Without 20/20 hindsight it was absolutely a huge risk. What if Microsoft had failed after five or ten years? He would have lost all of the time he could have spent earning a college degree and developing/working his network. Given that his parents were well off and he went to Harvard of all places, that is an insane opportunity risk to the vast majority of people if they didn't know that their efforts would become one of the most valuable companies in the world.

You are missing the forest for the trees.

You are ignoring that Bill Gates had to come from an extraordinarily privileged position to even be able to incur such a large opportunity cost. Most people don't have the opportunity to not to finish a Harvard degree, because most people don't have the opportunity to go to Harvard to begin with.

You are also ignoring that even if Microsoft had failed after a 10 years, the act of founding and running it would likely have afforded him experience that would rival in value a Harvard degree. This makes it doubtful that the opportunity cost was actually very large.

Furthermore, when you talk about how large the risk was, you play fast and loose with relative and absolute sizes. It may be true that Bill Gates took a large risk in absolute terms, but because of his background, the risk was actually not that big in relative terms. Not any larger than the risk of someone else choosing one education instead of another, or one career over another.

Given that he had a multi-million dollar trust-fund, I would imagine he either would've spent his days living off that and doing whatever work interested him most, or just continued on with his career at a roughly 5-year deficit to that of his peers. With a Harvard degree I'm quite confident he would've managed to get by.

Except, you know, he wouldn't have a Harvard degree if he dropped out, he'd have no career, he'd be bleeding money out of his trust fund, he wouldn't continue developing the very valuable network or pedigree during his remaining years at Harvard, and he'd be stuck with knowledge that wasn't as valuable then as it is now. That's how opportunity costs work.

We're not talking about whether he'd "get by," that's irrelevant. We're talking about relative risks assuming that Microsoft didn't succeed.

People want to believe that there's some sacrifice...some payment made for people like Bill Gates to have earned their wealth.

I think Bill Gates is a great businessman and he has worked for his wealth, but let us not be delusional. The son of a well-respected Seattle lawyer from a long-standing Seattle family that could afford to send their kid to the most prestigious school in Seattle was never going to have issues having a comfortable career by going with "Plan B".

An opportunity cost is literally a sacrifice by definition. Bill Gates made a choice to start Microsoft instead of finishing school so there was clearly one opportunity that he rejected and one that he followed. It's not "payment," it's a fact that he chose one path and due to the universal law of causality had to give up one opportunity for another. If Microsoft hadn't succeeded he would have been left empty handed. That's the very definition of risk.

The only delusion in this thread is the idea that Bill Gates took no risk when he decided to drop out of Harvard and start a company with the goal of ushering in the age of personal computing. I'm not comparing him to a starving African child, I'm just pointing out that he took a risk just like every entrepreneur on the planet.

When people say "he's rich, it wasn't a risk for him" they're really saying that the person wasn't risking their well-being. They're not saying that person didn't risk something else, such as employability; but employability is unimportant to someone in that position whilst for another person it's vital.

So yes, technically you're right, but your argument is missing the vital essence of what people mean when they say, eg, "Bill Gates wasnt taking a risk".

I stopped working for N months to build an indie game (which eventually didn't go anywhere). That was a risk and had an associated cost (N months of lost salary, expenses, growth etc).

But because of my skills I had no problem getting back into a normal development job afterward.

That means that my risk was a lot less than someone who would lose everything if their plan didn't work out; the same goes for him. His risk was negligible.

It turns out if you drop out of school, and decide you want to go back, they let you back in.

As for "bleeding money out of his trust fund" - you do realize, short of developing a 6-figure coke habit, he could've lived off the interest for the rest of his life QUITE comfortably, right?

His relative risk was nearly 0. He was going to live, at worst, an upper middle class lifestyle regardless of the success or failure of Microsoft.

>he wouldn't continue developing the very valuable network or pedigree during his remaining years at Harvard, and he'd be stuck with knowledge that wasn't as valuable then as it is now.

Except this is not a black and white matter, nothing is stopping him from going back to college except time and money of which he already had enough. I'm pretty sure his parents had a contingency plan in case his company failed.

Getting in a boat with your two children to escape Syria by crossing the Mediterranean, that's absolutely a huge risk. There's a substantial chance, say 4%, that the boat will sink, and all of you will die, within a few days after you choose to take that risk. Even if you get across, you may be sent back to Syria to die.

By contrast, not getting a Harvard degree and maybe having to spend an extra year or two for a degree from a lesser university, that's absolutely not a huge risk. It's like the ultimate non-huge risk.