sergiosantos.info

blog and works

Book: Founders At Work

27.May.2007

Founders At Work is a book by Jessica Livingston from Y Combinator. It’s a collection of interviews with the founders of some of the most successful and famous technology companies. From Adobe to Blogger, from Yahoo! to 37signals, there are a total of 32 conversations with unquestionable references of the industry. The interviews cover most of their path from the very beginning: the idea, the early times we don’t usually hear about. Questions like the ones we’ve all wanted to ask like what were their most difficult times, advices or when they figured out that their idea was going to hit big in the market. There are two free sample chapters with Steve Wozniak from Apple and Joel Spolsky from Fog Creek Software.

I’ve read the book trough several weeks and I must say it gives some valuable insights on the industry and on the hole startup business. But there’s a thing you’ll have to keep in mind while reading this book. Even if some success cases seem to be very easy to reproduce, you can never reproduce the context, so for every company mentioned on this book hundreds of others failed in this business. But then again, most of the success comes from persistence and the will to not give up trying, like it’s said by some founders on the book.

From the interviews I’m also able to observe two different groups of founders and startups. Some like the people from Research In Motion or Marimba seem that they had to create something big, one way or another, while other cases like Hotmail or Flickr were more like the right product or idea on the exact time, not taking away of course the merits from their products.

Anyway, this is a great book for those who dream of starting our own company or just like to live by their ideas and ideals.