Great little collection of articles by Stef Lewandowski, under the heading "Founder Stories" and the description "Experiences of people who've built companies. Let's learn from each other's mistakes and successes." The ones I've looked at so far seem worth a read.
However, I'd caution against sequentially reading through all the stories (unless you're trying to educate yourself about random startup stories), as that's really just a way to pass time - and surely you have better things to do with your time! - but some of those will have some very specific take-aways worth being aware of. I'll go through them and pick out the ones that I find most useful, and link to them on swombat.com too.
