Bill details why he thought Go Corporation was not so interesting to him. Jerry Kaplan also shared an email written by Bill Gates to him. State Farm recommended them to work with either IBM or HP and love hate relationship with IBM began.Įncounters will Bill Gates: Bill Gates visits Jerry Kaplan at his offices in San Francisco, CA and the entire visit and what happened post the visit was fascinating. They were competing with IBM and HP for a new project initiative. State Farm: Jerry’s trip to Indiana to visit State Farm, and they having a champion within State Farm to support Jerry and his team helped a great deal in the initial days of the start-up. IBM at one point wanted to acquire Go Corporation and John Doerr advises against it. The encounters of Jerry Kaplan with these legendary investors was fascinating to read. John Doerr and Vinod Khosla were some of the key investors in Go Corporation. Bill Campbell, (remember the Trillion Dollar coach) worked as CEO of Go Corporation. At one point in time, Lotus Notes founded by Mitchell Kapor was larger than Microsoft. There were interesting facts in the book. In a way it is no different from how the Enterprise Software market operates today.

However reading Jerry’s book was also like reading a bit of history on how things worked in the 80’s and 90’s. You get to read a lot of articles and also listen to podcasts of companies that are cutting edge today (Uber, LinkedIN, Facebook and more). This book is about the life experiences of Jerry Kaplan, Founder of Go Corporation, a Pen computing company he founded in 1987. Start-Up is an interesting book by Jerry Kaplan and it is different for a few reasons.

Startup by Jerry Kaplan