kidder and english

i originally learned about a truck full of money from watching this video of tracy kidder interview the founder of kayak, paul english. the video was at the bottom of an article titled  the psychological price of entrepreneurship. 

sometimes i can get into this rabbit hole of trying to understand the mental illness of founders, usually in the context of trying to understand myself, and this was one of those days.

never having investigated the kayak founding story, i was delighted to find that kidder had written a biography of sorts of paul english. i borrowed the audio book from the library and started to listen to it on my way to and from surf. 

there are a lot of personal reasons for me to like this book.

i love founding stories, but can be quite allergic to biographies, with a preference for autobiographies. kidder’s writing is excellent. it is as if kidder makes the reader feel like you are there the entire way. 

interleaf is what i consider an ancestor to what we are building with trunk. i didn’t know that paul worked at interleaf, so that part of the story i found incredibly valuable. i particularly enjoyed the part about knuth and his production of tex. 

paul was raised catholic. 

paul lives with bipolar disorder. 

later i learned that tracy kidder was also the author of mountains beyond mountains, the required reading for university of washington my freshman year. i didn’t take any classes that required me to read the book, but the entire class of tens of thousands of students were suggested to read this book. 

from reading tracy kidder’s wikipedia page i found that he authored a book called good prose: the art to nonfiction. i am on a mission to find these types of books. one notable books in this genre is elements of style.

anyways i am a really grateful to have stumbled upon the story of paul english and the work of tracy kidder.