Ashland native Jeff Raikes to run Gates Foundation
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By staff and wire reports
SEATTLE — Ashland native and retiring Microsoft Corp. executive Jeff Raikes has a new challenge: spending the money Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his buddy Warren Buffett are giving away.
Raikes will be the next chief executive of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The world’s largest charitable foundation has been looking for a new leader since chief executive Patty Stonesifer announced in February that she would be stepping down.
In the past decade, the Gates Foundation has made more than $16 billion in grants, mostly in global health, global development and U.S. education.
Raikes has been the top executive in Microsoft’s business software division, responsible for such things as the Office software suite, Microsoft’s server software and applications that help businesses track customers and business processes.
He announced in January he would retire from Microsoft.
Raikes spent 27 years at Microsoft, longer than anyone besides Gates and Chief Executive Steve Ballmer. Raikes, 49, was recruited to Microsoft from Apple Inc. by Ballmer in 1981.
He was named president of Microsoft Business Division in 2005. Since then, he has been responsible for a wide swath of some of Microsoft’s most profitable applications, including the Office suite, Microsoft’s server software and applications that help businesses track customers and business processes.
He has a reputation for being humble, straightforward and well liked by people working under him.
He is also intensely competitive.
``I'm absolutely thrilled to be joining the Gates Foundation,'' Raikes said Monday. ``This is truly a dream job.''
Melinda Gates said that when their friend Raikes expressed interest in the job, his selection was far from a done deal.
Raikes said he thought before Stonesifer's announcement that he would like to play a role in the foundation's future but was unsure what he would like to do.
He went through the same screening process as more than 150 other candidates. As a finalist, he was interviewed by top executives of the foundation and needed the blessing of the foundation's third-biggest donor, Warren Buffett, head of Omaha-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
Melinda Gates said she and her husband each interviewed ``quite a few'' candidates, but they kept coming back to the same idea.
‘`We really wanted to find someone to build the organization as it was,'' she said. ``We saw in Jeff the right leadership qualities.''
Raikes said he met Buffett years ago when the Gateses and Buffett came to his Nebraska farm and accompanied him to a Nebraska Cornhuskers football game.
He said his experience at Microsoft and his volunteer work with various nonprofit organizations give him many of the skills he will need to run the foundation. But he acknowledged he has much to learn.
``At Microsoft, the magic of software is used to take on very interesting challenges. Here, you have a similar situation, where the use of technology ... and systems thinking is used to take on very complex problems in society,'' Raikes said.
He had to overcome two obstacles before deciding to take the job: his daughter's desire to have her father spend more time at home and his own concern about the way he would respond to daily exposure to human misery.
Raikes said a long talk with his daughter resolved the first concern and a talk with Melinda Gates made him feel better about the second.
Raikes grew up on a farm outside of Ashland that his family has owned for 150 years, and initially prepared for a career in agriculture before discovering computers.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering and economic systems from Stanford University. He served on the board of directors of the Software Publishers Association from 1987 to 1993 and twice served as chairman of the board. Raikes also served on the board of the Washington Technology Center.
Raikes is a brother of Nebraska state Sen. Ron Raikes. He and his wife, Tricia, are trustees of the University of Nebraska Foundation. They endowed a University of Nebraska chair in plant sciences in honor of his father and mother.
Buffett, a good friend of Bill Gates, has pledged most of his own fortune to the Gates Foundation.
The gift will effectively double the foundation's annual spending by 2009, posing a challenge for the foundation to spend the money quickly and yet effectively, and almost double its staff without creating chaos.
Through the Raikes Family Foundation, Raikes and his wife, Tricia, have focused on education for underrepresented minorities, according to news reports.
The foundation had more than $112 million in assets at the end of 2005, according to tax records reported by the Seattle Times.
Raikes is a devoted baseball fan and has been part owner of the Seattle Mariners since 1992.
In 2003, Forbes estimated Raikes' net worth at about $490 million. That includes more than 5 million Microsoft shares, according to a 2007 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Those shares are now worth about $157 million.
The Seattle-based Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has a $37.3 billion endowment and more than 500 employees. It is organized into three program groups, Global Health, Global Development, and the U.S. Program, each led by a president.
“Jeff will step into this role at a good time,” said Buffett, a foundation trustee. “I’ve known Jeff for years, and we have chosen a leader who embodies the characteristics essential to continuing this work: an extraordinary mind and an uncompromising commitment to getting the job done.”
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