5 posts tagged “books”

Now I can properly link to it as a "book" asset instead of a weak-ass "photos" asset:

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days

Jessica Livingston

One literary micro-genre that I enjoy is the startup book–tales of technology startups, whether fictional (Douglas Couplands's Microserfs) or non (Jerry Kaplan's Startup!) Recently I read Dreaming In Code, which I recommend highly. Now comes another one, called "Founders At Work" which I learned about from Joel Spolsky's blog Joel On Software.

Here's a description of the book, copy and pasted from its website.

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.

I was pleased to discover after reading the full list of interviewees that Mena Trott is one of them.

Bcm

Douglas Coupland "Vox" which I just finished .And two Robert Heinlein classics, "Glory Rod" and "Double Star."

The author of Blink 182 and The Tipping Point has a good blog which, though not updated that frequently, is always interesting when it is. And, 6Aers will be happy to know, he uses Typepad. Today he posts on the topic of focus groups and the "taxonomy of reason-giving." He's actually quoting one of his readers, so now I'm quoting him quoting someone else, on why what poeple say in focus groups can mislead:
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...it seems that because of the artificiality of the situation, the perils of introspection, etc, most market research actually encourages people to answer in conventions, and doesn't encourage the telling of stories. Many of these stories are probably complex and deeply buried such that they are hard to consciously access anyway.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Malcolm Gladwell

Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Malcolm Gladwell