Is there an author who made a successful startup after publishing?

Long ago, Jim Gleick is sort of an example. Was a well-known science writer in the early 1990s, mostly for an excellent book called Chaos. He jumped onto the nascent internet train, starting an Internet Service Provider in NYC called The Pipeline, with a custom hardware and software stack (I wrote some of his software). This was around the time a soon to be very famous browser company called Netscape was getting started. He was successful and sold for circa 8 figures (big money back then) a few years later. He went back to writing after that. The startup wasn't directly in a subject matter sense related to his book work, but his intensity and curiosity and need to understand and make something were consistent across both endeavors. Hope that helps.

Sounds like the story of HP Labs Smallbase (now Oracle TimesTen):

"TimesTen was founded in HP labs by Marie-Anne Neimat, Sherry Listgarten, Kurt Shoens and Kevin Wilkerson, under the name of Smallbase" [0].

The you have that "Marie-Anne approached HP management about spinning out TimesTen as a separate company" [1].

Smallbase HP Labs publications (I couldn't find the originals) cited by [2]:

** “Smallbase API Reference Manual (Smallbase 4.1)”, Database Technology Department, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, April 1995.

** M. Heytens, S. Listgarten, M. Neimat, K. Wilkinson, “Smallbase: A Main-Memory DBMS for High-Performance Applications (Release 3.7)”, Database Technology Department, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, December 1994.

--

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TimesTen

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3019296/44marie-anne-neimat

[2] TPC-B on Smallbase and P21 -- https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/TPC-B-on-Smallbase-and...

You may not realize it, but there are a million books published each year. It is probably harder to write a widely-read book than to gain a following for a product because of the supply and demand dynamics

The median book sells less than a thousand copies, and many sell less than a hundred copies. I’m reading one right now (razor strike, a cyberpunk story) that is excellent, but I think the author suggested online once they only made a couple hundred dollars off it. Highly recommended btw

Justin Mares co-authored Traction and then went on to start some very successful companies (Kettle & Fire etc)

Hamish McKenzie was a journalist and is one of founders of Substack.