Bill Gates’ next book is about how he became Bill Gates.
The billionaire co-founder of Microsoft has written many books on topics such as business, technology, climate change and global health. A new memoir titled “Source Code,” Gates announced in a blog post on Tuesday, will be the first to focus on his formative years — “from childhood until I decided to leave college and found Microsoft,” he wrote .
Although “in the public eye since my early 20s,” most people know little about his early years, Gates writes. The new book will explore “the relationships, lessons, and experiences that laid the foundation for everything in my life that followed,” including building Microsoft into one of the world’s largest companies and decision Donate “almost all” his estimate 128 billion USD net worth through his charitable foundation.
Gates, 68, calls this memoir his “origin story” and promises to delve into aspects of his early life that can shed more light on the businessman he became. wall. According to a Gates spokesperson, the book will be published in select countries on February 4, 2025. All proceeds from the book will go to the nonprofit organization United Way Worldwide.
“I share some of the more difficult periods of my early life, including feeling lost as a child, confronting my parents as a rebellious teenager, struggling with leaving sudden death of someone close to him and almost getting kicked out of university. “, Gates wrote. “And I mentioned the challenges of dropping out of school to bet on an industry that doesn’t really exist yet.”
Gates shared several stories about his past school experiences and how they shaped his successful career. For example, in a 2005 speech at Lakeside School – the private high school he attended in Seattle – Gates talked about how his school experiences helped him become a future tech giant.
“Lakeside is one of the best things that ever happened to me,” Gates said. “One reason I am so grateful to Lakeside is because I was able to watch Microsoft’s founding firsthand from my first days here.”
High school shaped Gates’ future
Before enrolling at Lakeside, Gates wasn’t sure if he liked the school — and he almost sabotaged his own admission.
“When I was in 6th grade, my parents told me to go to Lakeside, I wasn’t so sure about it,” Gates said. “In those days, Lakeside was an all-boys school, where you wore a coat and tie, called your teacher ‘sir,’ and went to chapel every morning. For a while, I even thinking about failing the entrance exam.”
Once there, Gates was introduced to computers early – several faculty members acquired terminals, around the same time Gates started 7th grade in the late 1960s – and met future Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
Business tycoon and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates photographed in November 1985 in Bellevue, Washington.
Deborah Feingold | beautiful images
Gates said the machines are new to everyone, both students and faculty. Computers cost thousands of dollars, they run slow and consume a lot of electricity. “That makes computers quite scary for some people here, especially as 13-year-olds who are eager to try their luck next,” he said.
“Schools could have shut down the terminal or they could have tightly controlled who could use it,” Gates said. “Instead, they opened it up. Instead of teaching us about computers in the conventional sense, Lakeside liberated us.”
Gates quickly grasped that. He soon taught other students how to use computers, digitize class schedules, and hacked the planning system placed in all-girls classes.
“They can hire an outside computer expert to implement the planning system,” Gates said. “The teachers could have insisted that they teach computer classes, simply because they were the teachers and we were the students. But they didn’t.”
He credits his experiences in school with giving him and Allen “the confidence to start a company based on a bold idea that no one else agreed with – that computer chips would become so powerful that computers and software would software will become a tool that can be widely used.” on every desk and in every home.”
As a result, Gates added, “without Lakeside there would be no Microsoft.”
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