women often with bare feet and a child in their belly and one on their back and something on their. What has gone on here that things haven't started? And at the end of this trip we went off to an island that we were planning to go just for a few days before we came home off the coast of Africa. And we were already engaged to be married. And we had a series of marriage questionnaire we had done to prepare for getting married. We had a few things we wanted to go over where we wanted to make sure our values were the same, et cetera. And we started to talk on that trip that the vast majority of the resources from Microsoft would go back for society. And that was just. It was a given and it was an easy discussion. It's what we both believed and we fundamentally wanted to do. And we just thought it would be later in our lives when we got to do it because.
