Customer Reviews

Startups Open Sourced

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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).

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.

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.

This is, by far, the best "startup" book I've read in a long time. I've read all the important "startup books" like Founders at Work, Rework, Getting Real, Do More Faster, Almost every Paul Graham essay, etc. If you want to learn and understand how much work it really takes to succeed, you need to read this book. The author has done a fantastic job finding incredible startup founders to interview, and asks the right questions. It's long, which is good. I think I ended up with over 100 highlighted parts on my Kindle. This book is packed with information.

This book is amazing, no wait, this book is freaking amazing. I really enjoyed reading the stories direct from the founders and startups, rather than the romanticized version TechCrunch and Mashable seem to spew. I highly recommend anyone thinking of launching a startup or in the process of running one to read this book. Why waste time and make mistakes these others write about so clearly? My personal favorite part was the tagging the author used. These tags such as "bootstrapped" or "YCombinator" allow the reader to quickly find a relevant story. While I do think you should read the entire book (lots of great information) its nice of the author to allow the reader to jump to a specific topic.

Now that i've finished reading the book I am actually retooling my own startup, based on the guidance that the founders of Grooveshark, GitHub and Wufoo provided.

I found the book to be really intriguing but, as a previous reviewer said, it was a bit repetitive.

I'm not part of the startup scene. I'm a blogger from Australia that has a slight interest in startups. Many of the interviews felt like an inner circle focused primarily on the authors social network and those he admired. This is fine - it means we get an insight into the y combinator culture and the current mindset of the startup community. I just wish there was a bit more information outside of the interviews so people like myself could have done a bit more research. I'd be halfway through the interview sometimes and forget what the person did.

I really enjoyed it. I thought a couple of interviewees were irrelevant, such as the gamer. It wasn't necessary to add them to an already long book. I also wish there had been a bit more of a 'thread' between interviews, like there was with Founders at Work.

Those criticisms aside, I thought it was fascinating. I don't believe it is necessary to read every interview but it will help you figure out facets of the scene, as well as limitations that people have faced in their history. It also helped me make connections between different facets of the startup community.

Well worth the read. If you don't have some interest in web startups though, you will struggle. You only get the gems when you accept the book for what it is - a sneak peak behind the curtains.

I really enjoyed the first few chapters of this book, but most startups have similar stories and once you've heard one, you've pretty much heard all of them. The book makes the mistake of stating which of the companies interviewed are currently hiring, which makes no sense whatsoever on printed medium as this kind of information obviously changes all the time, so by the time someone reads the book, that information is probably no longer applicable. The book is aimed more at graduate students than at people who have many years of working experience, and I think the title of the book is extremely misleading, and this is probably the worst startup book I have ever read.