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Product Description
Product Description
Now available in paperback—with a new preface and interview with Jessica Livingston about Y Combinator!
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 businesses do—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.
About the Author
Jessica Livingston is a founding partner at Y Combinator, a seed-stage venture firm based in Cambridge, MA, and Mountain View, CA. She was previously VP of marketing at investment bank Adams Harkness. In addition to her work with startups at Y Combinator, she organizes Startup School. She has a BA in English from Bucknell.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
True inspiring entrepreneurs stories,
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This review is from: Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days (Hardcover)
Many authors have written "how to" styled books on start ups - always a pain because there is so much bias in their 'theory'. This is MUCH better: learn from real life stories of successful people!+++ What I love most about it: it's a no b*s* book where you can learn from the interviews of some of the most famous entrepreneurs of the 90s (at Apple, Adobe, Flikr, Craiglist, Hotmail...). The stories are just so inspiring when the real people tell them and what a collection! --- What I like least: it's only about software/tech companies hence some learnings will not apply to other industries. This is not the core of the books through so it's a really minor criticism. Overall, extremely inspiring book. I recommend it to all would-be entrepreneurs or simply to those curious about how these famous companies got started!
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Those who were "present at the creation",
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This review is from: Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days (Hardcover)
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.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential Reading for Web 2.0 Entrepreneurs,
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This review is from: Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days (Hardcover)
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.
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