The MouseDriver Chronicles

On the back of a beer coaster at a Dallas restaurant, Kyle Harrison sketched a computer mouse in the shape of a golf driver's head. At Wharton the idea won over his roommate, John Lusk, and after graduating in 1999 the two turned down job offers, borrowed from friends and family and ran up credit card debt to launch Platinum Concepts and its one product, the MouseDriver. Working from a San Francisco apartment that doubled as headquarters, they watched classmates grow rich in the dot-com boom. Their account grew out of the diary they kept and covers their first two years in business: endless cold calls, repeated failures to find a distributor and a typhoon that derailed their first shipment.

StarterStory founder Pat Walls admitted it sounds ridiculous but said it held him so completely that he read it in a single day.