Make a list of common boyhood dreams and Paul Allen will very likely have lived most of them. Start your own company and make a gazillion dollars? Check. Own two professional sports teams? Check. Play lead guitar in rock band? Check. Build a rocket to fly people into space? Check. Make giant telescope to search for aliens? Check. Crack the mystery of the human brain? Well, he’s working on it.
The seminal moment in the life of one of the world’s wealthiest men is often pegged as the time, in 1975, when he persuaded his high schoolfriend Bill Gates to drop out of Harvard University and co-found a company called Microsoft. But since leaving the software giant in 1983after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma—and then facing down the disease—Allen has lived a dizzying array of second lives. Drawing on his Microsoft-stock fortune, today estimated at $22 billion, he has funded dozens of companies in the software, cable, and Web industries,bought the Portland Trail Blazers and Seattle Seahawks, and built Seattle’s Experience Music Project, the rock-and-roll history museum.Along the way, Allen has also become a leading patron of the sciences,whose influence can rival that of huge government agencies.
Back when he was a high school guitar player obsessed with software,Allen was mesmerized by movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World. Thirty years later, he started steering his fortune toward projects that could easily belong in those movies. In 2001 his $11.5 million investment helped jump-start the SETI program, a methodical search for radio signals from intelligent life.(The new Allen Telescope Array will start sweeping the sky for aliens this year.) His love of rockets spurred a $30 million gamble on SpaceShipOne, which won the X Prize as the first manned craft in suborbital space. In 2003 Allen doled out $100 million to found the Allen Institute for Brain Science, with the ambitious goal of mapping all gene expression in the mammalian brain. Last September the institute released a complete genomic map of the mouse brain—a free,searchable, three-dimensional analysis of 21,000 genes (including 85million images) that will help neuroscientists understand how different regions of the brain operate and interact. Now Allen plans to move onto the big prize: mapping the human neocortex.
In his Seattle office—with a glass-encased replica of his 416-footyacht, the Octopus, in front of him and the Seahawks’ stadium visible from the window—Allen spoke with DISCOVER about funding priorities, Microsoft memories, and which childhood dream he plans to check off next.
Do you ever wonder what the world would be like today if Microsoft had never existed? Whoa. If Microsoft had never existed. . . . The industry would probably be very fragmented. But there are so many new models that have sprung up—things like the iPod, Google, YouTube, eBay, and Amazon. Soit’s like asking, “What if there wasn’t an Amazon?” Well, there would probably be other people online selling books, but would it have the impact of an Amazon? Probably not. Or what if there were five companies doing online auctions and not just eBay? For users, there may be a bigger variety of things to choose from, but whenever you have scale, obviously you have more of a chance to make it a better product. The bigger you get, the more inertia you have, which is good. On the other hand, you don’t want to get so big that you struggle to get releases out. So there is always that tension.
