Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure

I just finished reading Jerry Kaplan’s book Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure from 1996 and I must say it is one of the best entrepreneur books I’ve read in a long time. Jerry recounts the story of founding GO Corporation, the first pen computing company, and the wild ride of burning through $75 million dollars before a forced merger with another company and a final sale to AT&T. Here are some of my takeaways:

• Participating preferred stock 15 years ago was as poorly understood as it is today
• The original idea for the GO tablet in the late 1980s was for a large screen with one single button, much like the iPad is today
• The issues of weight, battery life, screen, and memory back then are all the same issues of today
• GO had a closet at their office configured by IBM security personnel for IBM confidential files that had a key only the GO CEO had and they even went as far as to put chicken-wire above the ceiling tiles to block someone trying to get in, which, of course, is ridiculous
• At the 1991 COMDEX show in Las Vegas it cost $53,000 to rent a small private room off the main hall plus $1,000 to have it vacuumed and $150 for electricity
• AT&T called the network of infrastructure that made phones work “the cloud”, which is different from today’s popular term
• Nine years after the book was published Kaplan finally sued Microsoft for anti-trust violations, which were chronicled throughout the story

My recommendation is for technology entrepreneurs to read the book.