Ideas - Written by Bob Walsh on Thursday, March 29, 2007 6:55 - 3 Comments
The key is Perseverance.
The MicroISV Show interview with Jessica Livingston, author of Founders at Work is now up and even if I hadn’t been one of the interviewers, I’d highly, highly recommend it. Here’s why: Jessica has gone out and person to person interviewed 32 people who were either micro-ISVs or VC funded start ups. These people opened up to her. They told her what, how and why they started their companies. They shared with Jessica their mistakes - and what they learned from those mistakes. There are two of the interviews - Steve Wozniak and Joel Spolsky up at the book’s site.
One incredibly important bit of metadata Jessica extracted from all these interviews (see list below), was the one trait all of the men and women whom she interviewed had: Perseverance. These people did not know how to quit. They overcame obstacle after obstacle to make their dreams come true.
Definitely give the podcast a listen and if you need a big boost of inspiration while you’re making your dream a reality, buy the book.
Interviews in Founders at Work include:
David Heinemeier Hansson
Partner, 37signals and creator of Ruby on Rails
Charles Geschke
Founder of Adobe
Ron Gruner
Founder of Alliant Computer and Shareholder.com
Steve Wozniak
Founder of Apple
Philip Greenspun
Founder of ArsDigita
Evan Williams
Founder of Blogger.com and Odeo
Craig Newmark
Founder of Craigslist
Joshua Schachter
Founder of Del.icio.us
Joe Kraus
Founder of Excite and JotSpot
Blake Ross
Creator of Firefox
Caterina Fake
Founder of Flickr
Joel Spolsky
Founder of Fog Creek Software
Paul Buchheit
Creator of Gmail
Ray Ozzie
Founder of Groove Networks and Iris Associates
Sabeer Bhatia
Founder of Hotmail
James Hong
Founder of HotorNot
Mitch Kapor
Founder of Lotus
Bob Davis
Founder of Lycos
Arthur van Hoff
Founder of Marimba
Mark Fletcher
Founder of ONElist and Bloglines
Ann Winblad
Founder of Open Systems and Hummer Winblad
Max Levchin
Founder of PayPal
Mike Lazaridis
Founder of Research in Motion
Mena Trott
Founder of Six Apart
Dan Bricklin
Founder of Software Arts and creator of VisiCalc
James Currier
Founder of Tickle
Mike Ramsay
Founder of TiVo
Steve Kaufer
Founder of TripAdvisor
Paul Graham
Founder of Viaweb and Y Combinator
Brewster Kahle
Founder of WAIS, Internet Archive and Alexa Internet
Steve Perlman
Founder of WebTV
Tim Brady
First employee at Yahoo!
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3 Comments
bobw
While that’s obviously true, as you read these interviews you can see that in case after case it was perseverance that made the difference: not technical ability, a likable personality, sufficient capitalization (actually, that worked against success), not “connections”, not hard work, not luck.
Just a refusal - a complete, absolute, from the core refusal - to give up.
stubbornness then? 
No, perseverence is only something that allows you to survive, not succeed. In fact stubbornness is the doom of someone chasing a dream that won’t work. I would venture that pragmatism is the key. These are people who followed something that worked, and did something with what they had, when they had it; they’re not starry eyed dreamers.
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Well, they’re in the book because they “persevered” long enough to succeed enough to get in the book. A bit safe; a bit circular (logically speaking); I don’t think that’s a very profound observation, not that I’d disagree.