Idea Man - Paul Allen

Reviewer’s Note:

Previously, whenever someone spoke of Microsoft, I always felt it was just Bill Gates Company. I knew Paul Allen was a Co-Founder, but I always underestimated his contribution to the company, until, I read this book. I’m in pure awe of how much this man has done in his lifetime, and the technology visionary he was. To give you just one example of his visions, he was the first one to come up with the idea of selling movies and concert tickets online, and he did that in 1993!

Book Review/ Summary:

The journey that Paul Allen has been on and the details of his life that he has shared in this book are truly mesmerizing. Right from his school days, to the initial projects, he and Bill Gates worked on, to founding Microsoft, to leaving it, and then founding multiple companies; it’s one of the most beautiful stories. A lot of people have written about Paul Allen during his Microsoft days, thus in this article, I will like to tell you’ll about him, and about the other companies, he founded and funded.

Paul Allen, since his childhood, has been a big music buff. He played the Guitar. While being a music player, he was introduced to the world of computers and fell in love with it. When he was studying computers in school, that’s when he met Bill Gates, and from then on the two became Best Friends and eventually ended up founding Microsoft together. Even after founding Microsoft, Paul still loved and played music. In the later years of his life, he got a yacht built for him (named Octopus), with a recording studio on it. He jammed with a lot of celebrities and friends over there.

Paul was a big Jimi Hendrix fan and like a true music fan tried to copy his rifts. He even built the Experience Music Project (EMP) in Seattle, which takes a creative approach to engineering and architecture.

Along with being a tech genius, he was also a part-owner of two major sports teams: the Portland Trail Blazers in the NBA and the Seattle Seahawks in the NFL. He was a big movie buff and thus was an initial and highest investor (at that time) of the animation studio Dreamworks Animation. Along with this; he has even founded the Venture Capitalist Firm Vulcan Capital and was the first one to create a sports website that updated the scores of live games in a timely fashion. This sports website was called Starwave and now is called ESPN.com.

Wait; there are more companies to come. He was the first one to vision movies and other tickets being sold online, and he was the one who suggested TicketMaster(a very famous ticket selling company in 1993) go online. He was the first one to realize how big the internet was going to be and thus invested in the company America Online. Along with all this, he even tried his hand at the space program. He was the sole investor in the SpaceShipOne, which was the first privately funded program to send a civilian to suborbital space.

There are many more things Paul did, but I’ll tell you’ll my favorites amongst them. In the early ’90s, he came up with an idea to create a stick that will scan the barcode and give you information about the product. How cool is that. However, he never ended up building it, but this idea was later taken up by someone else who built an app around it. Paul has always loved Aristotle for being a know it all. Aristotle knew about Physics, Medicine, History, and Political Science. Paul felt that there should be a virtual Aristotle and started a research institute to help build it. The institute is working on this project even today and loves to discuss and build around new ideas. Paul even started an institute to map the entire structure of the human brain in 3D. The institute works to study every single strand of the human brain, find out all its functions and see’s its importance to the human mind as well. And to help researchers and students, Paul created and posted all this information online, so that anyone could access it free of cost and work on it.

And the list of things and the companies he built and invested in is still far from over. He truly was a great mind. And the best part, over here, I have just touched the tip of the iceberg. In his book, Paul has gone in complete detail about what inspired him to take up those projects, what were the timelines and investments, and what were the results of those projects. I truly believe, everyone who loves technology should read this book at least once. So do check it out.

Happy Reading.