- Melinda French Gates turned down IBM on a hiring manager’s advice—and became a $15.2 billion mogul. She’s one of many billionaires, from Jensen Huang to Steve Jobs, who owe their success to unexpected wisdom.
If a manager at one of the world’s most powerful companies tells you to ditch them for a small startup, take the advice. You might wind up a billionaire like Melinda French Gates. At the start of her career, she interned at IBM for two summers, and had a job offer on the table. But a supervisor steered her to cut and run for the hills of Seattle.
“My hiring manager at IBM, a female, said to me, ‘Okay, are you ready to accept the job offer?’ And I said, ‘Well, I have one more company to go interview—this little company, Microsoft. It was tiny,” French Gates said during a recent interview with LinkedIn. “And she said, ‘If they give you an offer, you should take it.’ And it dumbfounded me.”
French Gates did in fact take the job at Microsoft and began her nine-year career at the pioneering tech company. She was a critical player in the growth of the business, rising within the ranks as the general manager of information products at the $3.1 trillion software giant. Her career success has fared well for her pockets, too. With her personal wealth standing at $15.2 billion, French Gates is one of the top 10 richest women in America.
And it may not have happened without the advice of a hiring manager who went against IBM’s own interests to prioritize French Gates’ success. “Here’s this woman who’s supposed to be my manager, giving me a piece of career advice,” French Gates said.
The transition wasn’t easy. Microsoft was out on the West Coast, meaning she’d have to uproot her life to work there. But she couldn’t escape the exhilarating thought of being a part of something big.
“I didn’t know anybody in Seattle. It was moving to the West Coast, but I was so excited about what they were doing. I was like, ‘I want to be part of that,’” she said.
French Gates left a potentially successful career at IBM behind to chase Microsoft, and she advises others, especially women, to take that leap of faith. You could land among the stars—or a trillion-dollar business.
“I remind them all the time you can pivot careers. You can change. You can go over here,” she said. “It’s not like one or two paths that carry you forward, even though you had plans before this.”
CEO and billionaires on finding advice in unlikely places
The 60-year-old philanthropist and ex-wife of Bill Gates isn’t the only billionaire to have received counsel from the most unexpected places. Jensen Huang, the CEO of $3.3 trillion chip giant Nvidia, doesn’t always get inspiration from the entrepreneurs he rubs shoulders with. He once said he received the best career advice from an elderly gardener at a temple in Tokyo.
When Huang was touring the gardens, he saw an old man tending to the temple’s moss with a set of bamboo tweezers. It was such a tiny tool to care for the expansive plants on the property. Huang asked the gardener how he managed to conserve all the moss with such a small gadget.
“He said something that is perfect. He said, ‘I have plenty of time,’” Huang recalled at the Chinese American Semiconductor Professional Association in 2023. “That’s the best career advice I can give you…Most of the time, I wait for things to come to me. I’m rarely chasing things.”
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PepsiCo’s former CEO Indra Nooyi also learned a thing or two about being a woman in leadership from binge-watching all 94 episodes of the TV show Sex and the City. When discussing the issue of unconscious bias in the workplace at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Conference in 2019, Nooyi credited the four main characters for showing her what supporting other women can look like.
“Their sisterhood was so strong, they never judged each other, they supported each other,” Nooyi said, later adding, “We tend to compete with ourselves, and I think it’s getting better, but we have to really step it up.”
Executives even go out of their way to field questions from the unlikeliest of sources. As Apple took off, its late CEO Steve Jobs wanted to know what would be the next best step beyond selling its products in retailers like Sears and CompUSA. At the time, the concept of a brick-and-mortar Apple store was wild; stepping away from big-box stores was a risk. So he employed the advice of LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault, whose Louis Vuitton stores were in prime real estate locations.
“Everybody thought it’s completely crazy to sell Apple products in a shop,” Arnault recalled during a 2016 interview at the Oxford Union, adding that even Michael Dell said it would never work. “I must say, I was myself a little doubtful of selling [iPods in shops]…But it was working.”
A technology CEO approaching a fashion mogul for business advice may seem out of the ordinary—but Apple has grown into a $3.5 trillion powerhouse with over 500 stores worldwide.
