'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)

Interview with George Zachary of Charles River Ventures

Charles River Ventures is a 37-year old venture capital firm headquartered in Waltham, MA. The firm has a west coast office in Silicon Valley, on the same street where all the big VC firms huddle: Sand Hill Road. And one of their portfolio companies, Netezza, just went public on Friday.

On June 28, I sat down with George Zachary, a partner who works in the firm's Silicon Valley office. Many of his investments, like GoTV and Areae, are consumer-oriented Internet plays -- the topic of my first "Innovation Economy" column this Sunday. Here's a video excerpt from our conversation -- followed by a list of five things Boston could do to help foster more consumer-oriented tech companies.



Five Things Boston Could Do to Encourage More Consumer-Oriented Tech Activity

1. Fly a banner over the Bay Colony Center in Waltham (home to most of New England's VC firms) that says, "Stop investing in the tried-and-true 50-year old alumni of DEC, Wang, and Lotus." VCs need to stop equating experience in the world of enterprise technology with bankability.

2. More people interested in consumer-oriented concepts ought to know about and attend gatherings like Web Innovators Group, OpenCoffee, Mobile Mondays, and tastybytes -- and start events of their own.

3. We need more blogs about consumer tech and Web 2.0, located all around New England.

4. We need more visibility from the few execs here with consumer experience -- they need to serve as poster children. Jeff Taylor, founder of Monster.com (and now of Eons), already does a great job of this. Bob Davis, back when he was CEO of Lycos and when Lycos was a standalone company, did well, too. And I never thought I'd sing this, but "Where have you gone, David Wetherell?"

(Avid Technology has a number of consumer products...but its recently-departed CEO, David Krall, lived on the west coast (even though the firm is headquartered in Tewksbury.) Privately-held Bose Corp. is a big consumer tech player, but its founder, Amar Bose, doesn't often show up anywhere other than Framingham -- and doesn't allow any of the company's younger execs to do much speaking or schmoozing at local tech events.)

5. We need to stop taking ourselves so seriously. Not all technology needs to solve a business problem or address a pain point.

James Currier, the founder of Tickle, told me a great story this week. His company was founded in Cambridge, and later moved to San Francisco. He raised $9 million in funding, and later sold the company, which focuses on online tests and quizzes, to Monster.com for $100 million. Here's what he said:

We started Emode [Tickle's original name] seriously. We had tests about depression and anxiety, which had been vetted by the American Psychological Association. But no one cared. The APA thought we were doing it right, and the people at Harvard respected it, but it wasn’t until we launched totally superficial quizzes like "what breed of dog are you?" and "who is your celebrity match?" that the site took off. It was totally flippant. But we had gotten to the point where we were off salary and about to go out of business. So we said, "What the hell, let’s try this. Maybe people will respond to fun." And they did.

Currier's new venture is called Ooga Labs -- and it is working on several start-up ideas simultaneously (the sort of thing people used to call an incubator). His first new site is GoodTree.

"Business in Boston is professional and trustworthy," Currier says. "People are deep technologists, and when it comes to building a new kind of networking switch, that's great. But all this digital media or consumer Internet stuff tends to be more creative and optimistic. You have to believe that people are going to want to do all this crazy stuff online."