Bill Gates's own account of his first twenty years: a competitive Seattle childhood shadowed by the death of his closest friend Kent Evans, the Teletype terminal at Lakeside School that put thousands of hours of programming practice into a teenager's hands, the Traf-O-Data venture with Paul Allen, Harvard, and the January 1975 Popular Electronics cover that triggered the Altair BASIC sprint and the founding of Microsoft. Published in 2025 as the first of three planned volumes, it stops in the late 1970s — before Windows, the IPO, and the philanthropy.
This is the primary source for the part of the Microsoft story that most biographies compress into a chapter: the pre-revenue years. Gates is unusually candid about how much of his edge was timing and access — Lakeside was one of the few schools in the country with a computer, and he treats that luck as structural rather than incidental. The founder value is the texture of the earliest stage: teenagers shipping a payroll product at Traf-O-Data, writing Altair BASIC on a Harvard mainframe without ever touching the machine, and leaving Harvard only when the window was visibly closing.
Read it against the biographies on this shelf — Hard Drive, Gates, Idea Man — and the difference is agency: the same events told from inside, with names, dates, and credit assigned precisely. The memoir's other register is personal — his grandmother's card games as strategy training, Kent Evans's death at seventeen — and it explains more about Gates's intensity than any of the outsider accounts.