A friend of mine who runs the freelancers outsourcing site People Per Hour, and who therefore knows a thing or two about startup internet companies, recently lent me a copy of the excellent Founders At Work, by Jessica Livingston (from the publishers of my own books, Apress).

Rather than your typical turgid management tome, this is a collection of interviews conducted by Jessica with the founders or those vital to the early success of various technology companies. As Jessica is involved in the high-tech internet oriented incubator Y Combinator naturally a lot of these stories are about dot com era internet startups, but there are a few stories from the microcomputer boom of the eighties and the minicomputer age before it.

Now, these really are interviews - although they have clearly been edited down to something manageable there's no additional analysis included. For me, however, this was a strength rather than a weakness. Jessica asked each founder a similar set of questions, so you really start to see the points on which there is consensus.

This is all particularly fascinating for me, as I'm a founder starting my own company right now, but I think I would have enjoyed it just as much when I was purely a contractor. The explanations of what makes a great company work are particularly illuminating. The common factor in the companies that are still around mostly seems to be respect for the customer and the ability to listen to them.

Many of the people interviewed here are the "usual suspects" who have their own blogs (Spolsky, Graham) or who are just plain famous in their own right (Wozniak), but with 32 interviews there is plenty of room for the voices of less well known figures.

High points of this book, for me, were the entertaining interview with James Hong (HotOrNot.com), and with the always reliable Joel Spolsky (Fog Bugz).

There were very few low points in the book, but I was a lot less interested by the stories of the "startups" such as Firefox and GMail that were really products created within some existing environment. The stories of startups that were well funded from the outset were less exciting to read about than those created on a shoestring, but there is still plenty of pithy substance here, as with the story of how Adobe Systems turned down requests from DEC and Apple to license PostScript before Adobe realised that their customers were telling them exactly what business should be in!

Anyway, I can wholeheartedly recommend this book as an excellent commuter read (the interviews being nicely self-contained), as a fascinating insight into the ups and downs of bootstrapping startups, and as a set of lessons on how to succeed under stress.