founders at work

Ch1 Max Levchin
Cofounder, PayPal
(page 16)
(page 17)
(page 18)
(page 19)
(page 20)
It was one of these things where you can’t just be done.

So we had stacks and stacks of Palm Pilots preloaded with the same software.

There were about a dozen TV cameras and journalists—there was really big coverage.
(page 21)
(p22)
p23

coders at work

ch1 Jamie zawinski
(page 18)

(page 19)
(page 20)
(p21)
The plan was that I’d be working part-time at ETI and then I’d be going
to school part time.
(p22)
That was incredibly difficult because I didn’t have the background to
understand what in the world they were doing.

After six or eight months of that it just felt like, wow, I’m really just
wasting my time.

So I ended up going to work for Lucid, which was one of the two
remaining Lisp-environment developers
(p23)

I worked a little bit on the back end of that to make the overhead of
spawning a thread lower so you could do something like a parallel
implementation of Fibonacci that wasn’t just completely swamped by
the overhead of creating a new stack group for each thread.

Before that I was bringing up Lisp on new machines.

Which for every architecture was bizarre, because it’s never
documented right.
p24