If you are into startups, marketing, and technology, this is the book to read, Founders at Work, by Jessica Livingston

The interviews in the book covered some important aspects of startups that any business can learn from. The founders of 32 successful startups talked about how the project got started, how they got funding or bootstrapped their company into a successful exit. They also shared in details about the obstacles they faced as a first time entrepreneur, the scaling problems they experienced and how they dealt with it. There were also some really interesting conversations about the marketing strategies that were used to find users and customers with a limited budget. In the interview with Sabeer Bhatia, he talked about viral marketing and how a simple message in the footer of every Hotmail’s message helped grew the users based to 300 millions in less than two years.

The success of these Internet startup were not overnight as the media made it sound like. The founders had problems with VC, partners, technology… It took more than just an idea and product to make it big. It was the founders’ passion, determination, and persistence that led them to success. Awesome book, thanks Jessica.

Interviews:

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!

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