William T. Gross

Bill Gross grew up dreaming of being an inventor. He started his first company–Solar Devices–in high school during the energy crisis of 1973 with a dream of making solar energy practical on a small scale. He sold kits and plans for solar energy products mail order in the back of Popular Science and Scientific American magazines. He sold more than 10,000 copies of plans, helping him pay his way through college at the California Institute of Technology, where he graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1981.

While at Caltech, Bill invented and patented a new high-performance loudspeaker design and started a company to manufacture those speakers called GNP Loudspeakers (Gross National Products). Those speakers went on to become a model for many other high-end audiophile products.

After Caltech, Bill and his brother created HAL, the natural language interface for the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, which was at the time the leading software in the world. Bill’s company was acquired by Lotus, and while there he created many software products, including the award-winning Magellan for finding and searching personal information.

In 1991, Bill started a new company called Knowledge Adventure, an educational software publisher that grew to be the third largest in the world. The company created the Jumpstart series of education products, sold 20 million copies to children all over the world, and revolutionized multimedia educational software. The company was acquired by Vivendi in 1995.