A reference biography by Michael B. Becraft, published by Greenwood in 2014 as part of its Greenwood Biographies series aimed at students and general readers. It covers Gates's full arc — Microsoft founding, the antitrust case, the Gates Foundation — in a compact format with a chronology, glossary, and annotated bibliography. It is a synthesised overview rather than an investigative narrative.
The Gates foundation file describes it as "a short reference biography from Greenwood covering the whole arc — Microsoft, the antitrust case, and the foundation — with a chronology and bibliography. Useful as a checkable single-volume overview rather than a narrative."
For a founder, the value is structural rather than narrative: the book compresses the entire Gates story into a format that makes the timeline and causal chain visible at a glance. The chronology alone — Lakeside to Traf-O-Data to Altair BASIC to the IBM deal to Windows to the antitrust case to the foundation — is worth studying as a sequence of inflection points. Founders who already know the Microsoft story from narrative accounts (Hard Drive, Gates) may find this useful as a reference spine to hang episodes on.