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Bill Gates about his days at Microsoft
last update: 2025-02-26
Bill Gates starts this story from his roots up until the point he found Microsoft and it became a really serious thing. I like that the book closes right after the founding of Microsoft. Because much has been written about that part of the story
Most of the content on the book was Bill’s (or in the book Trey) childhood endeavours and experiences.
For me the interesting parts where (apologies for drawing parallels to Indian education system),
Bill lived his life 10 times more agency and unconstrained than almost anyone I know of. There is no financial, physical (Living close to where technology was booming), proximity or moral (weed, LSD etc) constraints.
And everything he did in his life, he did it out of pure passion. Be it hiking for 5 days or, working on his computer for weeks on end when he was 13.
This is important because, only without those constraints can a person truly find what they want out of life and what their passions are. without that we’re just living a mirror of someone else’s dream.
It is incredible how the school systems are designed to support exceptional individuals. For example he takes a couple of months off from his final year at school to work on a project that he gets paid for. This is almost impossible in the school system that I grew up in.
He also gets to spend all his energy into a singular thing for extended periods of time while blocking the whole world out. Which is really important in the formative years.
Building Software, creating microsoft, dropping out of harvard, with the power of hindsight Bill makes it sound like the obvious next steps. But I’m sure were incredibly large leaps of faith.
The personal computing world looked at from the eye of bill gates was the most interesting part to me. It shows how to look for advantage in an ever growing ecosystem and leverage it/capture it.