Transcript
Introduction
In this series of posts, I will walk through some of my accumulated knowledge and experience in building high-tech startups. My specific experience is from 3 companies I've co-founded, Netscape, Opsware and Ning. But more generally, I've been fortunate enough to be involved in and exposed to a broad range of other startups, maybe 40 or 50, and in enough detail to know what I'm talking about, as a board member, as an angel investor, as an adviser, as a friend of various founders and as a participant in various venture capital funds. Much of my perspective is based on Silicon Valley and the environment that we have here, the culture, the people, the venture capital base and so on. Some of it will travel well to other regions and countries, some probably will not. With all that out of the way, let's start at the beginning. Why not to do a startup?
Okay. So that is from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today. So this is going to be a little different. If you're new to Founders, the premise of this podcast is really simple. I read a biography of an entrepreneur every week and then pull out ideas that I found interesting usually from their early life, how they got started, how they think about business, things like that.