Once someone told me about a guy who invented the disk brake, he went to a racing team to offer it, but they told him "we're looking for something to speed up our cars, not to slow them down."
At the end, disk brakes helped a lot in racing because drivers could reduce speed in less time which gave them more time to accelerate.
(I don't know if this is a true story or just a joke, but its a great story!)
The guy made a million dollars. You know, I had an idea like that once. A long time ago.
It was a "Jump to Conclusions" mat. You see, it would be this mat that you would put on the floor, and it would have different conclusions written on it that you could jump to.
Of all the stories in Founders at Work I think my favorite is Wozniak's. It still amazes me that he made the entire Apple II by himself, both hardware and software.
My personal favorite is the story of the Lycos founder in "Founders at Work". The guy just got a call from a VC, saying "we will give you money if you run a company with this great search technology we bought".
