By Hannah Rice
News Editor
The gaming system begged for by boys and girls everywhere, well-known by almost every human being – the almighty Xbox. More than 83 million of them have been sold since their release, but what many people do not know is that the architect himself was a student at Reynolds not too long ago.
Robbie Bach, the former president of the Entertainment & Devices division at Microsoft, was a member of the RJR class of 1980. After graduating from Reynolds and later UNC-Chapel Hill on the Morehead-Cain Scholarship, working in New York and earning a business degree from Stanford, Bach secured a job at Microsoft. The Xbox became one of his projects.
Bach looks back fondly on his days at Reynolds, with Key Club and “epic” field trips to New York and Washington being among his most memorable times here.
“We made our Key Club float for homecoming in the basement at my brother’s house,” Bach said. “As I recall, we didn’t do a very good job of it but had a bunch of fun staying up all night pretending that we knew what we were doing.”
Bach credits the Morehead-Cain Scholarship with allowing him to take advantage of opportunities he would not have otherwise been exposed to.
“The Morehead Scholarship had a huge impact on my career plans,” Bach said. “It gave me an opportunity to work each summer at some very interesting places (Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office in Portland, Pan Am Airways in Miami and IBM in Washington) and that motivated me to think about pursuing a career in finance.”
After working two years at Morgan Stanley, an investment banking firm in New York City, Bach discovered that his interests were with sales and marketing, not finance. With this realization combined with a business degree from Stanford, Bach pursued a job at Microsoft which was, at the time, an up-and-coming company. At the beginning of his career there were 3,000 people at Microsoft. When he left, there were more than 100,000.
“After spending some time in marketing learning the basics, I moved to Europe and worked for two years as the special assistant to the president (of Microsoft’s European branch). This got me some incredible experience in the international part of Microsoft’s business, which made me pretty unique,” Bach said.
Five years after returning to the States, Bach was promoted to vice president of the company, which allowed him to have a lead role on the Xbox project. The designing began with “a small team that loved gaming” made up of about 20 people, which eventually grew to become 2,000. After investing many hours working inside and outside of the office, the plans were approved by company founder Bill Gates, and Bach along with a partner were assigned to head the project.
“That first version sold a lot of units but lost a lot of money,” Bach said. “We fixed that with Xbox 360, which sold even more units and made good money for the company.”
Bach continued to have an extremely successful career at Microsoft and retired in 2010. Bach now describes himself as a “civil engineer.”
“When I left Microsoft in 2010, I wanted to find a way to have deeper social impact. I decided to use my skills as a writer, speaker and leader to help improve the way our local communities, non-profit organizations and governments work,” Bach said. “I call this work ‘civil engineering’ because it involves developing a strategy for improving civic institutions.”
Bach has played a major role in working with the Salvation Army’s Boys and Girls Clubs of America, a cause he is passionate about. He places a large emphasis on each person’s duty to be a civil engineer in their own community, seeking to improve and enrich the world they live in.
Bach advises current high school students to think ahead on what they might want to pursue, but to be ready for unexpected changes and to learn to adapt and take advantage of them.
“None of the great opportunities that I’ve been fortunate enough to experience were things that were part of my ‘master plan,’ ” Bach said. “I never thought about being in the video game business or working for a technology company when I was younger. But as things unfolded, those were the opportunities that presented themselves, and I grabbed on to them.”