James Wallace and Jim Erickson's 1992 investigative biography of Bill Gates and Microsoft's first fifteen years, published by John Wiley & Sons. Written without Gates's cooperation, it is the closest thing to a standard account of Microsoft's founding and its rise through the DOS monopoly — from the Lakeside teletype through Traf-O-Data, the Altair BASIC, the IBM deal, and the operating-system victory that made Gates the richest man in America. It is the source the Founders podcast has used in three episodes (#140, #290, #401).
The Gates foundation file calls it "the investigative biography that traces Gates from the Lakeside teletype to the IBM deal and the operating-system monopoly. Written without his cooperation, it is the source Founders read on the episode and the closest thing to a standard account of Microsoft's first fifteen years."
For a founder, Hard Drive is the narrative that covers the most consequential decisions in Gates's career from the outside — the IBM deal where Gates kept the right to license MS-DOS to competitors, the bet on graphical computing when the market was still text-only, the internal culture of extreme combativeness that both produced Windows and attracted the Department of Justice. The Founders podcast has covered it three separate times, which is the strongest signal in this library that a book is worth a founder's attention. David Senra returns to it because the decisions in the IBM-to-Windows arc are the closest thing the software industry has to a creation myth grounded in real trade-offs rather than hagiography.