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 …