Here in Norway, a few years back, almost every news outlet had "guides" on how to buy your first apartment/house (buying a home became an integrated part of our economy after the war).
It was in the style of "if I can do it, anyone can"-interview with someone that just recently had bought their first home. The articles started pretty tame with clever tips where the boy/girl made coffee/lunch at home and saved a miniscule amount of money. Sure. Nice tips on how to save money.
Then it usually escalated to get your parents to buy an apartment, rent it out and keep all the rent income while living for free at home. After a while, sell the apartment and buy a new one.
Pretty fucking horrifying that journalists thought: "yes, this is a good article to print. It will help people!"
IBM is how he got into the PC infrastructure via licensing. He saw what the execs didn't, that anyone could build hardware but what ran on it controlled the world. And I don't know how true it is, but my understanding is that Gates was so shrewd he bet on getting that agreement before he even had the software in hand. Which if true says even more about the IBM execs who agreed to something sight unseen.
Sadly, the age of garage tech startups is over, big tech made sure of that. They now just buy tech start ups with no intention of leveraging their innovations, but rather to maintain the status quo. Late stage capitalism...