#290 Bill Gates

What I learned from rereading Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson. ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders by investing in a subscription to Founders Notes ---- Follow one of my favorite podcasts Invest Like The Best and listen to episode 292 The Business of Gaming with Mitch Lasky and 293 David Senra Passion and Pain ! ---- Gates read the encyclopedia from beginning to end when he was only seven or eight years old. Gates had an obsessive personality and a compulsive need to be the best. Everything Bill did, he did to the max. What he did always went well, well beyond everyone else. You want to maneuver yourself into doing something in which you have an intense interest. —  Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. Gates devoured everything he could get his hands on concerning computers and how to communicate with them, often teaching himself as he went. A young man with no money and tons of enthusiasm. — The Dream of Solomeo: My Life and the Idea of Humanistic Capitalism by Brunello Cucinelli. (Founders #289) He consumed biographies to understand how the great figures of history thought. The idea that some people were super successful was interesting. What did they know? What did they do? What drove those kinds of successes? Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft by Paul Allen. (Founders #44) “I’m going to make my first million by the time I'm 25.” It was not said as a boast, or even a prediction. He talked about the future as if his success was predestined. Gates and Allen were convinced the computer industry was about to reach critical mass, and when it exploded it would usher in a technological revolution of astounding magnitude. They were on the threshold of one of those moments when history held its breath... and jumped, as it had done with the development of the car and the airplane. They could either lead the revolution or be swept along b