Replay: Bill Gates is ending his foundation — here’s how it began

Masters of Scale

WaitWhat

Entrepreneurship, Business, Management, Reid Hoffman, Mindset, Diversity & Inclusion, Jeff Berman, Bob Safian, Startups

4.6 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 9 May 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bill Gates announced this week that he will shutter his philanthropic foundation in 20 years – but not before using it to give away $200 billion to fight global diseases. In this archival episode from 2019, he tells host Reid Hoffman the story of how it all started – and how he learned to scale his impact as a philanthropist.

In Part 2 of this special two-part conversation, we’re talking with Bill Gates about the biggest success story ever told on the podcast. It was achieved not through Microsoft, but through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill and Melinda have built their foundation into one of the world’s single largest private philanthropies, and they’ve done it by taking lessons learned at Microsoft – on how to massively capitalize on inflection points – and applied them to the nonprofit world. With some surprises along the way. Here's their story.

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Transcript

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1:04.3	turring.com. Hi, listeners, it's your host, Reid Hoffman. Welcome back to part two of our landmark episode with Bill Gates on how to accelerate history.
1:17.3	In part one, we heard how Bill scaled Microsoft.
1:20.7	In this episode, we turn our attention to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
1:25.5	I believe this episode includes the greatest success story
1:28.8	ever told on the show. All that is ahead. We'll start, as always, with a story.
1:37.6	There's a piece of technology we all use every day, but barely notice it. This technology has been around in some form or another since the dawn of civilization.
1:53.0	The ancient Romans, Chinese, and the Abbasid caliphate all used it.
1:59.0	But product development plateaued over the years.
2:04.4	And billions of potential users aren't served by its current design.
2:10.1	That is what I call a neglected opportunity.
2:14.5	And a legendary tech founder stepped in.
2:17.4	We got universities involved. We did prototypes, now we're getting big companies drawn in.
2:22.3	That's Bill Gates.
	...

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