Ann Winblad, who is the ex-girlfriend Bill Gates went on vacation with
Frequented in the 1980s, she is also a legend of Silicon Valley, a world she helped build: today she is 70, she is married to an actor's brother and has remained on excellent terms with her ex.
With the sudden divorce of the Gates, an old agreement made before the wedding has re-emerged from the social networks: Melinda had granted Bill the permission to spend every spring a long weekend at the beach with the ex-girlfriend Ann Winblad, with whom he had left in the 1987 - the year he earned his first billion - shortly before meeting his future wife. Gates and Winblad met in 1984 at a tech conference and started dating virtually: they went to see the same movie in different cities, while they talked to each other on the phone. At the time, however, he was too busy with Microsoft to think about marriage, while she, five years older, wanted a family: it ended up like this, but when Bill - six years later - decided to marry Melinda, he called his ex-girlfriend to ask her approval. That came.
Today Winblad is 70 years old, lives in San Francisco and has been married for six years to Edward Alex Kline, 63-year-old private investigator and brother of actor Kevin Kline, with whom she played a small part in the film A Fish Named Wanda. Above all, however, Winblad is a legend of Silicon Valley, a world he has helped to build: since the dawn of Big Tech, in fact, Winblad has left its mark in dozens of startups, starting with Microsoft, of which he was one of the first investors. On her extraordinary intuition she built a successful career as a venture capitalist and technology entrepreneur in a male-dominated sector: hers is the famous definition "data is the new oil", offered to a journalist in 2012 well before the issue became dominant. global.
