During an emergency hospital visit, a neurologist diagnosed English with bipolar disorder. He distinguished himself as a top talent, but he soon started working 100-hour weeks, during which he’d oscillate wildly between incessant coding jags and prolonged bedroom isolation. After graduation, he landed a job with a former professor at a company called Interleaf, which made software that helped create huge, complex electronic documents like aircraft manuals.Įnglish’s work at Interleaf consumed him. “But he could always figure out how to tell the computer to do what he wanted, and it didn’t argue back or ignore him.”īut it wasn’t until he enrolled at the University of Massachusetts at Boston that English began to see programming as a potential career. “Upstairs, all the emotions of a big family were swirling around - arguments, many competing sorrows - and there was nothing he could do up there to change what worried and upset him,” Kidder writes. When his brothers and sisters lost interest in the new gadget’s games, English took possession full time and began teaching himself to code.Īccording to Kidder, the machine provided a refuge for English. In 1976, as a seventh-grader at Boston Latin, the country’s oldest public school, English joined the computer club, where he promptly hacked the school’s attendance software, winning the affection of a truant classmate nicknamed “Psycho.”įive years later, English’s mom came home with a Commodore VIC-20. Then again, how English got to be that guy, “A Truck Full of Money” makes clear, probably isn’t what you’d expect, either.Įnglish grew up in Boston’s West Roxbury neighborhood, the second-youngest of seven children born into a turbulent working-class family, where as a tall, skinny tween he got into more than his fair share of fights, often skipped his homework and once used the money he earned on a paper route to start a small-time pot-dealing business, which he ran for about a year at an “astonishing profit.”īut while English could clearly handle himself on the streets, he could also be pretty good in the classroom, at least when he felt like it, and that was especially the case when that classroom had a computer in it.

Hearing such a thing from a guy who, before he turned 40, had launched and run a bunch of tech ventures, one of which he sold for $33 million, is perhaps the last thing you’d expect. “You have to pay salaries, so, unfortunately, you have to make a profit.” “For me businesses exist as an excuse to get a team together, and product is what the team does,” English says.

A truck full of money by tracy kidder