Had Bill Gates not been ‘broke’ with his first startup at the age of 17, a Microsoft empire of more than $ 1,700 billion would not have happened!

Microsoft cofounder – Bill Gates is currently the second richest billionaire in the world and the owner of the Bill & Melinda Gates fund. It can be said that he was the most successful icon in software industry after dropping out of Harvard.

From the late 70s, he had a vision that sooner or later, every home would have computers. At the time, most people thought a computer was a big, unfriendly machine and they didn’t want it to replace their typewriter.

Most people only know Bill Gates as the richest man in the world for many years or the boss of Microsoft without knowing much about the stumbles he went through before he became successful.

The first company founded by him and his partner Paul Allen – Traf-O-Data, was in fact a failure. The company operates in the field of processing and analyzing data from road traffic kiosks, providing information to traffic engineers and providing automatic reporting on traffic flow to help reduce congestion.

Bill Gates (right) and Paul Allen.

One summer in high school, Gates worked for a company that measures traffic flow patterns by counting car wheels rolling through pressure-sensitive rubber pipes on the road. This process is monotonous, ineffective and makes the observer very tired.

Gates and his friend Allen felt the process could be done more efficiently and with less cost. Therefore, they came up with the idea of ​​Traf-O-Data. At that time, Gates was nearly 17 years old and Allen was 19 years old.

The two used computers at the University of Washington library (where Allen’s father worked) to create easier-to-read graphs of data about hourly traffic.

Then, a third associate joined the company and built a machine to automate jobs. They gathered $ 360 to buy an 8008 processor chip specially ordered for the Traf-O-Data machine. This is a lot of money for such a small thing.

Traf-O-Data calculator with tape reader.

Traf-O-Data has made it much easier to analyze traffic data for the Washington state road. Soon, the company charged $ 2 a day for data collection for customers including small counties near Seattle and one district in British Columbia. Allen once wrote: “During that first start-up, we had great dreams that money will come to us.”

After more than a year, while Bill was in his freshman year at Harvard, Allen in Washington tried to find a new business for Traf-O-Data, but they were all pressed for price. The contracts are not enough for two people to keep the business.

Not only that, as soon as Traf-O-Data’s business showed signs of prosperity, Washington and other states began offering a similar service for free, causing the two to consider selling the company’s machines. but it failed. Finally, after struggling for a while, they decided to close Traf-O-Data.

Gates once said, “In retrospect, Traf-O-Data was a good idea with a flawed business model. We didn’t do market research and did not foresee the difficulty of states having free services.”

But neither he nor Allen was discouraged. They gained valuable experience in the future to found Microsoft. At present, Microsoft is one of the most successful and influential corporations in the world.

In an interview, Allen shared: “If it hadn’t been for Traf-O-Data, perhaps Microsoft wouldn’t have been born. The lesson we realized is that there are very few dead ends in technology and entrepreneurship. Going wrong in one direction helps you a lot in the other. The failure with Traf-O-Data was important in getting us ready to make the first Microsoft product. next year”.