Suggest founders for new edition of 'Founders at work' | Hacker News Reader

Suggest founders for new edition of 'Founders at work'

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++++ Brad Fitzpatrick / LiveJournal

++++ Joe Kraus / JotSpot (not Excite)

+++ Chad Hurley or Steve Chen / YouTube

+++ Reid Hoffman / LinkedIn

+++ Jason Calacanis / Weblogsinc

++ Markus Frind / PlentyOfFish

++ Kevin Rose / Digg

++ Mark Zuckerberg / Facebook

+ Michael Arrington / TechCrunch

Kraus is in the current edition. I'd have to agree with Fitzpatrick. I know your thoughts on his brilliance. Didn't think of Hurley/Chen. For Calacanis I'd also add Dave Winer. Rose, Zuckerberg are still playing out. What did Arrington do thats so interesting with TechCrunch?

I agree with Kraus even though he's in the current edition. More!

Please include some people from the infrastructure world. Founders of companies like Cisco, Juniper, Qualcomm, etc. Even smaller chip companies. How did these people get started?

Here's an example of someone interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Bechtolsheim

And another: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade_Communications

Reading Founders at Work and going through the stories I was struck by who was not in the list. Another edition is in the planning by JL. What founders would you suggest for the second edition? Mine would be ...

- Donna Dubinsky, Jeff Hawkins (Ed Colligan) ~ Palm Computing

- CmdrTaco ~ Slashdot

- Larry Ellison ~ Oracle

- Hasso Platner ~ SAP

- David Kelly ~ IDEO

- John Carmack ~ Id Software

- Peter Molyneux ~ Bullfrog, Lionshead

Good suggestions. Haven't we all had enough of Molyneux, though? Plus, who out there is starting a game company? Nobody. Maybe Nolan Bushnell would be interesting, though.

I have a few suggestions of my own:

- Jeremy Wertheimer (ITA)

- Justin Frankel (Nullsoft)

- Lars Rasmussen (Where2)

- Jawed Karim (YouTube)

- Wil Shipley (Delicious Monster)

Longshots: Bill Joy, Larry or Sergey, Marc Andreessen, Pierre Omidyar

"Plus, who out there is starting a game company?"

The target audience for "Founders at work" is not just news.YC ;)

Sure, but like I said on my blog, if even Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin started Flektor instead of a game company, is there a whole lot of opportunity out there for anyone else?

http://www.zachbaker.com/articles/2007/05/19/congrats-to-flektor

That was also around the time last year at E3 where Warren Spector gave his advice to those who wanted to start the next big studio:

"You have a zero percent chance of success. The barrier to entry in terms of cost, quality required, access to a market... forget it."

'... Haven't we all had enough of Molyneux ...'

I think Carmack, Broussard, Molyneux represent the leading edge of software in the PC era (and beyond for Carmack). Molyneux is a good study. Created 2 startups in a difficult industry, shipped product.

Nolan Bushnell is definitely a good one. He's still at it with 'uWink'. There's a pattern here. These guys are serial entrepreneurs of technology.

As said elsewhere, you can read all about Carmack in Masters of Doom. Besides, I think he'd have technical rather than entrepreneurial advice to give. Still, if he made the cut I'd read his interview voraciously anyway.

I'm not looking forward to Molyneux, though.

Greg Stein - compare.net (sold to MS, originally founded with Pierre O. -- he left to found eBay); Greg worked on SVN and ended up at Google. Fascinating guy. Bill Gross BradFitz Justin Frankel Mark fraunfelder -- boingboing John Hanke - keyhole

Heidi Messer, LinkShare (sold to Rakuten for $425 Million in 2005)

It would be nice to see some women up there, the company took ten years to build, started in 1996 (the really early days and in NYC) was funded by ICG (remember the public internet fund that was worth more then GE in 2 years then almost bankrupt) they filed to go public, then the market went bust, then it was sold for a ton of money. She started the business with her brother.....sounds like an interesting read to me.

This has been around before, there were some listed here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=16901

Personally, I find the "big, but not huge" ones the most inspirational for some reason. Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the like have been covered a lot in various ways, and have also had time to let their legends grow in their own minds.

'... This has been around before ...'

I missed this and would have searched for it if I could have :( The ones I want are the side players as well There's lots of interesting going on in the pre PC, PC era, Web 1 & Web 2 era that have yet to be told.

- PC ~ Phil Kahn, borland

- Web 1 ~ realmedia

- Web 2 ~ moo, last.fm, zoomer, photobucket

Sean Adams - founder of Slim Devices. He seems like a great example of bootstrapping and initiative. Web startups are one thing, but starting a company that builds neat consumer electronics hardware, builds a great community, and then gets acquired by Logitech - that would be an excellent case study.

I'm mostly interested in hearing from hardware and finance guys. However, the first obvious interview would be:

- Larry & Sergey

- Astro Teller @ Body Media

- Matt Flannery @ Kiva

- Ross Freeman, Bernie Vonderschmitt, and Jim Barnett @ Xilinx

I'm clearly out of the loop. I've never heard of any of those except Larry and Sergey. They definitely aren't the "first obvious" choices for me. ;-)

Richard Barton of Zillow Jack Dangermond of ESRI

Also would like to see a gaming founder - Carmack is a fine candidate & -Jason Rubin & Andy Gavin formerly of Naughty Dog & currently with/founded Flektor

Yep, Carmack would be great; on the other hand, you can learn pretty much everything you need to know about how he started id Software with his friends by reading the great book "Masters of Doom" (I strongly recommend it).

George Broussard and the Duke Nukem team would be great, too (the brilliant guy who wrote the then-ubercool 3D game engine was still a kid at the time!)

By the way: web startups are great but they aren't the only ones. "Founders at work" is a great, great resource but it would have been even greater if it focused a little less on web stuff.

A very brilliant guy is Matt Dillon. Not the actor... well, he certainly is brilliant too ;) The software developer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Dillon_(computer_scientist)

He started a few startups but he is mostly known as a BSD kernel developer wizard. He started the very innovative DragonflyBSD project (a fork of FreeBSD with impressive goals).

Chuck Moore (inventor of Forth and computer visionary) started/was part of a few startups, too. Lately, he has been with IntellaSys creating an impressive, radically-different microprocessor ("SEAforth").

The story of Bill Joy (BSD, TCP/IP hacker and co-founder of Sun Microsystems) would be cool, too.

The Lisp Machine guys would be great as well (though there already is some info available of the net).

And why not founders in fields not related at all with computers? The founders of Bose, Hobie Cat, etc.

EDIT: yes, there is a lot of superlatives :)

'... George Broussard ...'

and the making of Duke Nukem Forever ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever

The Reddits, of course.

There will obviously be companies that appeal to certain people and companies that don't. Why not have different themed editions of the book....one that is hardware focused, one infrastructure, one software platforms (OSes, languages, frameworks), etc.

As well, add some from notable companies that grew up large enough to be recognizable but failed. Perhaps we could learn something from the seeds of their destruction...

Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank would be great. He started a microfinance bank and recently won a Nobel Peace prize for his work! That's not something many startups can claim. Possibly Iqbal Quadir of Grameen Phone too.

Also some European startups such as skype, last.fm, moo etc

You really think an interview with Yunus would be helpful? He's just a loan shark with good PR.

please include Markus Frind from PlentyOfFish. His story is both fascinating, inspiring and so not the norm. Also.. it may be better if you dont include YC companies, since most of their stories are already so well publicized.

Jellyfish.com - Brian Wiegand and Mark McGuire FeedDemon - Nick Bradbury

'... Nick Bradbury ...'

I'd read about Nick Bradbury. Been doing desktop based web stuff since '97. He's also the startup anti-pattern as a one man business (to my knowledge) & multi skilled.

I suggest my partner and me. Just give us a little while...

maybe the topics should be categorize into a few subtopics like web, gaming, OS, gadgets (the creators of PS, Nintendo, Xbox) and so forth...

JJ Allaire

Ben Nolan ~ Groupswiki.com

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