I recently read Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston. Jessica interviewed a whole bunch of really interesting people (Steve Wozniak, Ray Ozzie, Mitch Kapor and 29 other entrepreneurs) and has written up the interviews in this collection. It’s fascinating to read the stories of other people’s experiences as they make it big. The book has 53 reviews on amazon.com with an average rating of close to five stars.
I tried to give away an eChapter of Jessica’s book away on my conference web site, but for various reasons that fell through.
However, Jessica has published interviews with Steve Wozniak and Joel Spolsky online. You can go to the Founders at Work web site to read them.
Jessica is also one of the founders of Y-Combinator, which is early stage venture capitalism done the way it should be. It’s one of those things I wish I’d thought of.
Jessica has kindly agreed to speak at Business of Software 2008. Other speakers include Seth Godin, Joel Spolsky, Eric Sink and Jason Fried. Registration isn’t open yet, but subscribe to the RSS feed if you’d like to be kept informed.