Melinda French Gates’ life may have been very different if not for a conversation she had with an IBM hiring manager in the ’80s.
During an interview with LinkedIn News on Tuesday, French Gates said she got a job offer from IBM after completing two summer internships there.
She then had a conversation with a hiring manager that made her decide to go to Microsoft — a choice that defined her career and personal life.
“My hiring manager at IBM, a female, said to me, ‘OK, are you ready to accept the job offer?’ I was in person with her, and I said: ‘Well, I have one more company to go interview. This little company, Microsoft.’ It was tiny,” French Gates said.
“And she said, ‘If they give you an offer, you should take it.’ And it dumbfounded me. Here’s this woman who’s supposed to be my manager, giving me a piece of career advice, and so when I did get that offer from Microsoft, I really took that to heart,” she added.
French Gates joined Microsoft as a product manager after graduating from Duke University’s business school in 1987.
“This is going to be a bit scary. 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,'” French Gates told LinkedIn News.
French Gates worked at Microsoft for nearly a decade, where she rose to the position of general manager and oversaw the company’s information products.
Microsoft was also where she met her now ex-husband, Bill Gates. The couple married in 1994, and French Gates left Microsoft in 1996. They divorced in 2021 after 27 years of marriage.
In May, French Gates announced her departure from the Gates Foundation, a philanthropic foundation she cofounded with Gates in 2000. Her giving efforts are now mainly handled by Pivotal Ventures, an investment and incubation company she founded in 2015.
“Many years ago, I received this piece of advice: ‘Set your own agenda, or someone else will set it for you.’ I’ve carried those words with me ever since,” French Gates wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times explaining her decision to leave the Gates Foundation.
Representatives for French Gates didn’t respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.