ONE SUPER IDEA
For Allen, the Seahawks owner & billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, it all began at Harvard House of Pizza
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. − The road to East Rutherford begins here, at the corner of Massachusetts Ave. and Martin St., at a tiny place called Harvard House of Pizza. It has five faux-wood tables, peach-colored benches, and an amiable counterman named Naseer Khan, who is standing by a Coca-Cola clock and a sign promoting a two-slice-and-a-soda special ($4.85 plus tax), talking about the owner of the Seattle Seahawks, a guy who used to be a regular here, before anybody ever heard of Richard Sherman, the 12th man or personal computers.
It was here that Paul Allen would come for pepperoni pizza with his fellow tech geek and programming prodigy, Bill Gates, knocking around ideas that would ultimately change the world, spawn a company called Microsoft and make them two of the richest college dropouts on Earth.
“Being so close to Harvard, we get a lot of smart people here,” Khan, 57, says. He smiles. “I am not a computer man, though. My kids are the ones who know all about computers.”
Allen turned 61 years old on Tuesday. He owns three sports teams (the Portland Trail Blazers and a piece of the Seattle Sounders of the MLS), and two victories over cancer. If he is not the most intriguing billionaire on the sports block, he is on the short list, not so much because he is coming to town for Super Bowl XLVIII or because he is three times wealthier than Jer r y Jones and Daniel Snyder combined (Forbes pegs his worth at $15.8 billion, good for 26th place on its Forbes’ 400 list), but because he has the most far-flung passions this side of Benjamin Franklin, and contradictions to match.
Here is one Paul Allen, who worships every note that Jimi Hendrix ever played on his Stratocaster and jammed with Mick Jagger on his birthday and released an album with his group, The Under-thinkers, last year on Sony Legacy (it’s called Everywhere At Once). Here is another Paul Allen, who is obsessed with space exploration, and plans to put the largest aircraft ever built into orbit within a few years. And here is still another Paul Allen, the one who has endowed the Allen Institute for Brain Science and launched another institute dedicated to global animal health and the eradication of disease, even as he founded a museum of music, popular culture and science fiction in Seattle, and pursued his passion for filmmaking with his Vulcan Productions, and amassed a collection of vintage World War II aircraft.
And now there are fresh demands on Allen’s time, taking in Seahawk playoff games from a suite that straddles the 50-yard line of CenturyLink Field, visiting briefly before each game with coach Pete Carroll, whose team stands 60 minutes away from handing Allen football’s ultimate bauble: The Lombardi Trophy.
You wonder how the guy finds time to go to the bathroom.
“Not only is he one of the most significant technology leaders (of his generation), he’s very smart, and a great musician as well,” says President Elson S. Floyd of Washington State University, the recipient of a $26 million gift from Allen − the biggest single donation the school has ever had. “He’s someone who does a whole lot of things, and I don’t know that many people really
know that about him.”
Jerry Morse knows Allen in a way f ew others do. “I looked at his butt for a whole intramural football season,” Morse says. Morse, who pitched for three years in the Yankee farm system in the late 1960s (he was a teammate of Ron Blomberg in Johnson City, Tenn. in 1967) enrolled at Washington State University after his pro career ended in Ft. Lauderdale, and became the star quarterback of the Phi Kappa Theta intramural football team. The center was Allen, who was a freshman when Morse was a senior. Allen was not an athletic kid in the least, but would usually find a way to catch Morse’s high-octane passes, though Morse remembers him more for his mind than his hands.
“I always liked computers and electronics, but it was obvious that his intelligence was way beyond me,” Morse says. He still has vivid recall of Allen gathering his computer-punch cards − the kind you had to fill in the little ovals with a No. 2 pencil − and go up to the computer center at midnight to do his programming.
There was less waiting around at that time of day, giving Allen more time to write
his code.
“I can’t even imagine,” Morse says. “His ability to focus on the task at hand was amazing.”
Soon, Allen was bailing out of Washington State and was off to Cambridge, the better to be able to brainstorm with Gates, who went on to Harvard after meeting Allen at Seattle’s Lakeside School, a friendship powered by their fast-moving minds and a mutual fascination with writing computer code. Allen’s life in the shadow of Harvard, as he describes in his memoir, “Idea Man,” consisted of a boring job that earned him $12,500, a shabby apartment and a ’64 Chrysler that leaked oil, but even then Allen had a vision of a wired world, and the immense possibilities of the computer orbit evolving from a heaving, roomsized mainframe into something much smaller and more user friendly . . . a personal computer for almost everybody who wants one.
Once the operating system and hardware were sufficiently powerful − and the technology was changing by the day − Allen and Gates believed they could write a language for it.
One day at Harvard House of Pizza, Allen asked Gates how big he thought their company could become.
“I think we could get it up to 35 programmers,” Gates said.
Allen thought that sounded mighty optimistic.
And then came the magazine story that changed their lives. Like any self-respecting techie, Allen was a voracious reader of periodicals such as “Radio Electronics” and “Popular Science.” He went to a Harvard Square newsstand on a late December day in 1974, and saw the cover of the January edition of Popular Electronics. It fairly shouted at him: PROJECT BREAKTHROUGH World’s First Minicomputer Kit On Page 33, Allen read about the Altair 8800, the world’s first personal computer. He raced over to Harvard, where Gates was studying for finals. Gates, in his chair, began to rock back and forth, his telltale sign of intense concentration. Allen and Gates knew they were on the cusp of having a language that could work with the supercharged processor of the Altair 8800, pitched it to Ed Roberts, a principal of MITS, the machine’s manufacturer, and soon they were living in Albuquerque, N.M., near MITS headquarters, writing software language around the clock. Microsoft was no longer a struggling startup, and when it reached a deal with IBM some years later, a software behemoth was on its way.
Allen left his position at Microsoft in 1983, after his first cancer diagnosis and a falling-out with Gates, whom he accuses in “Idea Man” of trying to marginalize his role with Microsoft (a name Allen came up with) even as he was battling a life-threatening disease. It is just one of the striking disclosures in Allen’s book, which tells of Gates’ brutally competitive nature (when Allen beat him in chess one day, Gates angrily swept all the pieces onto the floor) and his stock response when somebody came to him with an idea he didn’t care for (“That’s the stupidest f---ing thing I’ve ever heard.”)
Such revelations are just one of the seemingly incongruous things about Allen, a man clearly of dazzling intellect and a relentlessly curious mind, and a hard-tofigure persona.
After spending almost 30 years as Microsoft’s lesser-known and perhaps, under-appreciated founder, he publishes a riveting, often bitter-sounding account of his wickedly productive but prickly relationship with Gates, with whom he has done some fence-mending, but still blisters for his selfishness and belittling rages. Allen also says that most of Microsoft’s ground-breaking ideas were his − hence the title of the book.
Allen, a lifelong bachelor, seems to enjoy being famous and having access to the bold-faced-name set − from Steven Spielberg to Bono to Martin Scorsese to Dan Aykroyd − but much less interest in being known. Allen declined, through his PR people, to be interviewed for this story (he turns down the vast majority of interview requests), and no one in Vulcan, Inc., the company that oversees his business and philanthropic activities, was cleared to talk either. When Allen dated tennis star Monica Seles, in the 1990s, a tennis insider said, “Allen went out of his way to stay in the background, always hanging in the back, hoping nobody would notice him.”
Allen has given more than $1 billion to philanthropic causes, and has pledged to leave the majority of his estate to philanthropy − a laudable thing, no doubt. Is this the same man whose yacht, Octopus, is a seafaring monument to excess, one that took 100 draftsmen more than a year to design, and two companies three years to build? At 414 feet, Octopus is seven stories high, with a crew of more than 50, a recording studio, a glass-bottom room, a lagoon and an eight-person submarine; it hit the water in 2003 as the largest privately owned yacht in the world − a perfect place for Allen’s parties at the Cannes Film Festival.
Sure, if you’re that rich, you should have the best toys. . . . but a lagoon and a submarine?
And yet people who know Allen, a longtime resident of Mercer Island, an affluent enclave just east of Seattle, insist he is deeply committed to improving life in his hometown, a man of rock-solid values and no pretense. The last time the Seahawks made the Super Bowl, he invited a bunch of old fraternity buddies, Morse included, to travel to the game on the team plane. They baked cookies at 35,000 feet, and had a blast.
“You’d never pick him out of the crowd,” Morse says. “He’s not worried about how he looks or dresses. He’s the same kindhearted guy he was as a freshman.”
On March 13, 1986, Microsoft had its initial public offering. Allen sold 200,000 shares, kept 28% of the firm and suddenly had $175 million he didn’t have before. Soon sports beckoned.
A lifelong basketball fan who had been a regular as Seattle SuperSonics games, Allen bought the Portland Trail Blazers in March of 1988, and bought the Seahawks some nine years later, right around the time the former owner, Ken Behring, was threatening to move the franchise to Los Angeles.
After a protracted stretch of poor personnel moves, off-the-court problems (remember the Jail Blazers?) and lackluster results (the team has missed the playoffs seven of the last 10 years), the Blazers are the surprise of the NBA this year, and now the Seahawks, in their fourth year under GM John Schneider and Carroll, will be playing a game in East Rutherford a week from Sunday.
Paul Swangard is the managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon, and has been a close observer of Allen’s sports realm. He believes the recent upturn of his teams is no accident.
“It seems when he tinkers as an owner, especially with the Blazers due to his passion for basketball, there can be problems,” Swangard says. “I think the best lesson is hire good people and stay out of the way."
On the corner of Mass Ave. and Martin St. on Super Bowl Sunday, Harvard House of Pizza expects to have one of its busiest days of the year. There are no plans to have a Microsoft or Seahawk special, and no plans for Allen to return for a nostalgic slice of pepperoni pizza. He will be tied up with a football game, and Morse knows which way he’ll be rooting.
“Paul is not only is a great computer guy, he’s a great guy,” Morse says.