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Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days First Edition
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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.
- ISBN-101430210788
- ISBN-13978-1430210788
- EditionFirst Edition
- PublisherApress
- Publication dateSeptember 16, 2008
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions5.81 x 1.09 x 9 inches
- Print length506 pages
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Product details
- Publisher : Apress; First Edition (September 16, 2008)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 506 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1430210788
- ISBN-13 : 978-1430210788
- Item Weight : 1.57 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.81 x 1.09 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #289,574 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #161 in Computers & Technology Industry
- #262 in Starting a Business (Books)
- #1,503 in Entrepreneurship (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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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That being said, the quality of the book was great. It was full of all sorts of insights and experiences. They can all be summarized as don't give up, watch out for VC's but don't write them off, listen to your customers, be willing to change, make sure the initial founding team works together well, etc... But just listening the values does not do it justice. You really have to read the experiences. The book is full of all sorts of insights too, not just about entrepreneurship but also about the individual companies. For example I was really impressed about PayPal and the fraud stuff they did and how valuable that was. I just never knew. Overall I think the book was very well put together. Although some of the founders liked to talk a lot more than others and it droned on and on. But others were brief and insightful. I would definitely recommend this.
If I bought the print edition I suspect I would be giving it 5 stars. But really the kindle experience is probably worth 0 stars. But the content is so good that I figure 4 stars is fair. Since at this time I see hardcover editions for $5 or $6 new I would say go grab one of those now!!! The book is definitely inspirational.
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.
this is a must read for anyone who wants or is in the process of starting a startup (mostly technology related). there are some amazing and sometime shocking stories from founders' perspective. i got the book few days ago and it's about 450 pages and haven't finish it yet. the good thing is that you can pick a chapter (each chapter is a founder's story) and read that one only. so far, i have read 8 of them so far.
hands-down, the hotmail story, told by Sabeer Bhatia, is the most amazing one. some very inspiring and sad conte-de-faits mostly involving valuation, term sheets, and legal matters. A must-read.
why did i give this great book 4 stars? i am not going to read all of those stories probably but out of those 9 i have read so far, some are a bit like a wired magazine type of stories: i-want-to-show-the-world-i-am-humble style or i-only-had-10-dollars-in-my-pocket-when-arrived-to-usa... although these stories have some elements of truth in them, they have been way exaggerated in the last 10 years. the other thing i didn't like was the fact that the title is not matching the content. i'm not exactly sure but out 32 chapters, 10 of so-called-founders are not founders but early employees. there is a distinct line between founders and early employees in term of equity, functions, early pitches, funding hassles, discipline and work ethic, connections, etc...
writer's questions were precise and inviting for discussion. i personally felt that it was watching a television interview.
kudos to the writer anyway. it's a very good book.
Top reviews from other countries
You will learn to ignore all conventional business rules and follow your instinct. You will read of numerous idiotic mistakes the most sucesful companies on the planet did when starting up, thus you will become more confident.
If they managed to become so successful after all these mistakes, then you actually stand a chance after all.
Did Adobe truly got it's name after a random map choice???
Did Yahoo operate from a flooding basement for a few months???
Was Paypal unable to make a simple transaction at it's first VC presentation???
Then I can make it.
Then you can make it.
Then we all stand a fair chance for success.
More than providing me with knowledge, this book gave me confidence. Confidence that I can can overcome my mistakes.













