Source Code: My Beginnings

by Bill Gates Narrated by Wil Wheaton, Bill Gates

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

You have heard a lot about Bill Gates, but what do you know about him as a person? In Source Code, he finally opens up, from being a misfit child to nearly getting kicked out of college. It's an interesting — and surprising — portrait of the beginnings of the larger-than-life personality that quite literally changed the world.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ¿ The origin story of one of the most influential and transformative business leaders and philanthropists of the modern age

“A surprisingly candid memoir of the Microsoft mogul's early years...Reading this book feels like watching someone take a well-known black-and-white sketch, fill in the details, and paint it in vivid color.” -GeekWire

Everyone is programmed a little differently, and Bill Gates' unique insight led to business triumphs that are now widely known: the twenty-year-old who dropped out of Harvard to start a software company that became an industry giant and changed the way the world works and lives; the billionaire many times over who turned his attention to philanthropic pursuits to address climate change, global health, and U.S. education.

Source Code is not about Microsoft or the Gates Foundation or the future of technology. It's the human, personal story of how Bill Gates became who he is today: his childhood, his early passions and pursuits. It's the story of his principled grandmother and ambitious parents, his first deep friendships and the sudden death of his best friend; of his struggles to fit in and his discovery of a world of coding and computers in the dawn of a new era; of embarking in his early teens on a path that took him from midnight escapades at a nearby computer center to his college dorm room, where he sparked a revolution that would change the world.

Bill Gates tells this, his own story, for the first time: wise, warm, revealing, it's a fascinating portrait of an American life.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

A remarkably introspective and personally revealing tour through some of the key moments and experiences that shaped Gates the boy and teenage programming whiz, years before he became a business titan.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“An unexpectedly revealing account of the swirl of factors leading to the birth of Microsoft and the ascent of personal computing.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“There is utility to be had … but there is also joy: the joy at marveling at genius coming into focus — confident, watchful, disciplined, exuberant, boyish and prickly — and the joy at watching a door left ajar kicked open wide. Yet the book is more than just that. Subtly, searchingly, always trusting the reader, Gates explores the mysteries of why he of all people became the Bill Gates: not only the first of the world-conquering tech titans of our era but also, in his second act, likely the best of them.”
—Bloomberg

“Illuminating…. Very much a bildungsroman…. A human story.”
—Wired

“Surprisingly candid. . . . This is not the behind-the-scenes story of today’s multi-trillion-dollar tech giant. It’s not a tell-all about the past few years of Gates’ life. But reading this book feels like watching someone take a well-known black-and-white sketch, fill in the details, and paint it in vivid color.”
—GeekWire

“The voice in this book is upbeat, wryly self-deprecating and unflaggingly congenial.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Gates’ new memoir explores how his childhood quirks, upbringing, friendships and experiences coalesced into shaping his internal operating system.”
—Associated Press

“Arrives at an unusual moment, as the tech billionaires have been unleashed. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg – their success has given them power that they are enthusiastically, even gleefully, using in divisive ways. . . . He is a counterpoint to the moguls in the news. . . . Writing an autobiography is another way Gates is different from his peers, few of whom seem so introspective.”
—The New York Times

“A highly readable account of his early life up to the creation of Microsoft, Source Code is unusually personal and laced with self-awareness. [Gates] doesn’t hold back from admitting his own shortcomings [and] delivers a fast-paced account of the rise from programming prodigy to budding tech mogul, replete with cliffhanger moments and revealing new details.”
—Financial Times

“Beguiling. . . . Gates provides a candid and charming look at his formative years.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“In contrast to the current crop of swaggering tech bros, the Microsoft founder comes across as wry and self-deprecating in this memoir of starting out. . . . There is a genuine gratitude for influential mentors, and a wry mood of self-deprecation throughout. . . . There is a sense of the writer, older and wiser, trying to redeem the past through understanding it better, a thing that no one has yet seen Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg attempt in public. That alone makes Bill Gates a more human tech titan than most of his rivals, past and present.”
—The Guardian

“Gates’ enlightening childhood memoir finds a fresh angle on his achievements as an IT pioneer. Source Code fills in key blanks of the tech guru’s pre-Microsoft life, with Gates detailing his formative years in his own words, covering emotional topics. . . . More tender than you might expect.”
—Apple Books Review

“Eminently readable … deeply researched and richly told.”
—New Scientist

FEBRUARY 2025 - AudioFile

While Wil Wheaton is the principal narrator of this audiobook, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates offers a workmanlike delivery of his preface and epilogue. There's something just a bit banal yet cheerful and enthusiastic about Wheaton's performance. His vocal impressions are especially off-putting when he recounts President John F. Kennedy's early 1960s speech on America's technology imperatives. Regarding the seemingly routine process of maturing, it's all here: the "kitchen cabinet" of nerds in Gates's childhood and adolescence, as well as details of those involved in the founding of Micro-Soft, as it was initially named. Listeners who want to hear more about how Gates ultimately became such a creative, generous, and philanthropic icon can look forward to the next two installments in his planned trilogy. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2025, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2025-01-31
The tech tycoon recounts his voyage from backwoods to boardrooms.

Born in 1955, Gates blended two traits early on: As a kid, he was the definitive nerd, and he was an avid fan of the outdoors, given to taking off to camp, hike, and climb for days at a time. “By the time I was in my early teens,” he writes in this fluent memoir, “my parents had accepted that I was different from many of my peers and had come to terms with the fact that I needed a certain amount of independence in making my way through the world.” His father, a prominent attorney, and mother, devoted to making sure that he had both a rounded education and at least some social graces, gave him that independence, and he ran with it—nearly getting expelled from prep school, for one thing, for hacking into a corporate computer system. Chastened, Gates and his co-conspirators—one his future partner Paul Allen—began crafting programs that would earn them entrée to the nascent tech world of Silicon Valley, with a detour at Harvard and a stint coding in the boondocks. In this narrative of his early years, ending when he was a budding mogul at just 23, Gates is sometimes self-congratulatory, proud of his ability to “hyperfocus” and to work out complex math problems without much tutelage; he also owns up to being a shark in business, a talent that for a time made him the world’s richest man and now one of its most prominent philanthropists. Yet Gates also generously acknowledges the contributions and work of other programmers, employees of what began as Micro-Soft, competitors such as Steve Jobs, and “the helping hand of beneficent adults.” As he writes in closing, “Piecing together memories helps me better understand myself, it turns out.” It will also help readers appreciate Gates’ hard-won accomplishments, and perhaps even inspire future entrepreneurs.

Well crafted and self-aware: a readable, enjoyable visit to the dawn of high tech.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940192048351
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	02/04/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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