Startups Open Sourced [Kindle Edition]

Jared Tame (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Get inside the minds of today's leading startup founders with the most honest and candid collection of startup founder interviews. Contains interviews with 33 startups discussing the most difficult topics entrepreneurs face: creating and validating ideas, finding cofounders, obtaining users, growing revenue, staying motivated, acquisition process, and more.

Companies interviewed: Grooveshark, reddit, GitHub, foursquare, Airbnb, Weebly, Greplin, AppSumo, Wufoo, Little App Factory, MixPanel, LikeALittle, Djangy, Divvyshot, Justin.TV, Blippy, Bump, WePay, DailyBooth, Gobble, KISSMetrics, Omnisio, Cloudkick, Noteleaf, One Llama, Octopart, Crowdbooster, Listia, Hipmunk, Indinero, OrangeQC, Camino Real, One

Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 1461 KB
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B004ZULMR6
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #41,744 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #95 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Business & Investing > Management & Leadership > Motivational

More About the Author

The quick bits:

- Studied advertising and computer science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduates in 2011

- Y Combinator alumni from the Summer 2009 batch; cofounded GraffitiGeo, which was later acquired by Loopt in 2009.

- First Silicon Valley experience was joining TokBox as employee #1 during sophomore year (2007). Later worked at One Llama and Illinois Ventures. Started 2 UIUC student entrepreneur groups: UBD (an ACM SIG) and IEN.

- Proud owner of github.com/god although unfortunately doesn't possess any supernatural powers

- Enjoys designing and coding

- Total sucker for gaming (Protoss ftw). I'm a Huskateer.

- Favorite side project is Hacker News Directory, where students can find other students from their schools who read Hacker News.

- Maintains a personal blog at posterous (http://jmtame.posterous.com)

- Has an awesome girlfriend who is equally nerdy and sells handmade jewelry on Etsy.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding interviews that really capture the essence of a starting a company, June 2, 2011

By 

Alex B - See all my reviews

This review is from: Startups Open Sourced (Kindle Edition)

This book is a great read for people interested in startups and entrepreneurship, it's essentially 30+ case studies of how the founders think about their companies, what types of challenges they deal with, how they emotionally deal with them, etc. These founders discuss current issues such as the difficulty of fundraising, particularly in a down economy such as the one recently in 2009. Some of the interviews are very personal and talk about topics of personal and emotional struggle for the founders, I was surprised to read how detailed many of these interviews were. There's something for everyone considering the breadth of topics discussed and the diverseness of the founders-GitHub for example has a very different perspective on raising money than most of the other founders interviewed.

The depth in the interviews is impressive. I'm subscribed to a lot of different online web sites and I haven't found many interviews that go into this amount of depth before, though Mixergy comes to mind when I think of interviews in similar formats. I was surprised to see that many of the founders don't consider themselves successful today. The quote about Dennis Crowley from Foursquare made me realize that most of these guys are hungry and many of them mentioned continuously setting their own bar for achievement higher as they continued to grow (Weebly comes to mind).

I really enjoyed reading this. Since a lot of these startups are still relatively young, I think it's going to be interesting to see how they progress and look back at the interviews a few years down the road from now when they've developed a bit further. These interviews seem to be done at the right time, when the founders are young (which also makes it easy to relate to) and before they hit their massive adoption curves (again, easy to relate to since many entrepreneurs are in the same stage).

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Reality, June 8, 2011

By 

Sam Johnson - See all my reviews

This review is from: Startups Open Sourced (Kindle Edition)

This book helps not-yet-entrepreneurs understand what the process is really like. If you read stories about other entrepreneurs, you can get the sense that they always knew what they were doing, even though they were clueless at the time.

Interviewing a younger generation of founders really relates more the start ups young people will be starting now, rather than reading about jeff bezos, steve jobs, or bill gates.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great information about startups, May 30, 2011

By 

Ryan Lackey - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Startups Open Sourced (Kindle Edition)

This book is a great source of information about how the founders of many successful startups think, how they responded to challenges, and insight into their personalities. A lot of startups face similar challenges, so if you're a founder (or an employee at a startup), learning from others can be very helpful. The book is easy to read in any order; each interview is self contained.

Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston, an earlier and fairly similar book, is also a great resource; Andrew Warner's Mixergy podcast is useful as well. If you are really interested in startups, I would suggest all three.