Where did the idea for Dot Dead come from? Way back when I had just one kid and before I started my company, I found myself with some spare time. I signed up for a mystery writing class at the University of California extension. We did a classroom exercise and -- poof! -- I had the beginning of a novel. You write what you know and what I knew was the entrepreneurial culture of Silicon Valley. In writing Dot Dead I tried to capture the Valley's zeitgeist, the monomania focused on bringing the next great product to the market and making millions along the way. Do you know what the divorce rate is among entrepreneurs? Giving up a personal life is SOP in Silicon Valley. You've worked in Silicon Valley for over 20 years. Did you base any of the principal characters in the book on people you knew? I wrote a work of fiction. My friends are a relatively sedate lot. I do take a few shots at venture capitalists, though. Not any particular one, but as a class. Couldn't resist. What authors influenced you? I've been gobbling up mysteries since grade school. But I think the biggest influence of all was the movies of Alfred Hitchcock (the French would call him an auteur) where ordinary people find themselves caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Movies like The 39 Steps or North By Northwest where the hero finds unexpected reserves of grit and moxie. You have a family with four kids and a full-time job. When do you find time to write? One of the keys for me has been enrollment in writing classes. Then I have a deadline to get the work done. Some of the people in the class turned into fans (my first ones!) and wanted to see the next installment. You don't want to disappoint them. It's almost like doing a serial. So you write first thing in the morning and last thing at night. On weekends. On airplanes. Whole chapters of Dot Dead were written on cross-country flights. Has your family read the book? I read each chapter aloud to my wife hot off the printer and in return she offered no-holds-barred advice. She's a maven on culture ("a woman like her would not wear that") and relationships ("he wouldn't say something like that to her at a funeral"). My oldest daughter, who was reading Sue Grafton at twelve, is not ready to accept that her father writes books with sex scenes. I've told the other three kids that the book is rated PG-32. Do you have advice for unpublished writers? Don't give up. Rejection comes with the territory. What separates published writers from the wannabes is the ability to keep going in the face of lots of noes. What similarities were there in starting a company and getting a book published? More than you'd think. In starting a company you need to find investors who believe in you, who will back your vision, and will put millions of dollars to work on making it a reality. Except that the money at stake is a lot less, that's pretty similar to finding a publisher. In both you need to believe in yourself and what you're doing because there will be incessant attacks on your ego. One venture capitalist might say, "We love the concept, but not the management team." A prospective publisher will tell you that they have no empathy with your book's hero. Well, keep going. Venture capitalists turned down Google and fifteen publishers turned down John Grisham's first novel. Here's another similarity: Entrepreneurs are extremely generous. When you call another entrepreneur and ask about a prospective hire or about what it's like to have a certain venture capitalist on your board, you get the unvarnished truth. The odds against success are long enough, and we need to stick together. When mystery writers get together, it's the same "us against them" fellowship you see among entrepreneurs. They suggest agents, publishers, conferences worth attending, etc. You grew up in Palo Alto in the heart of Silicon Valley. How has Palo Alto changed? First of all, it wasn't Silicon Valley when I grew up. It was the Santa Clara Valley, sometimes called "the Valley of the Heart's Delight." Orchards abounded. My mother used to dry apricots in the backyard every year. I went to Palo Alto High along with the children of janitors, school teachers, and founders of Hewlett-Packard. People didn't always lock the front doors. My parents' first house cost under $30,000. Of course, the orchards have been replaced by tilt-up buildings. The town is filled with software and network executives. Few houses can be bought for under seven figures. Palo Alto is exciting, dynamic, and the center of world technology, but excuse me for waxing a little nostalgic for the good old days. What have you given up to write? At one time, my main extracurricular activity was betting on the ponies. For six months way back in the eighties, I pretty much lived up at Lake Tahoe. But then I got a job in Silicon Valley, got married, had kids, and took up writing. No more Runyonesque adventures at the track. What else? I don't go to the movies like I used to, but who does? Are you ready to see Dot Dead as a movie? My wife likes to play the game of which actors would play which roles. So she's in favor. As for me, I guess I'd be willing to take the chance on success going to my head. What are you reading? I can convince myself that reading crime fiction is part of working. My accountant agrees and says that what I spend on mysteries is tax deductible. I just finished Cara Black's latest, Murder in Montmartre, and Killing Paparazzi, the second of Robert Eversz's featuring punk ingénue Nina Zero. I saw Peter Abrahams recently and have just started his End of Story. Stuart Kaminsky says it's sad that more people don't know about Brian Garfield; I listen to Stuart so I've got Garfield's The Romanov Succession on my nightstand along with Nadia Gordon's first Sunny McCoskey mystery. (If there is an earthquake, I'll be crushed to death if the books on my nightstand topple the wrong way.) And evenings I am reading The Return of Tarzan aloud to my seven-year old. I'm having a great time going through the favorites of my youth with him.