Giacomo ‘Peldi’ Guilizzoni is the Founder of Balsamiq and tells a wonderful tale of the motivation for and launching of his company.  37Signals has a nice interview with him here.  Balsamiq enables rapid and collaborative prototyping of user interfaces for applications.  Peldi’s story clearly shapes his company and blog, which makes it all the more enjoyable.

And it’s a story that illustrates how close at hand is the entrepreneurial option, which makes it all the more applicable.  I like particularly Peldi’s explanation for why he decided to leave Adobe to start his own company: “What’s Your Story”

On a related note, his passion shows through not for the new technologies but rather for the ways in which those technologies are changing how people (his customers) work:

Call it Web Office, Enterprise 2.0, Work 2.0, this stuff is powerful.. It’s a new way to work and it makes everyone more productive and the resulting work is better, which I believe impacts the bottom line directly as well as everyone’s morale. I truly believe that we’re in front of one of those “no going back” techonologies like broadband, cell-phones, clothes dryers, etc. 

My brother, Steve Hargadon, works in and writes about the latent revolution in computing in schools–why kids take a 30-year step back in technological time when they set foot on K-12 campuses, and what happens when someone changes that situation.  It’s the same passion, and doing something about it is now within reach of so many others who, like Peldi, decide to make the leap.