Product Description

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company. Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover? Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it's done. But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businessesdo—create value—more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26624 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 488 pages

About the Author
Jessica Livingston is a partner in Y Combinator, a seed-stage
venture firm. She was previously VP of marketing at investment bank Adams
Harkness. She has a bachelor's in English from Bucknell University.

Customer Reviews

Essential Reading for Web 2.0 Entrepreneurs
This book is without doubt one of the best reads available for entrepreneurs looking to start a a web 2.0 company. The number of case studies and insights offered both on successes and failures and practical approaches to impossible situations is simply amazing.

I've started up a couple of companies and been living in the web 1.0 and now web 2.0 worlds, and am also a consultant on many web 2.0 projects and this is my recommended read for the entrepreneurs who want more insight into launching their online businesses.

What is particularly important about the book is that most of the companies and individuals covered are extremely relevant today and are market leaders in many of the emerging ebusiness sectors.

OK book, but lacked any analysis
For anyone who is, or is about to become an entrepreneur, you probably should read this book. However, I'm applying such faint praise because the book itself is OK, but fails to include any real analysis in its text.

The 32 chapters are made up of verbatim interview with founders of various companies (some big and some small) and many of those interview contain real gems - actual applicable lessons for would-be entrepreneurs. But there's a whole of lot text which isn't really that interesting which the reader needs to work their way through to get to those lessons.

All in all, worth the money, but would really have benefitted from some analysis.

I've blogged about this at www.aroxo.com/blog/mattr

Those who were "present at the creation"

What we have here are interviews of 32 founders of start-up companies, interviewed by Jessica Livingston. To most readers, few of the names are familiar (e.g. Steve Wozniak and Apple Computer) and the interviews will often seem rambling, poorly edited, etc. That is a fair reaction. However, they have the value of being extemporaneous rather than "sanitized." However different the start-ups' circumstances were and however different their founders' perspectives on those circumstances may be, there are common themes: naiveté, almost unlimited enthusiasm, little (if any) fear of failure, and especially, a rock-solid faith in what could be accomplished. Those with an ability to read between the lines will also develop a sense that most of the founders do not second-guess themselves when recalling their blunders.

To me, the greatest single value of this book is that we are learning about 32 start-ups from eyewitness accounts provided by those centrally involved. True, human memory can often be selective and on occasion self-serving. Nonetheless, these founders (with few exceptions) seem to be making a sincere effort to "tell it like it was" without aid of a ghostwriter or even an editor with special talents for clarity and (especially) concision.

Of special interest to me are the interviews of Craig Newmark (Craigslist), Blake Ross (Firefox), Paul Buchheit (Gmail), Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail), Mitchell Kapor (Lotus Development), Max Levchin (PayPal), Mike Ramsay (TiVo), and Tim Brady (Yahoo). Of course, each reader must determine for herself and himself which interviews are most interest and, perhaps more to the point, which interviews are most valuable to those who about to launch a new company or have only recently done so.