If you have the entrepreneurial bug and dream of one day having your own high-tech startup business, I would highly recommend that you pick up a copy of the book Founders at Work.  In this well-written account of what it is really like to run a startup company, author Jessica Livingston interviews several founders of relatively well-known high-tech startup companies and lays it all out in front of you.  From the financial stress of having to make payroll, to the thrill of seeing your company take off, to the issues of dealing with venture capitalists, it is all there for your enjoyment and learning.

There are so many valuable lessons in this book that we can’t really do it justice by summarizing it in a short article like this.  However, we will attempt to capture some key advice and quotes from the founders of these startups to give you a sense of what this book has in store for you.

Joe Kraus, Cofounder of Excite

Joe cofounded Excite with five classmates from Stanford University in 1993.  They developed web search technology that made Excite into one of the four most popular web sites in the late 1990s.  In 1996 Excite went public and in 1999 it merged with the high-speed internet service company @Home, becoming Excite@Home.                     

Kraus on Success:

“Some famous person said, ‘Success is 50 percent luck and 50% preparedness for that luck’.  I think that’s a lot of it.  It’s being ready to take advantage of opportunity when they arise”

Kraus on persistence:

“I see way too many people give up in the startup world.  They just give up too easily… I love this stuff; the persistence part is the part that I like.”

Kraus on the startup team:

“…the last lesson is that people make all the difference in the world…Venture capitalists would tell you that they’d rather fund a great team than a great idea.  The reason is that if they have a bad idea, great teams can figure out a better one.  Mediocre people even with a great idea can screw it up in its execution.”

Kraus on important lessons learned:

“One is hiring slowly and more carefully.  Another is cheap, cheap, cheap.”

Ray Ozzie – Founder of Iris Associates, Groove Networks

Ray Ozzie led the development of Lotus Symphony and then developed Lotus Notes.  Lotus Notes was the first widely used collaboration software which was first release in 1989 and was later acquired by Lotus.  Ozzie later founded Groove Networks which was acquired by Microsoft.  In June 2006 he took over as Chief Software Architect from Bill Gates.

Ozzie on getting too attached to the product you build:

“You have to be comfortable with the fact that you are separate from the thing that you are building, and that the team and the people financing you will have joint custody over the asset that you create.”

Arthur van Hoff – Cofounder of Marimba

Arthur van Hoff left Sun Microsystems in 1996 to found Marimba, a software distribution company.  The company grew from 4 people to more than 300 employees by the time of the IPO in 1999.

van Hoff on venture captalists:

“VCs are an interesting bunch: you can’t live with them, you can’t live without them.  They are instrumental in your success because they give you money and a really strong endorsement.  They have this mafia-like network of connections and they help you with the deals and find the right executives.  They are really working your case.”

van Hoff on ideas:

“A lot of people get stuck on the idea.  They all want to invent something and go execute on it.  I think that’s a fallacy.  You have to have an unfair advantage in that you have to be good at something , or you have to have a direction that you’re interested in or a market that you see an opportunity in – but you shouldn’t get stuck too much on the details, because you can’t foresee your future anyway."

James Hong – Cofounder of Hot or Not

James Hong launched a web site called Hot or Not with his friend just for fun, allowing users to submit photos of themselves and to be ranked by other users on a scaled of 1 to 10.  The site became a huge success.

Hong on roadblocks to entrepreneurs:

“The biggest roadblock to the entrepreneur are liabilities in your life.  It’s not whether or not you can be a good entrepreneur, it’s whether you have to make a mortgage payment or support other people.”

Hong on gaining experience:

“Experience will come when you face certain problems and live through them.  And the best way to do that is to put yourself squarely in the path of those problems.”

Hong on what drives entrepreneurs:

“I think entrepreneurs want to make money.  It’s not that they do it for the money, but they want to make money.  Because money is the measuring stick; it’s how they know if they won or not."

Hong on planning:

“And nothing ever goes according to plan.  You can’t dwell on the fact that your plan didn’t work.”

And last by not least, Hong on easy entrepreneurship:

“there is no such thing as easy entrepreneurship.  It’s going to be painful, it’s going to be emotionally unstable, you are going to feel insecure.”

I hope these few quotes gave you a taste for the wealth of lessons that can be learned from Founders at Work.  If you are serious about being an entrepreneur, this is the book to learn from, straight from the people that have done it.