Bill Gates's memoirs arrive in three volumes, and this first one — published in 2025 — stops exactly where others would begin: before Microsoft was Microsoft.
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The first installment of Bill Gates's memoirs covers his origins: childhood in Seattle, his demanding parents, the teenage discovery of programming alongside Paul Allen, and the decision to leave Harvard to found Microsoft. Gates writes with unexpected honesty about his difficult temperament, his obsession with code, and the circumstances that made the world's biggest software company possible.
Bill Gates's memoirs arrive in three volumes, and this first one — published in 2025 — stops exactly where others would begin: before Microsoft was Microsoft. The decision is right. Gates writes about the obsessive, socially awkward child he was, about parents who channelled a difficult intensity, about the early death of his best friend Kent Evans, and about the hours stolen on Computer Center Corporation machines when access to a computer was a statistical privilege. The book's implicit thesis is a reflection on luck and preparation: Gates acknowledges without false modesty that his talent met unrepeatable circumstances — born in 1955, in Seattle, in a well-off family, with teenage access to terminals almost nobody in the world had. The writing is more introspective than expected, including Gates's own speculation about his probable neurodivergence. For the business reader, the interest lies in watching the traits that would define Microsoft take shape: extreme competitiveness, work capacity, and the conviction that software, not hardware, was the prize.
For readers of tech biographies and anyone wanting to understand the origins of software as an industry; this is not a book about Microsoft's imperial phase.
Fact«Source Code: My Beginnings» (February 2025) is the first of three announced memoir volumes and covers Gates's life up to Microsoft's early years.
