John Collison reading recommendations about the history of successful B2B companies

Here is what John Collison recommends for anyone looking to study the history of successful B2B companies in tech:

Question: If someone wanted to understand kind of how we got to where we are today in 2020, what technology companies would you encourage them to study and why?

John Collison: Stripe sells to businesses, and so I am probably indexed more on boring B2B behind the scenes, content then maybe someone who is starting a consumer company. I think the history of Salesforce is quite interesting to look at, similarly the history of Oracle is interesting to look at.

There’s a good book on Oracle called Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle.

I would say there’s obviously tons of content on Google, Facebook, all the super prominent mainstream companies. I think the interesting things to think about are, one, there’s a lot of content out there that’s essentially propaganda by these companies or “the blessed accounts.” And so it’s not like there aren’t interesting facts there, but they’re probably not as interesting as the thing is the company really wished you didn’t read because they go a little bit off script as the official accounts. And those can be a little bit harder to find.