William Gould is President of StataCorp. He was born in Burbank, California, on January 21, 1952. He received a B.A. in economics from UCLA in 1974 and a C.Phil. in economics from UCLA in 1977, after initially majoring in physics and then engineering. He studied economics in the Ph.D. program at UCLA and was simultaneously a Research Fellow at The Rand Corporation. He did not turn in his dissertation in labor economics before becoming a Senior Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Stanford, California, in 1977. In 1979, he become a Senior Economist at Unicon Research Corporation in Los Angeles, a company that he helped to found. He cofounded and served as Vice-President of Computing Resource Center in 1982, the company that went on to develop Stata. Bill became President of CRC in 1990 and, in 1993, CRC was renamed StataCorp. This conversation took place on December 7, 2004, in Bill’s office at StataCorp.