Melinda French Gates got her start at Microsoft because an IBM hiring manager told her to turn down their job offer—‘It dumbfounded me’

• Melinda French Gates turned down IBM on a hiring manager’s advice—and became a $15.2 billion mogul. She’s one of many billionaires, from Jensen Huang to Steve Jobs, who owe their success to unexpected wisdom.

If a manager at one of the world’s most powerful companies tells you to ditch them for a small startup, take the advice. You might wind up a billionaire like Melinda French Gates. At the start of her career interning at IBM for two summers, she had a job offer on the table. But a supervisor steered her to cut and run for the hills of Seattle.

“My hiring manager at IBM, a female, said to me, ‘Okay, are you ready to accept the job offer?’ And I said, ‘Well, I have one more company to go interview—this little company, Microsoft. It was tiny,” French Gates said during a recent interview with LinkedIn. “And she said, ‘If they give you an offer, you should take it.’ And it dumbfounded me.”

French Gates did in fact take the job at Microsoft and began her nine-year career at the pioneering tech company. She was a critical player in the growth of the business, rising within the ranks as the general manager of information products at the $3.1 trillion software giant. Her career success has fared well for her pockets, too—with her personal wealth standing at $15.2 billion, French Gates is one of the top ten richest women in America.

And it may not have happened without the advice of a hiring manager who went against IBM’s own interests to prioritize French Gates’ success. “Here’s this woman who’s supposed to be my manager, giving me a piece of career advice,” French Gates said.

The transition wasn’t easy—Microsoft was out on the West Coast, meaning she’d have to uproot her life to work there. But she couldn’t escape the exhilarating thought of being a part of something big.

“I didn’t know anybody in Seattle. It was moving to the West Coast, but I was so excited about what they were doing. I was like, ‘I want to be part of that,’” she said.

French Gates left a potentially successful career at IBM behind to chase Microsoft—and she advises others, especially women, to take that leap of faith. You could land among the stars, or a trillion-dollar business.

“I remind them all the time you can pivot careers. You can change. You can go over here,” she said. “It’s not like one or two paths that carry you forward, even though you had plans before this.”

The 60-year-old philanthropist and ex-wife of Bill Gates isn’t the only billionaire to have received counsel from the most unexpected places. Jensen Huang, the CEO of $3.3 trillion chip giant Nvidia, doesn’t always get inspiration from the entrepreneurs he rubs shoulders with. He once said he received the best career advice from an elderly gardener at a temple in Tokyo.