Founders at Work: Stories of Startups Early Days
posted in Management |
Starting one’s own company is the dream of thousands of people. But starting a business, transforming the ideas into products and services, building a team, getting finance, marketing the products and services, attracting and retaining customers, making the business a success, sustaining the success and growth is a very hard and arduous task that requires creativity, imagination, determination, hard work, knowledge of the business, and some amount of luck.
Starting a company and making it capable of surviving and thriving in this brutally competitive world requires a lot of effort and one has to do a lot of things right—right at the first time as you might not get a second chance. In this context, the experiences of people who have started and succeeded, the lessons they learned, the wisdom they gained, etc. have great value. These knowledge and wisdom could help a person who is planning to start his won business or a person who have just started her business.
This contains a series of interviews of the founders of some of the most successful businesses. The interviews are conducted by Jessica Livingston, founding partner at Y Combinator, a seed-stage venture firm. There are 32 interviews and the people interviewed are David Heinemeier Hansson (37signals and creator of Ruby on Rails), Charles Geschke (Adobe), Ron Gruner (Alliant Computer and Shareholder.com), Steve Wozniak (Apple), Philip Greenspun (ArsDigita), Evan Williams (Blogger.com and Odeo), Craig Newmark (Craigslist), Joshua Schachter (Del.icio.us), Joe Kraus (Excite and JotSpot), Blake Ross (Firefox), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek Software), Paul Buchheit (Gmail), Ray Ozzie (Groove Networks and Iris Associates), Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail), James Hong (HotorNot), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Bob Davis (Lycos), Arthur van Hoff (Marimba), Mark Fletcher (ONElist and Bloglines), Ann Winblad (Open Systems and Hummer Winblad), Max Levchin (PayPal), Mike Lazaridis (Research in Motion), Mena Trott (Six Apart), Dan Bricklin (Software Arts and creator of VisiCalc), James Currier (Tickle), Mike Ramsay (TiVo), Steve Kaufer (TripAdvisor), Paul Graham (Viaweb and Y Combinator), Brewster Kahle (WAIS, Internet Archive and Alexa Internet), Steve Perlman (WebTV), and Tim Brady (Yahoo!).
Each interview starts with a background of the interviewee—the founder. The idea of interviewing the founders is a good one as most of these businesses started with one or two people working from their home or garage. So there won’t be many other who would know what happened during the initial days, how they struggled, what the experience was like, what kept them going, and how they succeeded. So in a way Ms. Livingston has written a ‘Reader’s Digest’ version of the biographies of 32 influential people of the computing and IT field.
The interviews are conducted after considerable research and homework. The author’s homework and background research reflects in the quality of the interviews, which is quite excellent. The author has been successful in drawing out the experiences of the founders and making them share the knowledge and wisdom they gained while making their companies successful and household names. The are some excellent photographs that help in breaking the monotony and also seeing the ‘founders at work.’ More pictures could have been added (at least one per interview) to make the book more interesting.
The book contains very tightly packed 500 pages, which makes it a little difficult to read. A more lavish layout could have been used to increase the readability. Also some of the most famous names are missing from the list. But it must have been done for obvious reasons—a lot have been written about them. For example, an interview with Bill Gates or Steve Jobs would add nothing new than what is covered in the many books written about them. From that perspective, the choice of the ‘Founders’ is excellent.
Reading the interviews will provide valuable insights, inspiration, and motivation. This book is interesting, entertaining and teaches a lot about starting a business. Entrepreneurs will learn how these young startups added value to various products or services in a unique way using emerging technologies to start highly successful organizations.
I recommend this book to all people who want to start their own business and who have just started their business and are struggling to move forward. This will be an excellent read for management students and will be a source of inspiration to ordinary people.
Book Details:
- Author: Jessica Livingston
- Publisher: Apress
- Year: 2007
- ISBN: 1590597141
- Cover & Page Count: Hardcover, 500 Pages
You can order online at Amazon.