When founders speak . . .

I’m a sap for in-depth interviews.  I’m a Public Radio news junkie and I love shows such as Charlie Rose, The Actors Studio, and Fresh Air with Terry Gross, although I really don’t get to see/hear them very often. 

I particularly enjoy the admittedly very small sub-genre of interviews with business founders.  So I was pleased to discover, when I got their latest newsletter, that the Wyoming Technology Organization is collecting and publishing a series of podcasts of interviews with technology business leaders in Wyoming.  These folks are mostly founders or early employees of their companies, so they fit my criteria exactly.  You can find the podcasts at:  http://www.wyomingtechnology.org/blog/ .  (They are playable via my IE6 browser; I didn’t try any other versions.  I also didn’t see an obvious way to download them to iTunes etc, but maybe one of our more online-media-savvy members can post directions for doing that.  It would make them more portable.)

Truth in recommending disclaimer:   There are a lot of these interviews and I haven’t listened to many of them yet; I’ll be trying to fit them in over the next few weeks.  I do think they should be interesting.

If the topic interests you but listening online doesn’t fit in to your schedule, I can also recommend a great book that I have read all the way through:  Founders At Work by Jessical Livingston.  Each of the 32 chapters contains an interview with one high-tech-startup founder.  Many of them are dot-com era startups but she reaches back as far as Dan Bricklin, of Software Arts (Visicalc), Mitch Kapor, of Lotus Development, and Steve Wozniak of Apple. 

I read this book a page or two at a time, over a period of a couple of months.  (I try to keep a book on my desk for the times when I have three computers all working as hard as they can and I still have to wait before I can do some next step.  It’s a limitation on my part — if I get more than three real or virtual computers working at once, I tend to get a bit confused and begin to make mistakes.  ;-)  So I don’t have a great memory for each interview.  What I remember is the overall impresssion the book gives of how messy, chaotic, disturbing, and discouraging the startup experience can be.  How totally exhausting it is. How often the business ended up taking a complete right turn from the direction it started in.  And how most of the founders interviewed, even the ones whose enterprises eventually imploded into disaster, wouldn’t trade the experience for the world.

 (Also, for you true geeks at heart, please note that the Livingston book was almost certainly inspired by the much earlier and at least as excellent Programmers At Work by Susan Lammers.  The Programmers book is more about the technology created by startups than about the business travails but inevitably covers some of the same ground.  And at least two people are interviewed in both books.)

 ag