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I wrote about Founders at Work recently. Here are some memorable quotes from this book:

On customers:

David Heinemeier Hansson, cofounder of 37signals

“First we built the audience and then we figured out a product”

Meno Trott, cofounder of Movable Type

“Having customers from day one was the thing that really forced us to be a company. If we had been just talking about a product and we had to build up a customer base and figure out how to market it, that would have been incredibly hard.”

Mark Fletcher, founder of Bloglines

“Basically any technology can be copied, any concept can be copied. In my opinion, what makes one of these companies valuable is the users. That can’t be copied.”

On simplicity and doing less:

Joshua Schachter, cofounder of del.icio.us

“Reduce. Do as little as possible to get what you have to get done. Do less of it; get it done… Doing less is so important… It’s the traditional “I apologize for the long letter. I didn’t have time to make it shorter.”"

David Heinemeir Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails

Q: Was there ever a time you felt you couldn’t do all this?

Sometimes, but whenever we had those feelings we viewed them as clues that we were trying to do too much, so we’d think ”How could we make this feature require less engineering and programming?”… We aren’t producing more lines of software than everybody else; we’re just making each line count for so much more.

Caterina Fake, cofounder of Flickr

“I’m a big believer that constraints inspire creativity. The less money you have, the fewer people and resources you have, the more creative you have to become.”

Evan Williams, cofounder of Blogger.com

“I was also surprised by the success of something so simple…Simplicity is powerful.”

Charles Geschke, cofounder of Adobe Systems

Work smart and not long, because you need to preserve all of your life, not just work life.

Focusing on the product:

Joshua Schachter, cofounder of del.icio.us

Q: It had been tried and failed in the past. Why did del.icio.us succeed?

First of all, because it was not a venture to start. It was building a product and that’s it.

Joel Spolsky, cofounder of Fog Creek Software

All those little coupon schemes, this is what General Motors does. They figure out new rebate schemes because they forgot how to design cars people want to buy. But when you still remember how to make software people want, just improve it.

Thinking about the future:

Charles Geschke, cofounder of Adobe Systems

If you want to shoot a duck, you have to shoot where the duck is going to be, not where the duck is. It’s the same with introducing technology.

Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes

“You don’t want to fill today’s needs, but try to capture some window that will happen in the future.”

On connections:

Blake Ross, starter of Firefox

“One thing I didn’t know was how tightly connected everyone is in the Valley… It’s such a small industry, and so much business is done through the network circuit … It’s more like “Who do you know”

Dan Bricklin, cofounder of Software Arts

Even though it seems like it’s big business and impersonal, and “they” take care of it, it really isn’t. There is no “they”. It always comes down to an “I” of somebody.

Evan Williams, cofounder of Blogger.com

“Everyone was getting funded, but it is still completely just a network. You have to know the right people.”

 To be continued …

“Founders at Work” consists of 32 interviews with founders of famous technology companies such as Paypal, Apple, Lotus, Yahoo, TiVo, del.icio.us, craigslist, Flickr, Adobe etc. It’s about stories of startups’ early days, and contains valuable advice not only for people starting companies, but for everyone in technology business. 

It’s a great resource for learning about what the founders have been through, and how they transformed their ideas into successful companies.

Unfortunately this book represents only one side of the coin: For each success story in this book, there are tens of failures that we aren’t aware of. Nevertheless, here are some common traits I’ve realized after reading these interviews:

• Practice makes perfect: Either they have built similar products before, or had these ideas for years. When you get it right is only after you do it several times or develop that idea over time.
• Change is inevitable: Their product or business model changes a lot during the course of building it. Either the end product is a small part of what they initially thought they’d build, or the business model they had in mind doesn’t work and they try a completely different one.
• Focus on the future: They start at time when a new technology (computers or internet) is about to take off, or when a business opportunity does not exist yet.
• Solve your own problems: They get inspired by their own problems, things that bug them.

Overall, companies with interesting ideas had more interesting stories to tell. I highly recommend reading this book!

Lately, I’ve been thinking that everything is about user experience. We buy brands that make us feel special, we use beautiful products that provide a good experience. We love people that treat us well. What matters is how you feel, it’s all about the experience…

I bought a new bag for two reasons: (i) It looks great, I’m pleased every time I see it (ii) It’s in line with “less is more” philosophy 

I’ve learned to embrace constraints, in fact, I’m deliberately introducing constraints in my life. This bag is very small, so I can only fit my laptop, it’s accessories, a book and maybe a notebook. That’s it, but isn’t that all I need for school?

I’m amused when I see people walking around with huge, heavy backpacks. It seems as if they’re carrying their whole house on their back.

There are so many things I could put in there If I had some extra space. But the point is, I can live without carrying all that stuff with me, so I don’t really need them, do I?

[Note to self: "The things you own end up owning you"]

Randy Pausch, a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, passed away from pancreatic cancer in July, 2008. One year ago, on September 18th, 2007, he was one of the speakers in a series of lectures called “Last Lecture”. The idea was, “If you had one lecture to give before you died, what would it be?”

Sadly, he knew this lecture was one of his last ones, so he gave an inspirational talk titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”. This motivational talk is about life and living. He gives examples from his career about overcoming obstacles and shares the lessons he learned throughout this journey. It’s about an hour long, but definitely worth watching. I especially enjoyed the twist at the end

If this is not enough to convince you, I’d say the book version has been #1 on Amazon’s Best Seller list for a long time. Rest in peace Randy Pausch …

Getting Real is one of the books that helped me look at software development from a different perspective. The title of the book is “The easier, smarter and faster way to build a successful web application”, but it’s really the manifesto of 37signals, a web application and design company that’s been influential to the whole community with successful products like Basecamp and by creating the Ruby on Rails web framework.

The book is provocative and explains 37signal’s philosophy about creating simple solutions. You’ll read suggestions like “Keep it simple, keep it small” or “Perfect is the enemy of good, do it quick. Not perfect, just do it.” I can tell you that these principles apply to graduate school as well

Some of the lessons I’ve learned are:

• Ignore details, perfect it later
• Constraints help you figure out your priorities, guide you to creative solutions
• Your advantage is agility, ability to change, lower cost of change by building less software
• Bigger problem isn’t scaling, it’s getting to the point where you have to scale
• Take sides, don’t try to please everyone
• Best programmers are the ones that can determine what just doesn’t matter

Each chapter is short and simple, and contains good advice. They were kind enough to provide an online copy for free if you’d like to start reading this book.

There’s a funny anecdote in the book: They launched Basecamp without the ability to bill customers. They had 30 days to figure it out, which forced them to come up with a simple solution. I think it’s really a bold move

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In a talk at Startup School, a developer asks a question:

Q: I’m in front of my computer 10-14 hours a day, supposed to be working on writing code, but I spend a lot of time distracted surfing the web. What advice can you give?

The reply he gets is:

I think the problem is you’re trying to work 14 hours a day. Who the hell gets anything productive done for 14 hours a day? Try working 5 hours a day, if you had only 5 hours a day to spend on something, you’d focus your time a lot better.

I’ll do my best to change my lifestyle according to this philosophy.

I created an aggregated RSS feed that combines 28 different student blogs listed on Georgia Tech’s Student Blogs page. Yahoo! Pipes is such a great tool for manipulating RSS feeds easily. I suggest watching this tutorial if you’re interested in learning more about it. You can find my feed here.

Being a student for too long, I’m not a big fan of assignments or projects anymore. Among all assignments I had to do at Georgia Tech, there is one that I truly appreciate and will never forget:

First year. First semester. Alex Orso’s class on Software Development Processes. First assignment is about requirements gathering. There’s no written information given about the assignment. To learn what the assignment is about, each group has to interview the professor for 15 minutes. In a way, the professor is the customer, who needs an application developed, and it’s our job to figure out the requirements by interviewing him.

None of the groups were able to gather all the requirements correctly, in fact, if they were grading this assignment by automated testing, most of us would have failed. Who would have imagined that all the error messages needed to be displayed using error stream instead of standard output

I enjoyed this assignment because it was unconventional. It was creative, it was unforgettable. Through experience, I learned how important and difficult requirements gathering is. I wish all assignments were as interesting

Orhan Pamuk, a prominent Turkish writer who won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, lets readers take a glimpse at his inner-world and what lead him to become a writer in his Nobel Lecture:

“As you know, the question we writers are asked most often, the favourite question, is; why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can’t do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can’t quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.”

I found it very frank and well written for a speech. I highly recommend reading the whole speech.

You know that you are living in a third world county if:

• You have to waste your time by waiting in queues all the time
• It takes twice the time it would normally take to go to anywhere because of traffic
• You don’t see anyone smiling when you are walking on the streets
• Your government does not provide you quality education, health service or transportation
• The last thing you want to trust is your legal system, it takes ages to conclude any legal case
• Your country is threatened by terrorism
• You have to risk your life and waste your time for military service
• Your money becomes colored paper outside your country
• No one obeys the rules or laws
• Your government is censoring the Internet