Bill Gates on Armchair Expert

Dax, admitting his disposition to being a control freak, asks Bill how hard it was for him to learn to delegate and if it was one of Bill’s biggest challenges at Microsoft. Bill answers with an interesting and retrospective look at how he had to change his mental model, going from writing code to organization and orchestrating people (at about ~40:40):

Yeah, scaling [was] a huge challenge. At first I wrote all the code. Then I hired all the people that wrote the code and I looked at the code. Then, eventually, there was code that I didn’t look at and people that I didn’t hire. And the average quality per person is [went down], but the ability to have big impact is [went up]. And so that idea that a large company is imperfect in many ways [is true] and yet it’s the way to get out to the entire world and bring in all these mix of skills. Most people don't make that transition and there are times when you go “oh my god, I just want to write the code myself.” The famous thing I used to say is, “I could've come in and written that myself over the weekend.” Well, eventually I couldn’t.