'Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days'

Just finished reading Jessica Livingston's 'Founders at Work' over the weekend. It's a compilation of interviews with enterpreneurs -- many of them from the Boston area.

So few books are published that deal with building companies here...and Jessica gets into the nitty-gritty: relationships with co-founders, negotiations with VCs, competing with bigger players.

The Boston entrepreneurs interviewed in the book include:

- Dan Bricklin, Software Arts (VisiCalc spreadsheet)
- Mitchell Kapor, Lotus Development Corp.
- Ray Ozzie, Groove Networks (Ray is now chief software architect of Microsoft)
- Paul Graham, Viaweb (Graham went on to start Y Combinator, the early stage venture firm in Cambridge, where Livingston works)
- Philip Greenspun, ArsDigita (now a blogger and flight instructor)
- Stephen Kaufer, TripAdvisor
- Ron Gruner, Alliant Computer Systems and Shareholder.com
- James Currier, Tickle (Tickle was founded in Boston as Emode, and then moved out to San Francisco before being acquired by Monster.com)
- Bob Davis, Lycos (now a VC at Highland Capital Partners in Lexington)

Amazingly, there's a blurb on the back cover from Bill Kaiser of the venture firm Greylock Partners, which was involved in a very public battle with ArsDigita founder Philip Greenspun (it's recounted in Greenspun's chapter, in piquant detail)