Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston is an interesting looking book to be published in a few months. The book consists of interviews with founders of technology companies exploring the initial efforts to create a new company.
Interviews include: David Heinemeier Hansson [the broken link was removed] (who many of our readers may not have heard of but who has recently done a great web development framework [Ruby on Rails] and development philosophy very compatible with lean thinking), Evan Williams (founder of blogger), Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist), Joel Spolsky (who we have referenced in various posts), Ray Ozzie, Paul Graham and many more. The interview of Steve Wozniak [the broken link was removed] is available online [make that was]:
I went to management, and I had three levels of bosses above me in a room and a couple of other engineers, and I presented the ideas and told them what we could do at what price and how it would work. They were intrigued by it, but they couldn’t justify it as a Hewlett-Packard product for some good reasons. Hewlett-Packard couldn’t do a simple project, which was really what was interesting.
Very reminiscent of the ideas Clayton Christensen explores in Innovators Dilemma.
I think Taiichi Ohno would be very happy with such thoughts.
