Bill Gates tends to look towards the future.
In the early 1970s, he envisioned a future of mass personal computing. Today, his work revolves around other initiatives, such as the future of global health. Even his books tend to be about how to navigate an imagined future — one published in 1995 was titled The Road Ahead. But now, in a new memoir, he's looking back in time.
"It was only as I was turning 70 this year, and Microsoft turning 50, that I decided, OK maybe it is time to look back a bit," he told NPR's All Things Considered.
Gates channeled that reflective mood into Source Code: My Beginnings, the first installment of a two-part autobiography. It describes, in detail, the adolescence and early adult life of one of America's most consequential entrepreneurs.
Gates recently sat down with All Things Considered host Scott Detrow at NPR headquarters to talk about a variety of topics: sneaking out to the computer lab in the middle of the night as a teenager; how he and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen outwitted the established computing industry as young upstarts; and his thoughts on the current state of global health initiatives as the Trump administration takes office.
See the full video of their conversation above, and highlights from the radio broadcast below.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
Scott Detrow: What do you think about the person you were as a pre-teen, as a teenager? Because there's a lot of time in this book where you write about it, and at times you write with regret or embarrassment, or reflectiveness, but it's also clear that a lot of those traits helped you become who you were down the line as an adult.
Bill Gates: I mean, I blushed, thinking of how I could be abrasive or, you know, things like where I told my professor when he was wrong and turned out I was completely wrong. You know, I wanted to get that off my chest because I've always felt bad about it. And he was very gracious when I spoke to him recently.
Detrow: The thing that I was thinking about reading this is I'm wondering what you think about the idea, like how much of this path to success is replicable in 2025? Because on one hand, you have this industry being created around you in the moment. You're in the right place at the right time. The industry is exponentially expanding. But on the other hand, there's like this level of freedom that a teenager can have to go sneak out your window in code at two in the morning and then to like to ride the bus to another city. And code sensitive infrastructure, like. Like It feels like a Ferris Bueller movie type thing where just like clearly no teen would be able to do that today. Like, is any of this replicable these days?
Gates: There's no doubt that kids are more subject to restrictions. Even the hiking that I did where my parents didn't know where we were. It's not how I raise children. We were a lot tighter. And there is some pushback on that because you don't mature in quite the same way. You don't get to make the same mistakes. You know, I still think there will be unbelievable entrepreneurs, you know, companies like Nvidia. But I was lucky that Paul Allen I saw personal computing and the role of software and almost nobody else did. Even the big companies, particularly IBM, didn't see what we saw. So you always when you have lots of companies, you have to find a flaw in their thinking. Yeah. And so it'd be tougher today.
Detrow: Do you remember the moment when you and the other kids at the computer lab realized like, okay, in the next 20 years, everyone's going to have a computer? Like, do you remember when that clicked into place? Like this is going to happen?
Gates: Yeah, when I helped Paul get a job in Boston and he moved out my sophomore year, we were already writing that there would be a computer on every desk and in every home. And that became sort of the founding slogan of Microsoft. Actually, we added the words running Microsoft software, which was kind of the self-centered piece. And I was going to professors and saying, look, computing is going to become free because of this exponential improvement. And, you know, let's get involved in thinking that through. And people just didn't see it. That kind of surprised us, but it's what gave us the edge. You know, Paul wanted to do personal computers. I said, no, no, let's just do the software piece. And then when the first kid computer comes out, that's when I know to be in on the ground floor of the revolution. We'd been waiting for that. I had to drop out.
Detrow: Why do you think it was a bunch of kids who saw that so clearly? And professors and big companies and all of the existing infrastructure didn't quite see it the same way that you did.
Gates: Well, once you get your mindset that computers are these rare, expensive things and you've been spending your time thinking about how you make them a little more efficient and a little less expensive when somebody who's young and hasn't been around can say, wait a minute, exponential improvement. You know, that's the chip industry often in California, Intel and the computer industry, both IBM and the mini-computer companies that are mostly up in the Boston area, they're not really tracking that. I mean, Paul and I, the minute the 8080 chip was announced in 1973, Paul says to me, Is this one good enough? And I said, Paul, this thing is better than the most popular mini-computer, which was a $20,000 machine. And so we were like, Wow, how come everybody's not their mind isn't blown? You know, when we show up and actually call the company with that computer, you know, they were amazed.
The Gates Foundation is a financial supporter of NPR.
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