Microsoft Co-Founder, Paul Allen Is Dead

The man who persuaded school-friend Bill Gates to drop out of Harvard to start what became the world’s biggest software company,  Paul Allen, died on Monday at the age of 65, his family said.

pic.twitter.com/msJhSPZBXm

— Paul Allen (@PaulGAllen) October 15, 2018

Naija News understands that Microsoft Corp co-founder, Allen died from complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer as confirmed in a statement by the Allen family.

It will be recalled that earlier in October, Naija News reported that Allen had revealed he was being treated for the non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which he also was treated for in 2009. He had an earlier brush with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, another cancer, in the early 1980s before leaving Microsoft.

RIP Paul Allen. Thank you for your immeasurable contributions to the community and beyond… Rock on. pic.twitter.com/0C33KqA47k

— Pearl Jam 🇺🇦 (@PearlJam) October 16, 2018

Gates described Allen as following the Microsoft partnership with a “second act” focused on strengthening communities and in a statement said, “I am heartbroken by the passing of one of my oldest and dearest friends.”

Current Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella on Monday called him a “quiet and persistent” man who changed the world.

“He is under-appreciated in Seattle,” said David Brewster, founder of local news website Crosscut.com and the Seattle Weekly newspaper. “He’s remote and reclusive. There’s too much Howard Hughes in the way he behaves for Seattle truly to appreciate a lot of the good that he does.”

Paul Gardner Allen was born in Seattle on Jan. 21, 1953, the son of a librarian father and teacher mother. He was two years older than Gates but when they met in the computer room at the exclusive Lakeside School in Seattle in 1968, they discovered a shared passion.

“In those days we were just goofing around, or so we thought,” Gates recalled in his 1985 book “”The Road Ahead.”