David Lester
David Lester founded Impressions Software Inc in 1992 with a tiny office in Farmington, CT. The business grew and expanded to Cambridge, MA in 1993. Sierra Online Acquired the business in 1995; David stayed on and grew it to selling millions of copies of its leading game franchises Caesar and Lords of The Realm.
David's passion was small business, though, so in 1999 he founded Crimson Publishing to focus on entrepreneurs. David has sat on the boards of many startups and now writes, speaks about and trains small businesses. David remains CEO at Crimson.
Carol Tice
Carol has been a business journalist for more than 15 years, including a 7-year stint at the Puget Sound Business Journal, where she won the newsweekly's first-ever Best in Business award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW). She has been a freelance writer and blogger since 2006, appearing in The Seattle Times, Seattle Magazine, Alaska Airlines Magazine, Entrepreneur, and many others. She is the winner of numerous Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) awards. She has been a regular blogger for Entrepreneur.com for three years.
Carol also mentors other freelance writers through her Make a Living Writing blog which was named one of the Top 10 Blogs for Writers 2011, and serves as Den Mother of the writers community Freelance Writers Den. Online, she has written for Copyblogger, Problogger, Write to Done, InsuranceQuotes, and many more.
To get the stories in How They Started, Carol did everything from commenting on company founders' blogs (and reading years' worth of posts) to trying sources on LinkedIn and Twitter, besides the usual route of contacting their company's PR department.
For the first nine months, everyone thought we were fools. People would say, 
