How to Make a Presentation to Bill Gates
I found a blog entry that talks about a team at Microsoft giving a demo to Bill Gates. It gives some interesting insight into how the team deals with pressure and how BillG evaluates ideas.
And he listened, laughing a little from time to time, asking the odd question. I’d been at one of these before, but sitting along the wall, looking at the back of Bill’s head. This time I was at the big boy’s table. Last time, I’d tracked f-bombs, keeping a running total in my head: the higher the number, the worse you’re doing. The last time, we had one/hour, which was considered to be outstanding. This time, zero. Even though the demo I’d prepared didn’t go off flawlessly (there was a continuous reset in the underlying communications stack we were using that we’d never seen before), he got enough of the demo to appreciate our intent and was interested enough in the the rest of the material to seem pleased.
Near the end, he started talking more, synthesizing our work with the work going on in the rest of the company, making startling leaps that I’d never considered (and I’ve got pipe dreams in my head for the upcoming release and the one after that). We agreed some. We pushed back some. We asked him for help making some things happen.
Source:
http://www.sellsbrothers.com/news/showTopic.aspx?ixTopic=2181