Product Description

"All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever." —Steve Wozniak, Apple

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7791 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 500 pages

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.

Customer Reviews

I liked it and I lived through that period
Having started programming in 1979, I remember most of the book. The author has done an excellent job in eliciting information from the people being interviewed. In some cases they were allowed to wander a bit but it was extremely interesting what their thoughts were. I would imagine the editing process has cut out a lot of other information. Maybe publish that as an aside to this book. Maybe on the web or something. I'm sure it will bring a deeper sense of what they were going through.
I really enjoyed the book and have learned several lessons from the people in the book. I believe any entrepreneur in tech should read this. The lessons are invaluable and most likely you are an naive as many of them were.
I highly recommend this book. Its an excellent read.
-T-

32 interviews with technology entrepreneurs
32 intervies wiht some of the biggest names in technology in history. anyone in this industry should find some interviews worth reading and re-reading. i've found the following interviews realy interesting; Sabeer Bhatia (hotmail.com) and his advice on business plans. Stephen Kaufer (TripAdvisor.com) experience on building the largest online travel community in the world. James Hong (HotOrNot.com) - a lot of wisdom from a young entrepreneur.

worth reading indeed - just take some time ... it's a thick book

Attention all tech entrepreneurs!
If you want to be a millionaire, who do you ask how to do it? You ask millionaires how they did it. If you want to start a tech company, what do you do? You read this book. Simply the best.