Book Review: Founders at Work

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups Early Days is one of those books that calls seductively to many web workers. Written by Jessica Livingston of venture capital firm Y Combinator, the book consists entirely of transcribed interviews with founders of high-tech, mainly Internet, startups, all of whom hit it big in varying degrees. You’ll know the names of the vast majority of the firms, if perhaps not of the people: Adobe, Apple, Blogger, Craigslist, Firefox, PayPal, TiVo, and Yahoo! are among the companies featured here.

If you’re getting ready to go out and hit the VC circuit yourself, looking for funding for your own piece of Web 2.0, I’d rate this book a “must buy.” By and large, that’s a key theme of the interviews here; many of the interviewees made their money during the first Internet bubble, and Livingston’s own background leads her to drill down on funding and business matters in her questioning. There is plenty of good advice here, and an abundance of cautionary tales to help you avoid pitfalls while your own company is in the “rapid growth” phase.

Even if you’re not planning to go out and conquer the world tomorrow, it’s still a good read. Many of the people here are telling their best stories, and they have some pretty good stories to tell, from Steve Wozniak’s antics at the founding of Apple to Ann Winblad stuffing $120,00 worth of checks in her purse after a successful sales meeting. Given their head by a sympathetic interviewer, these founders are happy to talk and dispense their wisdom freely.

That said, I think it would be wise to take a more critical approach to this book than many reviewers have done. Remember, many of the subjects here made their money at a time when buckets of it were raining from the sky; luck played a big part in some of these success stories. And on close reading, it’s not clear how much success there is in some of these stories, with their serial failures before the one idea that gets bought out by a larger firm. Livingston passes up some obvious opportunities to ask probing questions that could have made people squirm (and probably caused them to refuse permission to include their interviews in the book).

Overall, I’d say, this book is worth reading if you have dreams of someday running your own startup and going after the brass ring. But treat it as inspiration and entertainment, not as a blueprint. If there’s one lesson that stands out, it’s that every startup is different, and that it takes a lot of hard work and fast thinking to succeed. For ongoing discussion about starting a business, check out GigaOM’s new blog for startup founders, FoundRead.

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post