Founders at Work is a collection 32 interviews with the founders of, mostly, successful companies. If you work for a startup, want to, or want further proof that startups are not for you then I suggest reading this book. Wait, thats pretty much everyone you may say. Yes, I may say but its a good book and I'm not being paid by the publisher so no worries.

There is no need to read the book chronologically as the interviews for the most part do not relate to each other (Joel Spolsky does references ArsDigita heavily and the chapter on Spolsky's company Fogcreek Software comes after ArsDigita).

The must read interviews are those with Steve Wozniak of Apple, Phillip Greenspun of ArsDigita, Mark Levchin of PayPal and Paul Buchheit of Gmail.  Unfortunately Jeremy Allaire, the founder of ColdFusion, is not featured but the founders of Adobe are.  The company was really founded for desktop publishing but their model was always to be ahead of the market which makes me feel comfortable that it is the home of CF for the moment.  Then there is the the last chapter of the book whch is a blank chapter waiting for the founders of InstantSpot!