I would also add that it's not his intelligence that would intimidate me, but more so his wealth of experience. His bullshit detectors are probably off the charts, considering that he's heard and seen every business pitch known to man.

If I was your friend I would just try to be as honest and upfront as possible. You're not going to sell Bill Gates on anything, but you can convince him you're someone that's worth dealing with.

http://www.templetons.com/brad/billg.html

He simply has to think differently than most.

Let me assure you he's smarter than your average really-smart-person. He's also more determined. ;-)

It reminds of the line from Good Will Hunting where the Professor says that only a handful of people in the world were smart enough to even tell the difference, even though it was grand, between himself and Will.

If your definition of a 'really-smart person' is someone who can ace the SATs or get into Harvard, then you probably won't be able to tell the difference between such a person and Bill Gates. There is a world of difference between the level of intelligence required to ace the SATs and level required to handle Math 55.

For graduate study, US News and World Report currently ranks it a hair under MIT, along with Princeton, Stanford and UCB (http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...). Harvard has been strong in math for a long time.

A colleague of ours (HN name spolsky) met with Bill Gates in the past and was pretty nervous about that interaction:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

Yes, his professor told him in class that X was the tightest bounds currently in existence. He came back a few days later and said "I'm pretty sure I have faster." He was right.

I don't recall the exact wording of it, but this is the gist of it as I recall:

"I read a lot, on very diverse subjects. There are a lot of things that I do not understand at first read. But irrespective of whether I understand it or not, I complete reading them. Then I re-read them. I re-read to the extent that I want to understand them in depth."

Also, he claimed in the interview that he completely avoids watching TV, that he instead spends time reading.

May be that is the secret to his smartness.

That article paints Gates as extremely quick. For example, it recounts an episode (touched on in the synopsis) where Gates was given a reading list by somebody who was used to potential donors wanting to get involved. Unlike most of them, Gates came back having read and synthesized most if not everything on the list.

I don't remember much about that article anymore, but I remember coming away from it thinking a lot more highly of him, both in terms of his intelligence and his willingness to use his skills in the service of others.

For instance it says he was writing business software as a teenager. It also says that Altair BASIC was initially written on an emulator, which was itself written by him! We're already at the clever and talented point right there.

"He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT[19] and enrolled at Harvard College..." isn't a perfect indicator but suggestive also. He might have had other breaks in life but smarts would have been one of them.