He certainly didn’t fail out of Harvard. Gates was never short on academic aptitude. He famously got 1590 out of 1600 in his SATs. Further, in his second year, he developed an algorithm to one of a series of “unsolved problems” , that is still a competitive solution to this day.
Despite not being focused on a number of his courses, he still did fine. One story has it that he took an introduction to Greek literature class. He did none of the work throughout the year, stayed up all night before the exam, slept through part of the exam, and still passed with a good grade.
However, after working at Honeywell over the summer of 1974, he saw an opportunity to found a computer software company with his long time friend, Paul Allen. He talked over the decision with his parents and decided to leave Harvard. He rationalised the decision by saying that if Microsoft didn’t work out, he could always go back to school. He considered that he was “officially on a leave of absence.” and the rest is history.
