Hitendra, it's great to be with you and I look forward to engaging with you and sharing some things with your audience.

Well, thank you. It is something I'm quite proud of because it was my early life on the farm that really shaped the values that I try to carry through my life today. My family have been farming in Nebraska since 1854, and our farm is near a small community called Ashland, which is in between Lincoln and Omaha. Ashland is about seven miles from our farm. That's where I went to school, K through 12. I managed to skip over going to the one room schoolhouse near our farm. My mom really put an emphasis on education and thought I'd get a better education in a little town in 1900.

So I grew up on the farm. It's something that was very dear to me. I learned some important lessons in humility, consistency, and the dignity of work. I learned to drive a tractor when I was aged seven. I started working in the fields at age nine. I did that all the way through college summers and weekends. One of my favorite stories is, I learned work balance and I would share that at Microsoft and the Gates Foundation, and they would think I was talking about work life balance, and I basically said, “No, you know, farming is a six and a half day a week job. It's not about work life balance.”

Work balance goes as follows. Some days you get to drive the tractor and some days you scoop hog manure. That's a real job. The thing about people who come to the Gates Foundation or come to Microsoft, it's so exciting. We're going to change the world, so on and so forth. And yes, that's true, but there are going to be good days and there's going to be bad days. So I carry that with me, I share that with them to emphasize that.

My dad was an excellent farmer and agribusiness person. My mom was a teacher. And they put a lot of emphasis on giving back to the community. Those values humility, purpose, community, they've shaped every chapter of my career.

It's a lot of hard work. One of the key things I learned growing up on the farm is work ethic. The other thing is, it's important to have a good sense of humor because you don't control the weather and you don't control the prices. My nephew now runs our farming operation and cattle feeding operation. This year has been a really tough year and so, trying to remind him that there are going to be good days and there's going to be some days that are tough. That's kind of what we have learned throughout our lives.

Yes. That's right. My brother, who was a tremendous professor of agricultural economics, came back to run our farm in the early 1980s. When I went off to college, I thought maybe I'd be joining him on the farm, but some things, twists and turns. But I'm grateful that his son, my nephew Justin, is now leading the farming operation.

Well, I'm going to break this into two pieces, and I'm actually going to say a little bit about how I ended up at Apple Computer. I mean, you might have thought, as I mentioned, I thought maybe I'd go back to the farm and work with my brother. My degree at Stanford Engineering Economic Systems, was an interdisciplinary degree that brought together sort of systems thinking and how you would allocate resources, make decisions, expected value, etc. And I thought what I would do is go work for the USDA in agricultural policy. That was my design. I thought I'd go work for the USDA, try and help change the world in terms of agricultural policy and then maybe leave and go back to work with my brother. But along the way, I learned to program because that was part of engineering economic systems. I bought an Apple II computer to help my brother run our farm.

It was that transformational moment that led me to Apple Computer because my degree was Engineering Economics Systems. I did a lot of modeling and Visicalc is a modeling tool. And so they thought I would be very helpful in terms of Visicalc. Visicalc, when I came to Apple Computer, was only nine months old. And so, it was a great opportunity. I was the first Visicalc engineering manager for Apple Computer. I was just 22 years old, but it was at Apple Computer that I fell in love with software. I just thought software was this magical medium that we could use to shape almost anything. I played computer games on the early Atari 800. I was fascinated by what Visicalc could do to have an impact, and so it was really a transformational moment for me to be at Apple Computer and to have that experience. But Steve Jobs wanted me to go work on the Macintosh. I would have been about the sixth person on the Macintosh. At Apple, I learned that hardware companies were really about trying to use software to sell their machine, as opposed to really thinking about the importance of software and the value. And Steve Ballmer had called me in May of 1981 and wanted me to come up and interview. I wasn't that interested in interviewing with Microsoft, but my sister lived in Seattle and I thought, “Okay, well, I'll get a free trip to see my sister.” When I visited Microsoft and it was on a Saturday, Steve Ballmer walked me down the hall to see Bill Gates and just there were all these different computers everywhere. He went by a door and he said, “You know, Jeff, that door is locked. There’s something exciting behind that door.” Well, that's a little weird. And then I went down to see Bill and had a very great conversation with Bill Gates and then, walked back down the hall and Steve said, “That door is locked.” I knew he was messaging me that they had the IBM PC. It hadn't been announced yet.

The thing that I was struck by is that I wasn't sure who was going to win in hardware, but Microsoft was doing software for all of them, and that was very exciting to me. And Steve gave me the opportunity to lead the Microsoft applications product marketing, which basically meant I got to help create Microsoft Office.

And so I decided to take the leap. One of the things I learned from my father, my father actually was trained as a chemical engineer and was headed to MIT when during the depression stopped by our farm, and my grandfather was losing the farm, and my dad stayed and literally and figuratively saved the family farm. There's a principle there, one that I really want your audience to think about. It’s good to have a plan, but be open to opportunity. My dad saw the opportunity of agribusiness in the 1930s and beyond. I had a plan. I was going to go work for the USDA, but then Apple Computer called and then Microsoft called. And so in each case, I had a plan, but I was open to opportunity. That was something that was transformational in my life.

Well, as I mentioned, Steve had asked me to work on the Macintosh. I would have been employee number six in the first ten. But I decided I wanted to go to Microsoft. On November 2nd, 1981, at 2:00 in the afternoon, I got a phone call in my office at Apple, and it's Steve. He's yelling at me, “What are you doing? This is crazy.” And then he launched into what became known amongst our network as the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. In the most eloquent and articulate way, he described to me how Microsoft was going to go out of business. In the end, I didn't like the way he treated employees very much. I had seen a couple of examples of how he treated people, and so I listened. And then at the end of his soliloquy about Microsoft and bankruptcy, I said, “You know, Steve, you might be right. But in my case, I can always go back to the farm and that's just fine with me.” And then I hung up.

I probably didn't see him for about a year and a half. But, as you can tell, I made the right decision. I followed what I was passionate about, which was software. Microsoft may not have succeeded. It had only 100 employees, only 12 million in revenue when I joined. But I loved what I was doing, and I loved that connection to shaping software in ways that were really going to transform how people did information work. I just thought that was pretty darn cool.

You'd asked me a little bit about Steve and Bill. Steve really had a vision. He had a very strong product design aesthetic that really should be admired. I didn't like the way he kind of browbeat people. He didn't do that with me, but I saw him do it with others. Bill also was very tough. Bill was very technical, engineering-driven, and very disciplined. And so it was interesting to see how both of these leaders in high tech succeeded in what were very different ways.

Yeah. It's extremely important. There were many great strengths at Microsoft and in Microsoft culture. But one thing that I think Microsoft could have done better was the way in which they drew more people into the intellectual dialog. There's a great book by Mary Murphy. She’s a professor at the University of Indiana. And her book is called “Cultures of Growth.” What she talks about is how sometimes you get into an environment where it’s kind of the culture of the genius. That person is the smartest person in the room. Elizabeth Holmes is the smartest person in the room. Adam Neumann is the smartest person in the room.

What happens in that culture of genius is it separates the intellectual contribution, or it depresses the intellectual contribution that others can make. Nobody feels like they can call that person up on that. One thing that I admire about Satya Nadella and his leadership is that he never tried to be the smartest person in the room. He tried to be the most intellectually curious person in the room. And I think that that creates a culture that can draw others into the dialog.

Now, I think Satya is quite a brilliant leader, but he respects that diversity of thought around him. And I think that that's really important. That's certainly one of the key things that I've learned through my career.

Another thing that I've learned that relates to your question Hitendra is that, I've seen leaders who have a particular style and a particular strength. I saw this, actually with my daughters in their basketball coaches. There are junior varsity coaches. He had a very soft style, and didn't yell at the students. Their varsity coach, very hardcore style, very intense, so on and so forth. I think they struggled from the JV to the varsity shift. And what I told my daughters is, in your life, what you need to do is you need to learn how to respond appropriately, adapt to different leadership styles, and also learn from that as to what you want your leadership style to be. And I think one of the things that is really important is versatility as a leader. You’re going to have some people where they’re going to be most successful. You're going to draw them out with a little bit more of a hard edge. Then there are others where they’re going to be harder on themselves than you are, and what you’re going to need to do is you're going to need to figure out how to build them up and draw them in. I think one important principle in leadership is that kind of versatility where you can respond to the differences in the people that you're leading or managing and adapt your style to help them be at their best.

Very interesting. I think there's also something in there about creativity and innovation. That's very important. I was very lucky to spend some time with Jack Welch in the late 90s, the CEO of General Electric and a fairly prominent famous business leader. One of the comments he made about Bill, which I appreciated, is that Bill has the ability to see around corners, and I think that's a great attribute, especially important for certain CEO roles, certain business roles where you're in a sector or an industry where technology is transforming things very rapidly. You want to be able to see around corners. I mean, Bill saw around the corner of what the internet was going to be. Early in the 90s, we saw around the corner as to what graphic user interface, what Windows and Mac would do to computing. I think there's something about the 3rd dimension there that relates to being able to see around corners.

That sounds like versatility.

Well, I was very fortunate to have my opportunities at Microsoft. I'd break my career there into three pieces. The first third of my career was building Microsoft Office, and then I had this kind of surprising conversation with Bill. We had visited Digital Equipment Corporation in Massachusetts. We were flying back to Seattle, and I was sitting next to him on the plane, and he basically said to me he wanted me to move over to lead the United States and then North America sales organization. And I thought that was the craziest thing in the world. I wasn't a deep programmer, but I was really more of a product person. I said, “Bill, look, I'm not trained as a sales manager.” And he says, “That's okay. This is not about being a sales manager. It's about understanding our strategy and our assets and helping shape the resources in the strategy that we need to succeed.” So, you know, I was a little skeptical, but I moved over and at the same time, Omar moved over to lead worldwide sales and marketing. So the middle third of my career was leading sales and marketing for Microsoft, ultimately worldwide sales when Steve became president and then CEO. I loved it, I loved being out with our customers, sharing the magic of software and what it could do for them. And then in 2000, Steve and Bill said, “Well, we really want you to come back and lead the business division.” They thought Office was going to die. And I said, “No, Office is not going to die.” And they said, “Oh, you know, it's kind of moribund, etc.” And I said, “Look, I think we can double this business in 10 years.” I loved what we were doing. I borrowed from some of the things I learned from Jack Welch and others, and we doubled the business in seven years.

At this point in time, I looked at what I had accomplished at Microsoft, the fortune that I had of working with so many great people and a lot of them worked for me. Satya was in my organization, the future CFO was in my organization. The future president of the business division was in my organization. At some point in time, you have to let those leaders have their opportunity. I was 50 years old and I thought, “Okay, I want to do something different.” And so I went to see Bill. This is December of 2007. And I said, “Look, I'm going to leave Microsoft and, I think maybe I'll work with my brother on international agricultural development. I'd be very interested in teaching business school.” But, you know, Bill, you have this agricultural program at the Gates Foundation. “If you want some help on that. I know a little bit about agriculture. I'm glad to help out.” And six months later, I was the CEO. It goes back to my dad's principle. You have a plan but be open to opportunity. And so when Bill and Melinda offered me the opportunity to be the CEO of the Gates Foundation, I just thought that was amazing. I got a graduate degree in philanthropy by being there.

Tricia and I had already started our own foundation. And so, this was an opportunity for me to both learn a lot about the work of the Gates Foundation, learn a lot about the world of philanthropy, what leads to good impact, what doesn't, so on and so forth. Hitendra, that's kind of how it all happened. I had my three different phases at Microsoft, and then I got this opportunity to lead the Gates Foundation. They wanted me committed for five years and I completed almost six years. I'm grateful for the opportunity that I had.

Well, in many ways, it was serendipitous. I grew up on our farm, not far from our community of Aspen, which was a little bit less than 2000 people and almost completely homogenous from a racial, ethnic standpoint. The people in my town were basically white and mostly white Protestant. And when I went to Stanford, Hitendra, they're probably only five students per year who got accepted into Stanford from Nebraska. Generally, you have an out-of-state student with a California roommate or vice versa. My roommate was from Omaha. He was from Nebraska. But Kenneth, who was a fabulous human being, had grown up on what is known as the north side of Omaha. He's African-American. He went to Omaha Tech. Kenneth and I grew up 35 minutes apart in two completely different worlds. I was completely naive about the experience that people in our society can have if they don't, and aren't part of the sort of the dominant demographic. I learned a lot from just being able to be with Kenneth and understand his experience in life as compared to my experience in life.

Kenneth and I moved to Ujamaa, which is the black cultural theme center and residence at Stanford our sophomore year. I ended up living in Ujamaa three of my four years at Stanford. I've always thought about it, part of it was the fact that I got to know Kenneth and I got connected to that community. But the other thing about Ujamaa, in a place like Stanford is. It's like an own little community inside the bigger community. And for the kid from a small farming community, actually, that sense of being connected more closely with others was really very special. And to this day, I'm connected to the freshmen who were in Ujamaa when I was a senior. They are the people I'm closest to at Stanford. It was that community feeling. But it also taught me a lot about the issues of race in our country and how we have suppressed opportunities for people of certain identities. It was quite a transformational experience for me and it planted the seeds for the work that we do at the Raikes Foundation.

At the Raikes Foundation, we want to make sure that all people, especially all youth, have access to what they need to thrive. We recognize that there are certain population groups in our society that do not get those same kinds of opportunities. Based on a great mentor to us, John Powell at the University of California, Berkeley, The Othering and Belonging Center, one of the things that we learned from John Powell is targeted universalism. If you set a universal goal to achieve, maybe it's a great education for all, but then you understand which groups have less access to that opportunity, and you design strategies for those subgroups, those targeted strategies to achieve the universal goal. What ends up happening is you improve the system for everyone. And that's something that we carry into our work. So back to the original part of your question, that really goes back to that serendipitous thing that the white farm kid from Nebraska got assigned to have a black roommate from Omaha, and that was a gift in my life.

Yeah. In the state of Washington, one of the things that we've worked on at the Raikes Foundation is addressing the challenge of housing instability for youth. Basically, we want to prevent and end youth homelessness. That is a systems-problem. You have to think about what the system is. You have to start at the core and have responsiveness, shelters, etc. But then you work your way out, you put in place a data system that helps you allocate the resources. Then another element of systems thinking, what are the upstream feeder pools into youth homelessness, juvenile justice, foster care, disproportionate discipline and education, behavioral health. And so by working in that way, we've had a 40% reduction in youth homelessness in the state of Washington in seven years. There are 10,000 fewer youth who have that housing instability.

The reason I thought of that is because we've put a particular emphasis on student homelessness. And if you put in place the resources to help those students who are in high school or middle school who are homeless, you’ll see things that improve for everyone. We've seen a significant increase in the graduation rate for homeless youth by just putting attention to what their needs are.

Can absolutely do that. We'll do that.

Well, first of all, let me set the context. I joined in September of 2008. And in 2006, when Warren Buffett made his announcement of committing a substantial portion of his wealth to the Gates Foundation, I think the organization was about 250 people and maybe around $1 billion a year in payout. By the time I was entering the organization was up to about 750 people and targeting 2.5 billion to 3 billion in payout. In other words, the organization was on a trajectory of very high growth. I look back on how fortunate I was that Bill and Melinda decided to select me as the CEO, but especially because it wasn't like my career was philanthropy or academia, which provided a lot of the leadership of foundations. But I think what they saw in me was my experience of having been at Microsoft when they were 100 employees and exiting when they were 92,000. I had about 17,000 employees in my organization. So I experienced a lot of growth. I knew the system I had to get in place. That was a lot of what my contribution could be, while at the same time I was getting so much in terms of the learning of what the world of philanthropy could do to make a better world.

Part of what I did was I brought my toolkit from Microsoft. I knew that I was going to have that. Bill was also coming into the foundation at the same time. He had announced his transition in 2006 to take effect in 2008. Melinda really wanted me to be there at that time because she felt I could help Bill make that transition. One of the things we needed to do was to really help Bill and Melinda be connected to each of the strategies. At Microsoft, we did business reviews and product strategy reviews. And so I put that discipline in place. I created a once a year opportunity for the program teams to present their strategy to Bill and Melinda and get their feedback, so on and so forth. At that time, there were about 20 strategies, where a single strategy was to eradicate polio. Another one was to transform K-12 education in the US. Each strategy by itself was huge. And so I had to put in place that kind of mechanism to both help Bill and Melinda, but also help the teams. Because, if you have a big aspiration like eradicating malaria, that's a 40 year proposition. What do you have to get done in the next five years to be on path for that North Star? What do you have to get done this year to be on path for those five years? What happened in this last year that you learned that causes you to adjust what you're going to do in this next year? What's your scorecard for your different initiatives? That was one of the key things that I put in place.

But I also observed that there were some cultural issues that we should try and address. One of the ways for you to learn about culture when you come into an organization is to do a big listening tour. In my first 30 days, I met with every one of my direct reports and most of the direct reports of those direct reports. Then the succeeding, 3 to 6 months, I met with each of the program teams in small groups. I met with the operational teams in small groups. I was just listening and asking, “Tell me about your work. Tell me what would help your work even better.” So on and so forth. When you're doing that kind of listening tour, you should listen to the funny phrases that people use. By funny, I mean unusual. People said, “We're overly collaborative.” What does that mean? They said, “Well, we don't know who's going to make the decision, but we know everybody wants to be involved in the decision.” I said, “Well, I think that's going to create some challenges. We need to address that.” Another funny phrase I heard was, “time bunching.” I said, “Well, what does that mean?” And they said, “Well, we get probably 50% or more of our work done in the last three months of the year.” And I said, “Oh, what that means is you're pushing money out the door to hit a budget, and you may not be doing as disciplined work at that time. So how do we spread the work out over the year?” So on and so forth. So these are some of the things that I learned.

I think what you're referring to is that I wrote this memo, a somewhat infamous memo about “Hygiene.” What I meant by that is we needed to clean up these cultural issues in order for us to be able to do our best work. We needed to be clear about who is going to make the decision, who needed to be involved to provide input, who didn't need to be involved to provide input, but who needed to be informed, so on and so forth. So those are the kinds of things that I tried to put in place, and it was mostly about trying to help Bill and Melinda with the growth of the foundation. During my tenure, as I said, it was about 250 employees and $1 billion 2 years before when I came in. Eight years later, at the end of my tenure, we were about 1,300 employees and about $4.5 billion in payout. Some of those disciplines like the strategy reviews, those remain to this day. They just had the annual strategy review last month.

Well, I think the key point is you're going to have the best outcomes when both the heart and the mind are aligned. My dad put his passion into farming and what we could do in agriculture. But he had been trained as a chemical engineer. So he had the rigor of the process of farming. He put in place the first Nebraska Farm Business Association, where we shared the data amongst a set of farmers so that we could evaluate our performance against other performance, so on and so forth. That's the way my dad thought about things. My mom was a science teacher. The scientific method was fundamental to how she thought about things. I think it's that combination of passion and purpose and rigor and evidence that represent the heart and the mind.

For a moment I want to just step back and say that if you want to have a long term, sustainable impact through your philanthropy, you're going to have to figure out systems. This is my bias as a systems thinker from my EES degree. You're going to have to really understand systems. Then there's another professor that is worth your audience thinking about. His name is Ronald Heifetz. He's at the Kennedy School at Harvard. He teaches the practice of adaptive leadership. Heifetz’ work really digs into what he calls factions. What that means is people who are loosely aligned around something they care about. For the things that we're trying to solve, they are generally systems issues that are shaped by the factions in and around them. I always recommend to people that they should understand Donella Meadows and system thinking and they should understand Ronald Heifetz in the practice of adaptive leadership because that's probably where you get into the mind, the rigor and the evidence. There's some philanthropy that can fill the gaps. But if you want to have a sustainable impact, you're going to have to evolve systems. That's how I came to work at the Gates Foundation. And it's how we think about the work at the Raikes Foundation.

There's a lot of different ways to approach philanthropy. There's what I would call a different typography or taxonomy. I think for what we care most about, we're trying to evolve the system so that you have a long term sustainable impact. I've talked about the mind, the rigor, the evidence, the systems thinking, the adaptive leadership, but the reason why the heart is important is because these things don't get solved overnight. Take youth homelessness, I mean, if it was easy to solve, it'd be solved because we know it's important, but it's complicated. It's not easy to solve. And so you really want to put your heart into it because that will lead you to invest for the long term. If it's something that you're not so sure you care about, but it's an important problem in society, and you don't have your heart in it, you won't be there for the long term. That's the reason I think heart is important. It'll help you with your purpose, but it'll be well paired with the rigor and evidence that comes from your mind and your discipline.

Well, I think, one of the key things I always used to say to the employees at the Gates Foundation is that even if your strategies and grants don't fully succeed, you only fail if you don't learn. I think one of the most fundamental principles here is the importance of continuous learning. Again, it goes back to the point I made earlier. If these things were easy to solve, they'd already be solved because they're important problems for society. I think you have to be a continuous learner. I'm very fortunate that one of my personality characteristics is intellectual curiosity. That also means that I like to ask questions. So I ask a lot of questions. That really helps me to learn and it helps me to understand how to improve.

In philanthropy, it especially is the people who are funders. It is a difficult thing to really get valid feedback or accurate feedback. Why? Distorted power structures. When I went to the Gates Foundation, I didn't realize just how funny, handsome and smart I was. Everybody wanted to tell me that because they wanted the money. You have to really understand that and then fight against being viewed in that way. So I would never ask a grantee how we were doing. I would say, what is the one thing that we could do that would help your work be better? And it was more likely to get a valid, useful answer because I understood the distorted power structure in philanthropy.

Back to your question about the power of one. When you have these really big, audacious goals, a key thing to do is to break them down. I mentioned earlier you can have a North Star. We're going to eradicate malaria. But what do you have to get done in the next 5 to 10 years to be on path for that? What do you have to get done in the next five years? And so you have to break it down. It's not only the temporal breakdown, but also, what are the tools that have to be developed and invented. What are the delivery mechanisms that have to be out there if you have to take a comprehensive look? One of the best ways to do that is proximity. How do you position yourself to be close to the people who are on the front lines of addressing the issue? In the case of our youth homelessness work, my wife Tricia created a mechanism where youth who had the lived experience came together as an advocacy group, and then she could tap in to their understanding of the issues, have them presenting at the Washington State Legislature about what their experience was, because a lot of these privileged people, I'm a privileged person, they can sit there and say, “Oh, that was a choice that that person made to be homeless.” Actually, it necessarily wasn't typically a choice. I mean, there were these circumstances. And so proximity is an important principle as well. I'm not sure I fully understand the power of one, but I think if you put together the people who are on the front lines, the people who have the lived experience, the people who have ideas that can complement that lived experience, then I think you're more likely to get a solution that will lead to long term sustainable and positive impact.

Exactly right. You learned.

I think that's very important. I just want to add to that, that one of the ways to do that is to also think about what might be the relevant structural differences in the population that you wish to address. Let's take schools. Some schools that have challenges are more rural, some are more suburban, some are more urban. So at the Gates Foundation with their school effort, again, drawing upon part of my learning at Microsoft when we were reaching out to small and medium businesses around the country, part of it was to understand what those differences might be, because these are not McDonald's franchises. If you take the approach that, “Oh, if I succeed in these two schools, I just now need to scale it up.” That might succeed. I think it most likely will not succeed. What you actually have to do is step back and understand, what was the underlying context? What were the underlying ingredients that helped you to be successful in that environment? So sometimes I use the metaphor of a recipe book or playbook.

Let's take a recipe book. When you're building recipes, you have some required ingredients. But people can be creative. There's some optional ingredients. And so for our youth homelessness work, we're working on the recipe book. We're trying to figure out what are the core ingredients that you have to put in place. And then what maybe should be some of the tuning that you have to do for a more rural county versus a more urban city center, so on and so forth. I think that's another thing to add to your model of the power of one.

It started with agriculture, but let me first say that it resonates strongly with how you're thinking about the world, in my opinion. Because the key thing with epigenetics is basically how living organisms respond to their environment. Let me just do a quick explanation for your audience how I got connected with epigenetics. We have our genome, we have our DNA and we have our genes. For the most part through our life, with the exception of a genetic mutation, our genes are going to stay the same. But our genes may express differently, that expression may change throughout our lifetime. There's a regulatory switch of on and off for the genes. And that's where epigenetics comes in. Epigenetics is that layer above the DNA. It's the methylome above the genome. Why is it called the methylome? Because a lot of that regulatory infrastructure is when methyl groups get attached to the cytosine in the DNA, and that changes over time. What happened is that I met a professor, a brilliant woman named Sally Mackenzie. She was the Ralph and Alice Raikes Professor of Plant Sciences at the University of Nebraska.

In 2014, she started to explain to me that if we could figure out how to predict, harness and manage epigenetics, we could dramatically improve both yield and resilience in crops. It's a bit of a Holy Grail thing to pursue. I think the world of Sally. I think she's brilliant. I think her work is fantastic. So we've spent more than a decade figuring out how to harness better epigenetic expression in soybeans, in canola, in tomatoes. And now we figured out how to do it in hybrid crops like corn or maize and sorghum. We think we're on to what will be a major transformation in crop breeding by understanding epigenetics. But it turns out, if you understand epigenetics, we now have a well-developed bioinformatics software to look at the methylome. If you understand that methylome, you can also do disease diagnosis. So we have just implemented two cancer diagnosis pilots, one for prostate cancer and one for breast cancer, where with 95% accuracy we can predict prostate cancer. And if you're into this, the Gleason score with just a blood test so you don't have to do the invasive biopsy that creates anxiety and side effects. We are doing that with breast cancer as well. We think we can do that with type II diabetes and autism and so on and so forth.

The reason I've fallen in love with epigenetics is that I think if we can develop this technology, if we develop the understanding of this biology, we can be transformational not only in crop breeding but also in human health. I've put a lot of energy into this because you only get so many shots in life to do transformational things. I mean, Microsoft Office was a transformational opportunity. Helping build Microsoft was a transformational opportunity. Helping the Gates Foundation grow was a transformational opportunity, helping figure out what we can do to understand and develop epigenetics is a transformational opportunity. And so you're probably getting a sense of why I'm excited about it.

The name sounds familiar.

Well, one of the things that's a little bit hard for me to answer the question is there's just so many things. Are you familiar with Enneagram? I'm an Enneagram seven. If you know what that means, Enneagram sevens have a fear of missing out, and so I like being involved in lots of different things. Tricia and I have three wonderful children. Our youngest daughter is engaged, and we're looking forward to that chapter in our life. As you know, the Raikes Foundation is designed in what we call giving in time. We will spend down our capital towards the end of 2038, 2040. Even though our capital flow will wind down, what you really want is you want the quality and integrity of the work to be sustained in the future. That will put us under the test of whether we've created things that should continue to grow and develop in order to make a difference in society. As you can tell, I'm very excited about epigenetics and how that can be transformational. I'm the board chair of a company called Hudl, which is a sports technology company that is now supporting more than 300,000 sports teams around the world and having an impact on how athletes can be the best that they can be.

Yeah. That's right. It came out of the Raikes School of Computer Science and Business Management at the University of Nebraska. Three founders, and they had an idea in 2006, three students. And today they've got a company of more than 5,000 employees and they're changing the world and in their way. It's just a great honor for me to be able to support them, be a mentor to some of their leaders, and so on and so forth. And then we didn't talk about the Seattle Mariners, which Tricia and I are part of the partnership group. I think the thing that probably most motivates me is to pay it forward through what I can do to support, in particular, young people like the founders of Hudl or Sally with her science of epigenetics, or our family, our children, as they pursue their careers, their paths. I think that, what gives me the greatest joy is that ability to draw upon my career, my experiences, my fortune in life, not just wealth in the financial sense, but my good fortune to be with people like Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and Jon Shirley and try and use those experiences in ways that help others contribute to society so that they feel that sense of humanity that you and I talked about, that they're a part of something bigger than themselves and having the impact that they aspire to. So I think that's probably the common thread for the things that I've mentioned.

Thank you. Have a plan but be open to opportunity.