Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days (Recipes: a Problem-Solution Ap)

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For would–be entrepreneurs, innovation managers or just anyone fascinated by the special chemistry and drive that created some of the best technology companies in the world, this book offers both wisdom and engaging insights—straight from the source.

— Chris Anderson, editor–in–chief of Wired Magazine, and author of The Long Tail

“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

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 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.

This is a very well written book, full with interesting details about startup culture, and experiences.

Founders At Work is a series of interviews with founders or key employees of 30 high growth web and tech companies. Apple, Gmail, Paypal Hotmail are just a few of the brand's employees Jessica Livingston interviews.

A great read for anyone locked in the loneliness of trying to accomplish something big.

Some of the interviews are better than others obviously but I subtracted 1 star because I felt many of the questions could have been more pointedly. Yet still an impressive work.

446 pages yet very easy to read.

John Halloran San Juan, PR

Certified Gold Exchange, Inc

CEO

I can't do any better than the reviews that came before so I won't even try. This is a great book. It provides insight and a sense of history for anyone who works in the technology industries, especially those involved in startups.

Being one who likes to read stories of the successful entrepreneurs, it was only natural that I'd be drawn to this book. The subjects in the book didn't necessarily all go to create Google-sized companies, but were still successful either way. They were either taken over or merged (at the time of the book's writing) with other companies.

I do not run or own a company, still I found the book to be quite enlightening to people like me who'd like to break on their own one day. It was quite sobering and instructive to realize just how hard work, passion and perseverance can really take you far. The book is quite an easy read and extremely enjoyable. Just about every story is likely to leave you with a very strong impression on your endeavors, whatever they may be.

Very interesting to know what was on the mind of people starting business that managed to become part of the history like Yahoo, Hotmail, Blackberry RIM, Flickr, Apple, Adobe and Lotus. Basically, people with some geniality and good ideas, faith in a vision, stubbornness, lack of options (sometimes) and a little luck (or a lot in some cases). I definitively recommend it.