Vinu Suresh's Reviews > Source Code: My Beginnings

Bill Gates: Source Code is the first of the 3 projected memories chronicling Bill Gates's life. It tells the tale of his early upbringing to when he and Paul Allen created Microsoft in 1975.

This is the first time I'm reading a memoir in phases. Usually, all the upbringing and early childhood stories get condensed to the first 50 pages of the book. Here it's very well-detailed and you can see why Gates went on to become who he is. If you are someone who's been following Gates for a while there's nothing of interest in this book, but for those who are curious to read his early stories all in one place, this book is worth it.

I found the memoir to be a fairly honest assessment of his life. He acknowledges that a million things had to go right for him to reach the place where he is. He was born into a wealthy affluent white American family in the 1950s, he had a knack for mathematics and could shut things off and hyperfocus when he needed to and most importantly he was at the right place at the right time. The introduction of the personal computer and his idea of looking at software when the entire world was looking at hardware is described here.

And for all the people who keep saying Bill Gates dropped out of College, so can I, this book would serve as a reality check. He dropped out of Harvard, not some tier 3 college and he was doing well at college, he left cause he couldn't manage a fully-fledged start-up and his studies, not cause he was weak at them. You can draw tangents from what you were doing at a particular age and what Gates was doing and see why all these successful people are wired differently.