Christine undoubtedly exudes a fighting spirit, but not in an aggressive way, more from a refusal to let any negative energy settle in, which perhaps stems from her Buddhist roots. I am intrigued by the almost contradicting transition from a tranquil life of retreat and meditation to the relentless world of business. “From seventeen years old I was driven by a desire to make a difference and to remove pain from the world.” She tells me that since she was thirteen, she became acutely aware of all the suffering in the world. “At first I thought it was depressing. Then by the age of seventeen I was determined to help reduce human suffering. I thought by becoming a monk I could do that.” Christine spent seven years as a monk, often retreating to caves to reflect and meditate, but didn’t feel that being sequestered was the right way to achieve her goals. “Not in this lifetime anyway,” she adds. “I felt I needed to be out there in the trenches, in the racket with people, having relationships – stuff that is more challenging to me.

“The fact that we are human means we will screw up and face personal challenges which will occasionally affect the quality of our work, but that’s just how it is. I think it’s great when corporations become more philanthropic. People have to realise that it’s so important to be connected in all aspects of our lives – we all want to be part of something bigger. My cause is to help people understand that they have a renegade core, that they can achieve amazing things they were not aware of. If a high school drop-out like me can make a zillion mistakes and still be able to retire after ten years of working then everybody else can do so much more. I want to help people grab onto that renegade core, take risks and realise that if they fail for some reason they can handle rejection and failure – that’s just part of the process of getting closer and closer to success.” After breaking her vows, she moved onto becoming the first female contract engineer Microsoft hired without a college diploma. Her road to success began here, and coincided with the time she met Bill Gates from whom she learnt to chase her dreams. “The number one thing I learnt from Bill was supreme self-confidence. He was always so confident that he was going to achieve all of his crazy goals.” She tells me he retaliated from being kicked out of the computer club by stating, “I’m going to be great at software – I’ll show them.” “He said to me, ‘We’re going to have global domination, Windows is going to be on every desk top,’ and he did, he just went for it!” So that’s the secret to his success, because he was kicked out of computer club? “I believe a lot of it comes from an ‘I’ll show them’ attitude, he wanted to show the computer club the same way that I wanted to show my father. After a while when you get some success behind you, you can then get onto a more altruistic motivation. Now my motivation is about making a difference to the world. But generally, our motivation comes from pain, by people pushing us down and us rebelling and refusing to be pushed down, then emerging triumphant. You have to figure out what motivates you and what drives you to take these crazy risks.” Indeed, when her relationship with Bill Gates ended she admits that she did take some crazy risks. She tried her hand at becoming a trainee American Geisha. “When Bill Gates dumped me, I couldn’t figure out why. I thought everything was going great between us, I was crushed. I thought maybe it was because I wasn’t a ‘chick’. I was flicking through a fashion magazine one day when I suddenly saw an opportunity to create American Geisha. It was a stupid, crazy move but I said to myself, ‘I’m going to learn how to be an uber female – I’ll be elegant, poised and untouchable, I will become this paragon of art and culture!” Quite an extreme measure, some might say, but then again Christine is hardly a shrinking violet. However she does confess that she rather naively didn’t realise that it would mean sleeping with patrons. “I got through the poise etiquette and the cheese ceremony – but once I learnt about the patrons I was like, ‘Yikes, I’m out of here!’”