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It’s been more than a year since Bill Gates stepped down from day-to-day operations at Microsoft to focus on his philanthropic efforts through the Gates Foundation.

In that time, Gates has traveled the world (in the past week alone, he’s been in China, India, and today, New York), strategizing the best use of his enormous fortune and that of his foundation, which, also includes $31 billion of Warren Buffett’s money.

Tonight at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, Gates shared a progress report of sorts in an interview with Matthew Bishop of The Economist, which also included some broader questions from the audience.

What Gates Is Trying to Do

Rather than spread his money over dozens of causes, Gates is focusing on a few specific issues, where he hopes his hands-on approach and vast resources will make a significant difference. In his case, those causes include providing necessary medicine and equipment to help stop the spread of disease, finding vaccines for the likes Malaria and AIDS, and improving education, both in the US and around the world.

As for how he measures the success, at least on the healthcare side of things, it’s pretty simple: fewer people, especially children, dying. Gates is optimistic that the problems he’s focusing on can be significantly aleviated or outright solved within his lifetime. He doesn’t see an AIDS vaccine within the next 10 years, but thinks it’s possible within the next 20. He thinks by 2025, there’s a good chance that no one will have to die from (though the disease will likely still exist) Malaria.

Gates executes in these areas by talking to scientists, deciding where to invest, and hoping that in the long-run, some of those investments pay off in the form of successful vaccines and cures. He says this isn’t dissimilar to his work at Microsoft, where investments in things like speech recognition and robotics wouldn’t yield any tangible bottom results for many years, if at all. Here’s a map of where the Gates Foundation has issued grants to scientists around the world:

Even more related to Gates’ history in the technology world, his vision for education revolves largely around online universities, where lectures would be available to all, and anyone can complete coursework and receive the same accreditation as someone who attends a four year university. In this area, Gates believes we’ll see significant progress within the next 5 years.

Gates said if he could, he’d like to be able to use some of his resources to fight terrorism and nuclear proliferation, as well as rid African nations of corrupt governments. However, he doesn’t believe he’d be effective in those areas.

On Philanthropy and Getting Involved

Bishop asked Gates about comments that the Microsoft founder had previously made about the relative stinginess of some of those in a position to give major amounts of money (i.e. – the Forbes 400), as well as the role that the financial crisis has played on philanthropy. Gates jokingly said that last he checked, the people on that list are still in a good position to give, but it’s not his interest to go recruit people into philanthropy.

Looking around the globe, Gates is optimistic that emerging markets like China and India, where vast amounts of wealth are being created amongst the super rich, will eventually become #2 and #3 in the world in philanthropy, behind the US.

As for those of us without billions of dollars to spare, Gates believes the best way to get involved is with a similar approach to his, albeit on a micro scale. His theme can be summarized as ridding the world of inequality – which for regular people, means finding an inequality that you care about and doing what you can to help, first locally, and then if you can, on a wider scale.

Selective Sound Bites

Asked if he thinks that two of the world’s richest men (him and Buffett) working together creates the lack of a competitor in philanthropic efforts akin to the likes of Larry Ellison or Steve Jobs from his Microsoft days, Gates says “the fact that Malaria kills people makes it a bit worse than what those guys did.”

Moving on to the financial crisis, Gates offered a couple interesting pieces of commentary:

(1) He’s not so sure the government should have a role in running private companies like AIG. For example, he thinks the whole “sales trip to the spa” fiasco is a perfect example not necessarily of corporate excess, but of why the whole thing is a dicey relationship.

(2) He thinks the pay limits imposed on Wall Street were the biggest thing that’s ever been done to increase executive pay. Why? Because they’re simply finding other ways to compensate executives, like with stock options.

Gates’ Closing Advice

It’s hard to imagine a Bill Gates Q&A without someone in the audience asking for his business advice. And, sorry to tell you, there’s no cheap and easy secret to becoming a billionaire.

Instead, Gates’ advice is not much different than that you’ve likely heard from countless other successful entrepreneurs: don’t fit the business to an economic opportunity, but find something you have a passion for and do it. Gates says that when he founded Microsoft, he was passionate about software, had been doing it for the better part of his life, and at the time, didn’t completely realize the enormity of the economic opportunity.

In Case You Missed It

Earlier this year at TED, Gates touched on many of these same themes, while also offering the Web a memorable video moment by unleashing mosquitoes into the audience. It’s definitely worth a watch:

Tags: bill gates, microsoft, philanthropy

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