When Paul Allen and I first started Microsoft, I didn’t know as much about computers as I did today. Paul kept saying “Bill Gates, here is a computer chip” and I would say “Haha like a potato chip!” and would usually eat the computer chip in front of him. I think I ate about 3000 computer chips in our first year of Microsoft. It nearly put us out of business. Eventually they would just hand me a crouton and tell me it was a computer chip while they made real computer chips in secret and wouldn’t tell me. It was the solution that saved Microsoft.

When Paul Allen and I first started Microsoft, I didn’t know as much about computers as I did today. Paul kept saying “Bill Gates, here is a computer chip” and I would say “Haha like a potato chip!” and would usually eat the computer chip in front of him. I think I ate about 3000 computer chips in our first year of Microsoft. It nearly put us out of business. Eventually they would just hand me a crouton and tell me it was a computer chip while they made real computer chips in secret and wouldn’t tell me. It was the solution that saved Microsoft.

—Bill Gates on the early days of Microsoft
(via 75mgs)