Paul Allen

Paul Gardner Allen (born January 21, 1953) is an American philanthropist, investor and innovator, best known as the co-founder of Microsoft Corporation alongside Bill Gates. As of January 2015, he was estimated to be the 51st richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of $17.5 billion.

Allen is the founder and chairman of Vulcan Inc., which manages his various business and philanthropic efforts. Allen also has a multi-billion dollar investment portfolio including technology companies, real estate holdings, and stakes in other technology and media companies. He owns two professional sports teams, the Seattle Seahawks of the National Football League (NFL),and the Portland Trail Blazers of the National Basketball Association (NBA) and is part-owner of the Seattle Sounders FC, which joined Major League Soccer (MLS) in 2009.

He is also the founder of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence,the Allen Institute for Cell Science and Stratolaunch Systems.

Paul Allen was born in Seattle, Washington, to parents Kenneth Sam Allen, an associate director of the University of Washington libraries, and Edna Faye (née Gardner) Allen, on January 21, 1953. Allen attended Lakeside School, a private school in Seattle, and befriended Bill Gates, who was almost three years younger and shared a common enthusiasm for computers.They used Lakeside's Teletype terminal to develop their programming skills on several time-sharing computer systems.After earning a perfect score of 1600 on the SAT (pre-1995 scale), Allen went to Washington State University, where he joined Phi Kappa Theta fraternity, but dropped out after two years in order to work as a programmer for Honeywell in Boston, placing him near his old friend again.Allen later convinced Gates to drop out of Harvard University in order to create Microsoft.