Ric Weiland

Richard William Ric Weiland, born April 21, 1953 and died June 24, 2006, was a software developer, programmer and philanthropist. He was a high-school classmate and friend of Paul Allen at Lakeside School in Seattle, where they and Bill Gates joined the Lakeside Programmers Group. Allen and Gates hired him in 1975, the year they founded Microsoft, making him one of its first employees; he became a lead programmer and developer for the company's BASIC and COBOL language systems and later project leader for Microsoft Works. At 35 he left Microsoft to work in investment management and philanthropy. He gave to more than 60 nonprofit organizations, with an estimated 21.5 million dollars distributed between 1996 and 2006, and was an active supporter of LGBTQ causes. His 2007 bequest to Stanford University, 54 million dollars, was described as the largest since the university's founding grant.