I just finished reading a highly inspirational book. It’s just a bunch of interviews about startup’s early days, straight from the mouth of the founders. With a few minor exceptions where stories were a bit dry and did not sound completely honest the rest of the book is absolutely fantastic.

To me the most interesting was the recurring pattern on how the business came to be – in most cases the founders started something else (sometimes a completely different product) but the market steered them in the right direction. I was also delighted to find out how humble and realistic most of the founders were. Rarely would a founder claim how the whole success story was a result of his/hers great vision and the ability of the team to execute, yadda, yadda, you know the corporate speak. These people are realistic and realize that sometimes it’s not just skills but the timing, the availability of funds and, let’s admit it, pure dumb luck.

One story did stick out though, in a negative way – Bob Davis (who was a CEO of Lycos at the time) was constantly downplaying the role of the technology in the story about Lycos’ success. Even though he admitted on several places how it was technology that separated them from some of their main competitors, after being asked directly he would still repeatedly claim that they were not technology company at all. Then I realized that this was probably the only non-technical guy (he was a VP of sales before becoming their CEO) in all of the startups’ stories.

I really am sickened by the antagonism between developers and business people. Often you’ll hear how developers ridicule the “dumb suits” but the reverse holds too. Hey, a company is a sum of all of its parts. The technology company produces technology, but it needs to sell it to someone, so it needs salespeople (if it’s big enough to warrant that). At the same time, what would salespeople sell if there was nobody to produce the technology?

There’s no need to understate anybody’s role in the company. In fact, you’ll find out that the other founders who were mostly technical people had nothing but the kindest words for their CFOs and CEOs who were often brought in by the VCs in the capacity of “adult supervision” (a lot of the founders were very young when they started).

If you’re thinking about ever starting up a business this book is a great resource. It does not have concrete advice (it’s not a list of recipes for success) but if you can read between the lines you might learn a lot.