Founders at Work is a collection of interviews with founders of some of the largest and most interesting technology companies including Steve Wozniak from Apple, Max Levchin from PayPal, Mitch Kapor from Lotus and Caterina Fake from Flickr.

It is absolutely fascinating to see how some of the most famous tech businesses got started and the combination of luck, flexibility, determination and individual brilliance that led to their success.

It is an inspiration of sorts that if you bring the right mixture of things together, the path to extreme success can be so quick. The book reinforces that in order to succeed you need to be flexible and as long as you stay focused to listening directly to the customer and reacting to them you will succeed.

In contrast it is so disappointing to reflect after reading this book that when many of the businesses mentioned became subsidiaries of large corporations that their momentum and entrepreneurial spirit were lost.

I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the way new highly successful businesses are formed and are interested in the people who form them.