Previously, I spent more than a decade building products, technologies, and teams at LinkedIn, TripAdvisor, Cisco Systems, and Thomson Financial. I got my BS and Masters in Computer Science at Cornell University. I'm active in the open source community, I maintain a popular blog, and I've given talks at conferences all over the world.

I wish I had a book like Hello, Startup back when I was in college. By the time I graduated, I had a BS, a Masters, a bunch of internship experiences—and absolutely no idea what I was doing. What technologies should I learn and use? How do I build a user interface that doesn't look terrible? How do I negotiate a job offer? Should I negotiate for more salary or more equity? What is equity, anyway? Should I work at a large company or join a startup?

I learned the answers to these questions, and many others, the hard way—through trial and error. I also learned that thousands of other developers before me went through the same inefficient trial and error process. It doesn't have to be this way. While there are a small number of lessons that you can only learn by making your own mistakes, my hope is that you can learn everything else by studying the successes, failures, and stories in Hello, Startup.