Gates isn’t done just yet; preliminary bgC3 details emerge

You didn’t think Willy G would be content fading away into the background after stepping down as the head of Microsoft, did you? Not a chance. Of course the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a place where Bill can still play boss but Gates never was a one-horse town kind of guy. Enter “bgC3 LLC”. Details regarding Gates’ latest venture are still scarce and much of the detail we have is unconfirmed but rest assured, bgC3 is likely a name we’ll be seeing plenty of in the coming months and years. Firstly, what does the name mean? “bg” obviously represents initials and is short for “Boy Genius”, err, “Bill Gates”. The meaning of “C3” is still a bit up in the air. The “3” is thought to indicate that this is Big Bill’s third major venture, after Microsoft and his foundation. The “C” however, is a bit of a mystery. The first possibility is “Carillon”, as the company was initially called Carillon Holdings before formally shifting to bgC3 shortly after Gates left his full time role at Microsoft. Next up is “Company” as in, this is Bill’s third company. Lastly, reportedly from a Gates insider, is “Catylist”. Mmm, interesting. Public documents don’t offer many specifics but they do describe the company as a “Think Tank”. These days, think tank could mean a million different things. It could be anything from a big office where Bill and his friends sit around talking about yachts, perhaps to a larger scale of an idea incubator a la New York’s betaworks or even something more involved like Mountain View’s Y Combinator. Or perhaps Bill has made enough money for this lifetime and he’s assembling a crack team of brains to combat large-scale issues such as energy, the economy or the Yankees payroll. Whatever the case may be, Gates has a tendency to do things big and we expect bgC3 to be no different.

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