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Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days (Hardcover)
by Jessica Livingston
| Category:
Entrepreneurship |
| Market price: ¥ 258.00
MSL price:
¥ 248.00
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Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
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| MSL Pointer Review:
An eye-opening and inspiring reading for people who plan to start your own business, with the interviews of 32 great founders of tech companies: Be passionate and try something you never having done before. |
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Author: Jessica Livingston
Publisher: Apress
Pub. in: January, 2007
ISBN: 1590597141
Pages: 500
Measurements: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00790
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-1590597149
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- MSL Picks -
The book Founders at Work is basically a collection of interviews with several founders of tech companies, with one chapter for each of 32 people. If you aren't at all familiar with the people or companies, there is a small half-page blurb on each founder. Some founders, like Steve Wozniak, go off on complete tangents. He talks in-depth on hardware design and different types of RAM. There's a lot of esoteric knowledge in there.
This is an incredibly inspiring book if you're into software and computer science and you have this itching feeling that maybe you should make the plunge and (co)found something for yourself. Especially if you've ever felt that you're onto something new and exciting in terms of a new application, algorithm, or anything else that you think may make a big impact if you tried to take it to market.
Most of the times these ideas slowly die because people don't dare to take the next step. Especially engineers tend to be worried about the risk of failing, investing your savings and not being able to run a company or talk to investors. A lot of this insecurity stems from not knowing what to expect and stepping into an unknown territory.
Reading the interviews in this book really sheds some light on these unknowns. You'll find that many of the founders of these high-tech companies were single-minded engineers themselves that didn't know what to expect either. It doesn't give you a clear set of rules for how to be successful in a business and luck appears to have been a significant ingredient of some of these stories, but it never fails to inspire you.
This book really takes you back to first days of those well-known tech companies, mostly from the perspective of engineers. You feel the atmosphere and enthusiasm that these people felt when they first started. Take following tips to your heart:
- Do something you're passionate about
- Find a solid team to work with, even if just a single partner
- Don't be afraid to start a company even if you have no ideas
- Getting money from VCs is not necessarily important. It can help and hurt.
- From quoting Ing E. Van and Chris
Target readers:
Would-be entrepreneurs, innovation managers, or business owers
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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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From the publisher
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 businessesdo - 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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| View all 6 comments |
Bryan Kennedy (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-30 00:00>
I'm the founder of an early-stage startup, and I can wholeheartedly say that this book has enlightened me. The usual problem with books of this vein is that the author only has one core idea and then fluffs it up to get 300 pages. Founders at Work however is like reading a pile of books written by successful founders, each with their own insights and tidbits of useful advice.
You end up reading these real-life, down-to-earth stories about the early days at Apple and Yahoo and PayPal, and you're seeing you and your co-founder right there. Hey! I code in a towel sometimes too! They aren't telling you the glorified stories their PR guys tell them to say. This is the real deal. It's awfully inspiring.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is thinking of starting, or is currently running a startup. |
Ron Atkins (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-30 00:00>
Reading biographies about successful people is a great, and entertaining, way to learn about business. In this excellent set of interviews, Livingston delves into the early years of some household name companies, such as Apple, Hotmail, and Paypal. Entrepreneurs will learn how these young startups added value to various products or services in a unique way - often using emerging technologies - to start wildly successful organizations that we have benefitted from. I highly recommend this book. |
Beja Springer (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-30 00:00>
I've been looking for a book like this for years. This book makes it easier to see the very first steps to create a successful product and company. The primary themes are an extreme focus on providing value to the customer and an enormous willingness for hard work. You don't have to have all of the answers or all of the contacts to begin. Just begin, persevere, adjust as needed, and focus. Great book for anyone needing a boost in confidence to develop a new product or build a company from the ground up. |
Michael D. Westover (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-30 00:00>
I really enjoyed this book. Unlike the monotonous repetitive nature of a lot of recent business books, the interviewee's personality comes out in each interview. It's very interesting to see who methodically progresses their interview versus the more scattershot (and sometimes brilliant) interview. |
View all 6 comments |
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