Source Code: My Beginnings
by Bill Gates
View on GoodreadsThe first volume of Bill Gates's planned three-volume autobiography — his Seattle childhood, parents, Lakeside School, the early friendship with Paul Allen, and the founding of Microsoft up through roughly 1980.
Core ideas
- The book is unusually candid about Gates's social-cognitive specifics — the rocking-while-thinking, the relational difficulty, the relationship with his mother that shaped his ambition — without overclaiming a contemporary diagnosis.
- The Lakeside School / Computer Center Corporation period is the book's most-cited material — the unusual hours of computing access that he and Allen got at exactly the formative moment, which Gates is candid about treating as the foundational luck of his career.
- The book ends before the Microsoft of public memory — pre-Windows, pre-antitrust, pre-Foundation — so the later controversial chapters await subsequent volumes.
Published2025
Pages336
ISBN9780593801581
ReadSep 2025
