Gabe Logan Newell (born November 3, 1962), nicknamed Gaben, is an American businessman and the president of the video game company Valve. Newell was born in Colorado and grew up in Davis, California. He attended Harvard University in the early 1980s but dropped out to join Microsoft, where he helped create the first versions of the Windows operating system. He and another employee, Mike Harrington, left Microsoft in 1996 to found Valve, and funded development of their first game, Half-Life (1998). Harrington left in 2000, leaving Newell as the sole owner. As of 2021, he owned at least one quarter of Valve. Newell led development of Valve's digital distribution service Steam, which launched in 2003 and controlled most of the market for downloaded PC games by 2011. He is one of the wealthiest people in the United States; in December 2021, Forbes estimated his net worth at US$3.9 billion. Early life and education Newell was born on November 3, 1962, in Colorado, and attended Davis Senior High School in Davis, California. He enrolled at Harvard University in 1980, but was convinced to drop out to work for Bill Gates at Microsoft by the head of sales in 1983. Career Microsoft Newell spent 13 years at Microsoft as the lead developer of the first three releases of the Windows operating systems, making him a millionaire. Newell later said he learned more during his first three months at Microsoft than he ever did at Harvard, which was one of the primary reasons why he dropped out. In late 1995, Doom, a 1993 first-person shooter game developed by id Software, was estimated to be installed on more computers worldwide than Microsoft's new operating system, Windows 95. Newell said: "[id] ... didn't even distribute through retail, it distributed through bulletin boards and other pre-internet mechanisms. To me, that was a lightning bolt. Microsoft was hiring 500-people sales teams and this entire company was 12 people, yet it had created the most widely distributed software in the world. There was a sea change coming." At Microsoft, Newell led development on a port of Doom for Windows 95; the port is credited for helping make Windows a viable game platform. Valve Inspired by Michael Abrash, who left Microsoft to work on the game Quake at id, Newell and another employee, Mike Harrington, left Microsoft to found the video game company Valve on August 24, 1996. Newell