Name: How Melinda met Bill
Uploaded: 2015-05-21
Duration: 2 min 11 s
Description: Melinda Gates sits down with Fortune's Nina Easton and talks about her first date with Bill.

How Melinda met Bill

Melinda Gates sits down with Fortune's Nina Easton and talks about her first date with Bill.

now. Your life, um, really took a turn when this guy named Bill Gates asked you out, and you were kind of put off by his, uh, excessive advanced planning for the first date. I read, Yeah, How did that go? And my mom also, it took me about four months to tell my mom I was dating him, and she didn't think that was a very good idea because, you know, I was new to the company, so I had. So first of all, I'd never When I joined Microsoft, um, they sent me on my first business trip three weeks into the job. And, um, I've never been to New York City. I didn't have a passport. Not you need a passport to go to New York. But I did need one later to go on my first trip with Bill, but So I went to New York and anyway met Bill briefly at a group dinner That was there, um, and, you know, didn't think much of it. But then, uh, maybe about 12 weeks later, we were back at Microsoft and, you know, pretty much everybody worked on Saturday morning. It was kind of just known you worked long hours and you worked Saturdays at least till two or three o'clock. And I was coming out of my building one day and a small company. Then it was 1200 people and his car was parked near mine. And so he stopped me in the parking lot and we talked a little bit. And then he asked me if I'd give him my phone number and I said yes. And he said, Well, you know, I was looking at my calendar and I was wondering if we could go out two weeks from this Friday night and I was really I mean, I was 23. I just joined the company. I was like, two weeks from Friday night. I have no idea what I'm doing, I said, and I tease him. I just That's really not spontaneous enough for me. You know, Why don't you just call me closer to the date, you know? But here's my phone number. And so about an hour later, I got home and he called me and he said, Okay, tonight I have this event and then I have a user group event, and then maybe we could get together for drinks at, like, you know, 10 o'clock somewhere downtown. And I said, All right, that's pretty spontaneous. I'll try that. And it was immediate clique. Um, I would say immediate, but he was dating other people. I was It was complicated. Okay, We dated for about 5.5 years.