Gates was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28, 1955. He is the son of William H. Gates Sr.(born 1925) and Mary Maxwell Gates (1929–1994). His ancestry includes English, German, Irish, and Scots-Irish.His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way. Gates' maternal grandfather was JW Maxwell, a national bank president. Gates has one elder sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby. He is the fourth of his name in his family, but is known as William Gates III or "Trey" because his father had the "II" suffix.Early on in his life, Gates' parents had a law career in mind for him.When Gates was young, his family regularly attended a church of the Congregational Christian Churches, a Protestant Reformed denomination.The family encouraged competition; one visitor reported that "it didn't matter whether it was hearts or pickleball or swimming to the dock ... there was always a reward for winning and there was always a penalty for losing".
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see bill gate for success below
Management style
From Microsoft's founding in 1975 until 2006, Gates had primary responsibility for the company's product strategy. He gained a reputation for being distant from others; as early as 1981 an industry executive complained in public that "Gates is notorious for not being reachable by phone and for not returning phone calls."Another executive recalled that after he showed Gates a game and defeated him 35 of 37 times, when they met again a month later Gates "won or tied every game. He had studied the game until he solved it. That is a competitor."
As an executive, Gates met regularly with Microsoft's senior managers and program managers. Firsthand accounts of these meetings describe him as verbally combative, berating managers for perceived holes in their business strategies or proposals that placed the company's long-term interests at risk.He interrupted presentations with such comments "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard!"and "Why don't you just give up your options and join the Peace Corps?"The target of his outburst then had to defend the proposal in detail until, hopefully, Gates was fully convinced.When subordinates appeared to be procrastinating, he was known to remark sarcastically, "I'll do it over the weekend."
Gates was an active software developer in Microsoft's early history, particularly on the company's programming language products, but his role most of its history was primarily as management and executive. Gates has not officially been on a development team since working on the TRS-80 Model 100,but wrote code as late as 1989 that shipped in the company's products.He remained interested in technical details; Jerry Pournelle wrote in 1985 that when watching Gates announcing Microsoft Excel, "Something else impressed me. Bill Gates likes the program, not because it's going to make him a lot of money (although I'm sure it will do that), but because it's a neat hack."On June 15, 2006, Gates announced that he would transition out of his day-to-day role over the next two years to dedicate more time to philanthropy. He divided his responsibilities between two successors, placing Ray Ozzie in charge of day-to-day management and Craig Mundie in charge of long-term product strategy.
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