David i dont consider myself a journalist. Nobody else would consider myself a journalist. I began to take on the life of being an interviewer, even though i have a day job running a private equity firm. How do you define leadership . What is it that makes somebody tick . You have a new book called the moment of lift. What does that refer to . The phrase, lift . Melinda i grew up in a family in dallas, texas and my dad was an apollo engineer on the apollo missions. It is when we would watch that rocket launching, the earth would be shaking, it pushed against the forces of gravity and went to the moon. To me, that is the same thing i have seen with 20 years of work to the foundation for women. If we can lift up all women, we will change the world, but there are a lot of forces pushing women down. David it is the largest foundation in the world. It has assets of how much . Melinda about 50 billion. David you created the foundation from the wealth created from microsoft, and then one day, warren buffet called me you and said, guess what, i dont know what to do with my wealth. I want to give it to you because i like what you are doing. Is that essentially it . Melinda that is essentially it. Warrens plan was his wife was very involved in philanthropy. His plan had been to give it away through the foundation that he and she had, but she passed away early, unexpectedly. So yes, he came and surprised bill and i and said, the vast majority would go through our foundation, and his children and the Susan T Buffett foundation. David when somebody said, we are giving you 50 billion dollars we did not expect, what did you say . Thank you, i cannot believe this . Melinda bill and i took a walk after that discussion and we were alone and we both cried. I think we cried, both of us, because to know warrens generosity and we would be able to do even so much more than we were already doing for people around the world, it was an unbelievably touching moment. And a touching moment of friendship. David when you are doing work, going to Subsaharan Africa, you decided you wanted to focus more on womens issues. One of the first ones you thought about was contraception. You are a committed catholic. Was it difficult for you to say, we should focus more of the foundations efforts on contraception . What was bills view . Did you get flack from the catholic hierarchy . Melinda bill was 100 supportive of this decision. He knew i had learned so much in the developing world from talking to women. He knew i had looked at the data, i looked at where we did not have data. I was able to talk to him about it. He knew this was the greatest antipoverty tool we have. The greatest. If you make sure women have access, 200 million women were asking the world to have this tool. We were not delivering it. I knew when i decided to take this on, the reason we were not delivering it was political controversy in our own country and religious issues. It was a difficult decision for me because of my catholic roots. I am still catholic. But when i met so many women around the world, and they would discuss with me, this is literally a lifeanddeath crisis for them as a mom. They say if i have another baby too soon, i will die in childbirth. Or, i have five children, it is not fair to my others to have another one when i cannot feed them. I had to wrestle with my faith and say, what do i believe in . I believe in saving lives, so this is the right thing to do. David did you find sometimes, a woman would say, take my child . Melinda more than once. I learned from warrens wife, if you can go in anonymously, i will go into many rural settings, a woman from the west. Khaki pants and a tshirt. I was in northern india. I visited a health clinic. I went into a village. I was talking with a woman. By the time i was finished, i had one last question. What hope do you have . Her name was mina, what hope do you have . She looked down for a long time. She cast her eyes down. I thought, i have asked something inappropriate. She said, the truth is, i have no hope. I have no hope for feeding this child or that one, or educating them. Please, take them home with you. When that happened, it was not the first time, it is heartbreaking. To see a woman who clearly loves her sons that much, but to know they would be better off going home with a stranger, that is heartbreaking. That is the story of many women and families around the world. David annually you have a letter written by the the heads of the foundation you and bill. Originally it was written by bill. When you said, bill, i want to get womens issues in, what did he say . Melinda the idea came from warren and we both thought that was a good idea. However, we had three very Young Children at the time. I was on several boards and working at the foundation. I said to bill, i dont have time. I just cant do it. Bill said, that is ok, i will do it. Bill started writing it and he did a great job, but he got used to writing it alone. When this contraceptive initiative i was leading came out, i said i wanted to write about this in the annual letter. He felt like the annual letter was going quite well from his perspective. We had some difficult discussions at home and i finally wrote a sidebar in the annual letter. The next year, we discussed it again before pen was put to paper. I wrote a piece of the annual letter, about a third. The next year, we had another discussion and i wrote half. Now i always write half of the letter. We sometimes have to have those uncomfortable conversations. Bill and i believe in equality, but did we really have it in our voice . Not yet. We worked on that systematically over time. Now i can tell you, my husband is 100 committed to make sure i have my voice in the world. David like most married couples, you have disagreements from time to time . Melinda sure. I think every marriage does. I believe in marriage you should have a little healthy grist because that is how you move forward. David you talk about abusive relationships. Melinda the reason i even write a page in the book about having been in an abusive relationship is i want people to know it can happen to anyone. It silences your voice. Millions of women are being either harassed or abused in all kinds of places. We can go in and name it and recognize it and all commit to changing it everywhere in the world. David lets talk about the beginning of your life. You grew up in dallas. He went to an allgirls Catholic School and you went to duke. Where else did you think of going . Melinda the first place i thought i wanted to go was notre dame, because many of my girlfriends in high schools dads had gone there. When i went to notre dame, they were phasing out Computer Science, they thought it was a fad. I knew i wanted to study Computer Science. Duke had a grant from ibm. Two great computer labs. I said that is where i was going. David you are not on the basketball team. Melinda i went to the games, though. I love them. David you point out in the book women back then were more involved in Computer Science than today. Why was that . Melinda in the late 1980s, we had about 37 of undergrads as Computer Science undergrads as women. We were on the way up, like law and medicine. That has since dropped down to about 17 or 18 . We dont actually know why women have dropped out of Computer Science, but there are some theories looking at the data. Personal computers were really promoted to boys as a home gaming device and women and girls said im out and it became this selfreferential circle. David you went in a special program as a fiveyear program where you get an undergraduate degree and mba. You are about to have your degree. You were interviewing at computer companies. There was a Small Company interviewing at duke as well, called microsoft. Melinda i was part of the first hiring class of mbas at microsoft. There were nine men and me. David you go to microsoft and is it as good as you think . Melinda we were changing the world. I loved the innovative nature. I loved creating products. I did consider leaving microsoft within two years because the culture was abrasive, quite honestly. I could play that game, i knew how to do the debate, how to stand up for my ideas, my team. But i didnt like myself. I didnt like how i was treating other people when i was going to the Grocery Store or out in the world. I thought about leaving. Then i thought, i dont think this will work, but i will try being myself in this culture and see if it works. If not, i will take some other job. I started to be myself and build teams that were collaborative and worked together more and were less abrasive. It turns out, i could recruit people from all over the company to my surprise to work on these teams. David when did you first meet bill . Melinda three weeks into my job, i had never been to new york city. I never hailed a cab. Microsoft sent me to new york for a meeting. My female roommate, microsoft used to make you have a roommate when you went traveling on the road, she said, why dont you come to this dinner . I said great. Sat down at a dinner. There were two chairs open because i came late. I sat down. The next chair was empty. 10 minutes later, bill came in and sat next to me. That is when i first met bill, about three weeks into the job. David he said wow, how about getting to know me better . Melinda he said, a bunch of us are going out dancing tonight. Why dont you come . I said, i have some other plans. Back at microsoft a few months later everybody used to work late on friday nights, late on saturday. My car was parked next to his in a parking lot. He struck up a conversation. We talked for a while. He said, he asked me if i would go out with him eventually. This is saturday. Two weeks from friday night. I said, two weeks from friday night . I was 22 years old. I have no idea what im doing two weeks from friday night. That is not quite spontaneous enough. He said, can i take your phone number . He did, called me an hour later. And said, well is this spontaneous enough . How about tonight . Then he said, but i have a User Group Meeting and a dinner i have to go to. How about a glass of wine downtown . A User Group Meeting on a saturday night. That was our first date. David was it hard to work at the company while people knew you were dating the ceo founder . Melinda yeah, the first date with bill, i thought i would go out with him once, maybe twice. He is running this company doing all these amazing things. Then when i realized we were going to start dating more after the first two days, i thought, this is tricky. Im not sure i want to do this. I had worked really hard on Computer Science, my mba, i studied economics. I thought, i am not sure this is going to go well for me. I remember talking to my parents on the phone, saying, this is not a good idea. I said, but he is interesting and has a big heart i dont think people see. I dont know why i have gotten to see that side of him. What i decided to do, i would date him but i will make it known in the company. I did not try to hide it. I made it incredibly clear to the teams that i was managing that i had a very bright line. I did not go home from microsoft and talk to bill about work. I am preparing teams to go into meetings with senior leadership, including bill, and they are nervous. I have to prepare them, prepare myself. The last thing i could do is go home and talk to him. They had to know i had their back. And so, i had to have very bright lines around that, and we made it work. David it worked out. Melinda it did. David it is hard to believe, the first night you met him, i cant see bill going out and be a dancer. I would not picture he would be going out and dancing. Melinda he likes to. [laughter] david you decided when your children came, you wanted to spend more time with them. You left microsoft. Melinda i surprised bill and told him i wanted to leave microsoft. David his reaction was . Melinda really . He knew i loved working at microsoft. He knew i had that piece of my brain that loved to be on the working side. He was quite surprised when i told him i was going to leave. David did you go to the foundation fulltime after your children were older . Melinda my whole issue, i had it timed for when our kids would get older. I knew until our last daughter went off to preschool, i was not going to be fulltime. Once she was in preschool, my plan was always to work fulltime. David lets talk about the issues of women in Subsaharan Africa and other things you address in your book. You point out in Subsaharan Africa, there are child marriages. Women are forced to marry at 6, 7, 8 years old. Why does that happen . Melinda quite often a family will marry their daughter off because they dont have to feed her, so there is less resources from their family, and they also want to protect the familys honor. That is a cultural barrier that is horrible for girls. They often dont go to secondary school. Or if they are in secondary school, they are pulled out of school. They are moved to a village often where they know no one. It is not even close to their home. It is a horrific thing for a girl. She basically becomes the property of her husbands family. Or her motherinlaw. David what have you tried to do to prevent some of this . Melinda the only way to overcome cultural barriers, you go in with very sensitive ways with partners, and then the community has to commit to it. David another area you talk about in the book is a situation where you have female cutting. Genital cutting. What is the purpose of that, and how frequent is that done with young women around the world . Melinda that is still a tradition, particularly in a lot of northern africa. It is horrific for a young girl. Young girls bleed to death. It is trauma, a traumatic event. Villagers do it for different reasons. They believe it protects the girls honor. They believe if they love their daughter, they will do it. What i have known, when education comes in i talked to a village leader, an elder, a group of women who used to cut their daughters and no longer do. And a group of women who are the cutters, and they no longer do it. You know, when people bring in education from outside and they talk to us about how people view this and other parts of the world, it starts to change our mind and we start to question our past. And then we create change. David another one you talk about is abusive relationships. Husbands are very abusive to their spouses in different ways. You point out in the book that you had an abusive relationship as well before you were married. Melinda the reason i even write a page in the book about having been in an abusive relationship is that i want people to know, it can happen to anyone. It silences your voice. It is a way of silencing a womans voice in a marriage or her workplace or community. For me, i lost my selfconfidence. Millions of women are being either harassed or abused in all kinds of places. It silences women. We have to talk about this barrier. We have to lift it up. What we can do is collect data about it, the world does not actually collect data on abuse. Then we can go in and name it and recognize it and commit to changing it everywhere in the world. David Jackie Kennedy said, if you mess up raising your children, nothing else in life really matters. Melinda when you have a great means, you dont have money as a buffer. My kids have always had an allowance. When they wanted something, they either had to use their allowance to buy it or put it on their wish list. And they hope their grandparents or me would give it to them. If they saw something in the store they wanted to have, i would say just because i can, doesnt mean i should. David a few years ago, you bill, and warren decided to launch the giving pledge. What was the purpose of the giving pledge, and how many people have signed . Melinda this was warrens big idea. The giving pledge was to say, if you have great wealth, if you are a billionaire in our country or anywhere, you can afford to give half away. That is the right thing for society. Bill and warren are very clear they could not have founded their businesses if it had been in malawi or mozambique. We benefit from what society gives us, the infrastructure. Those resources have to go back to society. You have been a big help to us in this, david. We have 190 families that have committed to the giving pledge in 22 countries around the world. David there is a reaction to wealthy people saying, lets put our money here. How do you respond . Melinda what i know to be true is bill and warren and i believe we should not have this inequity that exists in the u. S. We need to do something about that. But, we are lucky. I meet so many people around the world who would like to live in our country, our democracy. We do have gaps, and we need to do things to fix those gaps. The thing bill and i tried to be most cognizant of is what is the role of philanthropy . All philanthropy can be is that catalytic wedge. We can try things, we can experiment with money where you would not want the government to experiment with taxpayer money. It is up to government to scale up. We feel philanthropy with government, with a private sector, with a Nongovernmental Organization that set of partnerships can do the best for the world. David many people probably wonder what it is like to be the richest couple in the world. Does it make it possible to go to a restaurant, movie . Melinda we are incredibly privileged and lucky to have the resources we have from microsoft. That is that. We do give up some privacy by having that. I have to say, most people are incredibly respectful. Seattle is a lovely place to live. Bill grew up there. It is more because they are proud of what he built with microsoft, or what we are doing with the foundation. We try to look at those as moments of grace. We try to be out in the world. Bill and i still love movies, to go out to restaurants. David you told me a couple of stories about your life. I might ask you about them, you told me once when you drop your oldest daughter off at college, like anybody that drops their kids off in school, in college, they first say, you need this, you need that. You decided you would go to lowes to get some additional things to help your daughters room look better. I cant picture bill gates going through lowes, shopping. Melinda we were looking for an extension cord, which was not easy to find. Bill goes into a store like that, it is like a laboratory. He is curious about everything. Jen and i kept having to drag him saying, come on, we have to find these extension cords. Stay focused. He was not recognized until we got into the cashiers line. He plays along with it and he was fine. David Jackie Kennedy said if you mess up raising your children, nothing else in life really matters. Melinda absolutely. David as parents, we know the hardest thing to do is raise children. You have had to shield three children from the wealth and publicity. Melinda i have tried with our children first, to let them know they are loved no matter what. And their job in life is to find their talents. Whatever those are, we will support that. It is up to them to bring those talents in the world, no matter what they want to be. When the children were young, i have taken them out in the seattle community. Even when they were kindergarten age, and then at age appropriate times, when they got to be 1011, out into the developing world. To not only do a beautiful safari but to see what life is like on the ground. The last thing i will say, when you have a great means, you dont have money as a buffer. My kids have always had an allowance. We have had an agreement, they are not to tell other people their allowance. Neither am i. Some people would say that is all the gates kids get . Others would say, that is too much money. Since they were young, they have always had an allowance that grew over time. When they wanted something, they had to use their allowance to buy it or put it on their wish list for christmas. I could say to them, if there was something they saw in the store they just had to have i would say, just because i can, doesnt mean that i should. David what would you like your legacy to be, you and bill together . Melinda that we helped other people lift themselves up. To help everybody advance in society. I hope people say about me, i helped lift up other women. David thank you very much and again, it is a very good book and i recommend it. The moment of lift. Melinda thanks david. Great conversation. Haslinda hello. Of as the founder and ceo 2 billiondollar tech company. A woman willing to take risks. Her company, blackline, services the need of one fifth of the fortune 500 giants. Therese tucker is todays