Description

Founders at Work is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.

Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?

Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful one, to learn how it’s done.

But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businesses do—create value—more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.

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Interviews in Founders at Work include:

David Heinemeier Hansson
Partner, 37signals and creator of Ruby on Rails

Charles Geschke
Founder of Adobe

Ron Gruner
Founder of Alliant Computer and Shareholder.com

Steve Wozniak
Founder of Apple

Philip Greenspun
Founder of ArsDigita

Evan Williams
Founder of Blogger.com and Odeo

Craig Newmark
Founder of Craigslist

Joshua Schachter
Founder of Del.icio.us

Joe Kraus
Founder of Excite and JotSpot

Blake Ross
Creator of Firefox

Caterina Fake
Founder of Flickr

Joel Spolsky
Founder of Fog Creek Software

Paul Buchheit
Creator of Gmail

Ray Ozzie
Founder of Groove Networks and Iris Associates

Sabeer Bhatia
Founder of Hotmail

James Hong
Founder of HotorNot

Mitch Kapor
Founder of Lotus

Bob Davis
Founder of Lycos

Arthur van Hoff
Founder of Marimba

Mark Fletcher
Founder of ONElist and Bloglines

Ann Winblad
Founder of Open Systems and Hummer Winblad

Max Levchin
Founder of PayPal

Mike Lazaridis
Founder of Research in Motion

Mena Trott
Founder of Six Apart

Dan Bricklin
Founder of Software Arts and creator of VisiCalc

James Currier
Founder of Tickle

Mike Ramsay
Founder of TiVo

Steve Kaufer
Founder of TripAdvisor

Paul Graham
Founder of Viaweb and Y Combinator

Brewster Kahle
Founder of WAIS, Internet Archive and Alexa Internet

Steve Perlman
Founder of WebTV

Tim Brady
First employee at Yahoo!