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Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days Paperback – March 11, 2009

by Jessica Livingston (Author)

199 customer reviews

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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.

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jessica Livingston is a founding partner at Y Combinator, a seed-stage venture firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Mountain View, California. She was previously vice president of marketing at investment bank Adams Harkness. In addition to her work with startups at Y Combinator, she organizes Startup School (www.StartupSchool.org). She has a bachelor's degree in English from Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

Paperback: 488 pages
Publisher: Apress; 1st edition (March 11, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1430210788
ISBN-13: 978-1430210788
Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 1.1 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 199 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #72,010 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #94 in Books > Business & Money > Management & Leadership > Management Science
- #157 in Books > Business & Money > Industries > Computers & Technology
- #161 in Books > Business & Money > Small Business & Entrepreneurship > New Business Enterprises

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Alan Hogan

A classic, but skip Apress’ awful paperback edition

December 7, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This book contains great interviews by an insightful and influential person. While I haven’t finished it yet, I am writing this review mostly to be able to add some product images. I was horrified by the quality of the printing of this book! Apress, the publisher, ought to be ashamed. I have uploaded images showing how poorly the printed word looks in the paperback edition. Note the awful dithering (fuzziness). None of the letters are crisp. It almost looks like a cheap photocopy on a bargain-basement laser printer.

I do not know if the hardcover edition has this problem or not.

10 people found this helpful11 people found this helpful

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Graybeard

Excellent

February 12, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This is a wonderful collection of interviews of company founders and co-founders. Kudos to the author for asking good questions and kudos to the interviewees for their candid, fascinating, detailed answers.

What surprised me most was how down-to-earth and normal most of these successful people were. Only a couple of them seemed full of themselves. The rest, surprisingly, were just the opposite. Their stories about their startup days provided insights into their values, motivations, aspirations, points of view, work ethic; as well as their worries, fears, doubts, and concerns; plus their approach to making tough decisions and a recognition of their personal limitations and flaws. Their interview responses are full of insights into their decisions about business development, product development, product management, pricing, promotion, distribution, customer service, technical support, accounting, finance, hiring and technology choices; and dealing with venture capitalists, business partners and actual or potential competitors.

The interviews also provide a lot of insights into technology trends and market trends during the time that the founders' companies were starting up.

Here are the companies whose founders were interviewed, in the order they appear in the book: PayPal, Hotmail, Apple, Excite, Software Arts, Lotus Development, Iris Associates, Groove Networks, Pyra Labs (Blogger.com), Yahoo, Research in Motion, Marimba, Gmail, WebTV, TiVo, Viaweb, del.icio.us, ONELIST, Bloglines, Craigslist, Flickr, WAIS, InternetArchive, Alexa, Adobe Systems, Open Systems, Hummer Winblad, 37signals, ArsDigita, Fog Creek Software, TripAdvisor, HOT or NOT, Tickle, Firefox, Six Apart, Lycos, Aliant Computer Systems, Shareholder.com.

This book is perfect for anyone interested in entrepreneurship, technology startups, technology companies in general, and business books in general. I've read the book once already and now I'm in the middle of reading it a second time. I wish there were an audio version of it.

2 people found this helpful3 people found this helpful

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N. Schultz

A view of successful business from an engineer's perspective

November 19, 2012

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I have only finished about a third of the book, and have already gotten my money's worth out of it. It is fascinating to see the vicissitudes of a project shape -- and be shaped by -- the business decisions.

The chapters covering Hotmail and PayPal showed some remarkable insight into how a given product can be marketed. Hotmail was a fairly straightforward shot from original idea to sales, (email from PIM DB is a fairly minor refinement technically -- it was huge from a business standpoint) but went through some massive changes in how that idea was sold. PayPal, on the other hand, went through profound shifts in the product itself, and also in marketing.

For me, insight into the founders' thought-processes as they rolled with the changes that they encountered was the primary value of the book. The author, then, is to be commended. Keeping the discussions of multiple interviewees relevant and picking out such insightful details is no mean feat. Every chapter so far has been excellent in these regards -- A further testament to her skills as an interviewer and editor.

If you are in or are considering going into a technical business, this book will help you understand the mind of those successful at that sort of thing. Most of the business advice I find is directed at the non-technical side of things, which is a very different sort of mind. That is what makes this book so particularly useful.

One person found this helpful

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Jonathan Collins

I've never seen a professionally printed book that looked so bad. I have the "Coders at Work" book from ...

July 28, 2018

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

The printing quality is appalling, I've never seen a professionally printed book that looked so bad. I have the "Coders at Work" book from the same publisher and it's 100x better, so I'm inclined to say that the copy I received is a second rate knockoff and not an official copy.

Cannot comment on content of the book because I literally cannot stand reading the blurry text.

One person found this helpful

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J.Westrbook

All around positive and fulfilling purchase

November 8, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Book was delivered as advertised. Now about the book. Well done by the author. The interviews were interesting and enlightening. If you're thinking about entrepreneurship you should read this book to get familiar with the possibilities, both the positives and the challenges. From the success arrived by detour to the success of following a dedicated plan. There's much to absorb and it's just plain interesting.

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Craig Cecil

Not bad -- but read Programmers at Work first

February 18, 2009

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

After reading the classic Programmers at Work (see below) back in the 1980s, then re-reading it again last year, I was a little disappointed with Founders at Work.

The book has the same interview format as Programmers at Work, this time mainly with web startup founders from the 1995-2005 period. There is some overlap with similar individuals interviewed in Programmers at Work, such as Dan Bricklin, Steve Wozniak, and Mitch Kapor. But mainly, you'll read about the guys and gals behind PayPal, Blogger, Yahoo, craigslist, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. I was hoping for the same level of storytelling from the individuals interviewed--however, this time I found the stories to be flat, and uninteresting after awhile. This may just be an individual preference and bias, since many readers of this book won't have been influenced by Programmers at Work.

I would still suggest reading this one, but only after you've read Programmers at Work.

4 people found this helpful5 people found this helpful

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