An Interview With John Sundman Firefighter, Techie, And E-Publisher On What It Takes For Creatives To Make It In A Start Up

John Sundman is best known for his seminal dot-com-boom cyberpunk novel, Acts Of The Apostles but in his long career he has been a truck driver, a fireman, a construction worker, and an early employee at Sun Microsystems. Sundman’s cult following has brought him world-wide acclaim. Now, however, he’s working at a startup. Tasked with managing software quality at Zola Books, an ebook reseller that aims to add a cool social aspect to the process of discovering, buying, and reading books, Sundman took a moment to discuss what creative types can do to make a dent in the startup ecosystem. TC: Tell us about yourself. Tell us about Acts. Sundman: I’m a 60-year-old bald guy, married to long-suffering Dear Wife; I’m a member of the company of Tisbury 651 (ladder) on Martha’s Vineyard, currently on leave of absence while I work in New York City as Director of Quality for Ebook startup Zola Books. I’m a long-time, if accidental, geek, and a novelist of some talent, slight output, and preposterous literary ambition. Since 1980 I’ve worked mostly for computer-makers and software startups in Silicon Valley and the Boston area as a technical writer, manager of publications, and similar. I’ve also done stints as a forklift operator, construction laborer, furniture mover, and agricultural development worker in West Africa. To the best of my knowledge, I’m the first person to ever have the title “Manager of Information Architecture” on a business card (Sun Microsystems 1987). My wife says I snore but she has never adduced evidence. My novel, Acts of the Apostles, which I published in 1999, is a thriller about nanomachines, neurobiology and brain-hacking, Gulf War Syndrome, and the cult surrounding a Silicon Valley tech genius bent on world domination. It’s not a perfect book, but I’m proud of it. Some people have said it’s the scariest book they’ve ever read. It’s been called the “greatest hacker book ever” and “the first great novel of the age of synthetic biology.” It’s also properly read as a lampoon of the whole hipster-geek messiah thing, Steve Jobs as Jesus or whatever. Hence the title of the book and the Christian allegory all through it. In any event, it’s a geeky book in the sense that those readers who have a working knowledge of VLSI design, Unix internals, and the music of Frank Zappa will have an easier time guessing the surprise ending. Some

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