Few people know is that Bill Gates first company was a failure. A business called Traf-O-Data was designed to process and analyze data from traffic tapes. The business never took off.

“It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” Bill Gates

Traf-O-Data was a business partnership between Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Paul Gilbert that existed in the 1970s. The objective was to read the raw data from roadway traffic countersand create reports for traffic engineers. The company had only modest success but the experience was instrumental in the creation of Microsoft Corporation a few years later.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen were high school students at Lakeside School in Seattle. The Lakeside Programmers Group got free computer time on various computers in exchange for writing computer programs. Gates and Allen thought they could process the traffic data cheaper and faster than the local companies. They recruited classmates to manually read the hole-patterns in the paper tape and transcribe the data onto computer cards. Gates then used a computer at the University of Washington to produce the traffic flow charts. (Paul Allen’s father was a librarian at UW.) This was the beginning of Traf-O-Data.^[2]

Source: Wikipedia