The fifth stage of maturity, begins when the company reaches cruising altitude and leads the market. At that point, the entrepreneur and his management team can bet on the expansion, either through acquisitions or mergers. Act 2: The capitalist entrepreneurs of the eighties 2.1 .- Bill Gates: "A computer in every home" Few entrepreneurs survive the transition from a small business to large enterprise. Of these, only a small fraction continues the way to build a company achieve a billion dollars. And of those few, only one company has been listed on stock markets with shares estimated at half a trillion dollars – compared with some nations, your company can claim to be the ninth largest economy in the world. At 44, Gates is perhaps the richest man in history: some estimates his wealth at about U.S.

$ 77,000 million. And not only that: he has created – in turn – more millionaires than any other man in history of world business, either directly with the offer of shares in his company (an investment of U.S. $ 10,000 in the first public stock offering Microsoft's is now worth about U.S. $ 4.8 million. This is the most sought-millennium action) or indirectly by making computers part of daily life. It all began when, at 25 years of age, "Gates convinced IBM to sell him the rights of the DOS operating system it had developed for them. His goal was to integrate it into what would be the personal computer (in fact, bought the software to another company and simply adapted to operate a personal computer).