Please join us at Sanders Theatre for a conversation between technologist, business leader, and philanthropist Bill Gates & Harvard professor and best-selling author Arthur C. Brooks about Gates’s memoir, Source Code.

About Source Code
The origin story of one of the most influential and transformative business leaders and philanthropists of the modern age

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 the heyday of Microsoft or the creation of the Gates Foundation or the future of technology. It’s the human, personal story of how 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.

About Bill Gates
Bill Gates is a technologist, business leader, and philanthropist. In 1975, he co-founded Microsoft with his childhood friend Paul Allen, and today he is chair of the Gates Foundation. Bill is the founder of Breakthrough Energy, an effort to commercialize clean energy and other climate-related technologies, and TerraPower, a company investing in developing groundbreaking nuclear technologies. He has three children.

Gates enrolled at Harvard College in 1973 where he lived in Wigglesworth as a first-year student. Before leaving Harvard after his junior year to pursue his career, he was a member of Currier House where he met fellow student and future Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. An applied Mathematics concentrator, Gates took mathematics (including Math 55A) and graduate-level computer science courses during his time at Harvard.


About Arthur C. Brooks
Arthur Brooks is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership and happiness. He is also a columnist at The Atlantic, where he writes the popular weekly “How to Build a Life” column.

Brooks is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 13 books, including Build the Life You Want in 2023, co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, and From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life.

Brooks is one of the world’s leading experts on the science of human happiness, appearing in the media and traveling the world to teach people in private companies, universities, public agencies, and faith communities how they can live happier lives and bring greater well-being to others.

Logistics

• Tickets will be available online beginning Monday, January 27th at 7PM
• Harvard College Students: Free (1 ticket per ID). Ticket valid until 1:45PM.  
• Tickets are non-transferable. 
• Each attendee will be gifted a free copy of Source Code.