Source Code
My Beginnings
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Source Code
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Narrated by:
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Wil Wheaton
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Bill Gates
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Written by:
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Bill Gates
About this listen
#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
The business triumphs of Bill Gates are 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.
©2025 Bill Gates (P)2025 Random House AudioWhat the critics say
“We cling to tidy success narratives—appealing stories that trace an outsize triumph to a single critical decision, a vital personality trait, a striking incident from childhood. Such stories make extraordinary success seem comprehensible, perhaps (we imagine) even attainable. Yet reality tends to be more complicated. At a certain level of achievement, success is unfathomably contingent, requiring a hefty amount of luck on top of remarkable ability and durable conviction. In Source Code, Bill Gates’s chronicle of his early years, we are treated to 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
“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
“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. . . . [This volume] is more than just a geek’s inventory of early achievements. 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
What listeners say about Source Code
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Andriy Makukha
- 2025-02-18
Fascinating
Great autobiography! From his childhood to 1977, when Microsoft's BASIC was used by three most popular personal computers of the time.
It's interesting how much Bill Gates owes to his rich family and upbringing. And how much of it can be attributed to his hyperfocus, which could be itself caused by neurodiversity. Nevertheless, the story is thrilling.
I can't wait for volume 2.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- casual customer
- 2025-02-14
explaining an icon
I very much enjoyed the book ,the real Bill Gates, but not the narrator.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Lilly
- 2025-02-05
Narrator
I truly enjoyed the content of this book— it's a beautifully written memoir filled with exciting childhood stories and cherished memories. Thank you, Mr. Gates, for finally sharing this part of your life with us.
However, I found the narration to be a mismatch for the book. The pacing felt slower than necessary, and at least once per paragraph, the pitch would drop so low that I had to rewind multiple times just to catch what was being said—or even guess at the missing words. While the book itself is wonderful, the listening experience was hindered by these issues, making it difficult to fully immerse myself in the storytelling.
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