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Jessica Livingston
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Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days First Edition

by Jessica Livingston (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 644 ratings
See all formats and editions

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 businesses do―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.

Previous page
  1. ISBN-10
    1430210788
  2. ISBN-13
    978-1430210788
  3. Edition
    First Edition
  4. Publisher
    Apress
  5. Publication date
    September 16, 2008
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    5.81 x 1.09 x 9 inches
  8. Print length
    506 pages
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jessica Livingston is a founding partner at Y Combinator, a seed-stage venture firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Mountain View, California. She was previously vice president of marketing at investment bank Adams Harkness. In addition to her work with startups at Y Combinator, she organizes Startup School (www.StartupSchool.org). She has a bachelor's degree in English from Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Apress; First Edition (September 16, 2008)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 506 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1430210788
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1430210788
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.57 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.81 x 1.09 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 644 ratings

About the author

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Jessica Livingston

Jessica Livingston

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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.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
644 global ratings
A classic, but skip Apress’ awful paperback edition
5 Stars
A classic, but skip Apress’ awful paperback edition
This book contains great interviews by an insightful and influential person. While I haven’t finished it yet, I am writing this review mostly to be able to add some product images. I was horrified by the quality of the printing of this book! Apress, the publisher, ought to be ashamed. I have uploaded images showing how poorly the printed word looks in the paperback edition. Note the awful dithering (fuzziness). None of the letters are crisp. It almost looks like a cheap photocopy on a bargain-basement laser printer.I do not know if the hardcover edition has this problem or not.
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Top reviews from the United States

Graybeard
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent
Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2017
Verified Purchase
This is a wonderful collection of interviews of company founders and co-founders. Kudos to the author for asking good questions and kudos to the interviewees for their candid, fascinating, detailed answers.

What surprised me most was how down-to-earth and normal most of these successful people were. Only a couple of them seemed full of themselves. The rest, surprisingly, were just the opposite. Their stories about their startup days provided insights into their values, motivations, aspirations, points of view, work ethic; as well as their worries, fears, doubts, and concerns; plus their approach to making tough decisions and a recognition of their personal limitations and flaws. Their interview responses are full of insights into their decisions about business development, product development, product management, pricing, promotion, distribution, customer service, technical support, accounting, finance, hiring and technology choices; and dealing with venture capitalists, business partners and actual or potential competitors.

The interviews also provide a lot of insights into technology trends and market trends during the time that the founders' companies were starting up.

Here are the companies whose founders were interviewed, in the order they appear in the book: PayPal, Hotmail, Apple, Excite, Software Arts, Lotus Development, Iris Associates, Groove Networks, Pyra Labs (Blogger.com), Yahoo, Research in Motion, Marimba, Gmail, WebTV, TiVo, Viaweb, del.icio.us, ONELIST, Bloglines, Craigslist, Flickr, WAIS, InternetArchive, Alexa, Adobe Systems, Open Systems, Hummer Winblad, 37signals, ArsDigita, Fog Creek Software, TripAdvisor, HOT or NOT, Tickle, Firefox, Six Apart, Lycos, Aliant Computer Systems, Shareholder.com.

This book is perfect for anyone interested in entrepreneurship, technology startups, technology companies in general, and business books in general. I've read the book once already and now I'm in the middle of reading it a second time. I wish there were an audio version of it.
11 people found this helpful
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skg
5.0 out of 5 stars Entrepreneurial Role Models
Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2007
Verified Purchase
This is a wonderful book with special appeal for entrepreneurs, especially those interested in Internet and software companies. It covers the bases, and includes interviews with Steve Wozniak (Apple), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Tim Brady (Yahoo), Steve Perlman (WebTV), James Hong (Hot or Not), and about two dozen others. There's an incredible diversity of backgrounds of these founders, as well as the lessons that can be learned from their stories. While most business biographies demonstrate diminishing marginal returns relative to the wisdom they can impart, this book is a clear exception. Every story is different and teaches something new. And some of these interviews are incredible -- revealing stories that many of us have never heard before. This book is highly recommended as a great source of entrepreneurial wisdom and inspiration.

Steven K. Gold
Author,  Entrepreneur's Notebook: Practical Advice for Starting a New Business Venture
One person found this helpful
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Christopher R. Field
4.0 out of 5 stars Great content but kindle edition leaves much to be desired
Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2010
Verified Purchase
I bought the kindle edition of this book and I found it to be a terrible reading experience. Quote often it seemed like pieces of sentences were missing and occasionally when going from one page to another I would see the text of two lines superimposed on each other. I don't have a kindle so I used the android kindle app and kindle for the PC and both left much to be desired. Also I hated that if I flipped a few pages ahead that it would reset the location. Overall I would not recommend the e-book edition, the quality is horrendous. Also now that I see the prices, I paid more for the terrible kindle edition than the hardcover edition goes for. Anyway I would never recommend paying more for an e-book than a print book because you have less rights than with the print book. Also for a book like this I think there is value to being able to flip through it really quickly while the kindle interface is best for flipping through page by page.

That being said, the quality of the book was great. It was full of all sorts of insights and experiences. They can all be summarized as don't give up, watch out for VC's but don't write them off, listen to your customers, be willing to change, make sure the initial founding team works together well, etc... But just listening the values does not do it justice. You really have to read the experiences. The book is full of all sorts of insights too, not just about entrepreneurship but also about the individual companies. For example I was really impressed about PayPal and the fraud stuff they did and how valuable that was. I just never knew. Overall I think the book was very well put together. Although some of the founders liked to talk a lot more than others and it droned on and on. But others were brief and insightful. I would definitely recommend this.

If I bought the print edition I suspect I would be giving it 5 stars. But really the kindle experience is probably worth 0 stars. But the content is so good that I figure 4 stars is fair. Since at this time I see hardcover editions for $5 or $6 new I would say go grab one of those now!!! The book is definitely inspirational.
8 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Francesco
3.0 out of 5 stars Great inspiring stories, some "ego" fille interviews...
Reviewed in Italy on July 18, 2020
Verified Purchase
Overall the book is very good, it shows how hard work and believing in your ideas can give you great (work) satisfaction.
Some interviews are "polluted" by the interviewee ego, but overall it is an enjoyable book.
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Paulo Roberto Feldmann
5.0 out of 5 stars Theory & Practice
Reviewed in Brazil on February 25, 2018
Verified Purchase
Excellent book. Many very interesting cases. I will use the book in my classes of start up. It is a technology book.
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Relentless_explorer
5.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining business read
Reviewed in Canada on January 22, 2017
Verified Purchase
5 stars to the author for going out there and compiling all these stories together.

The book is basically a collection of stories about people who worked hard and succeeded.
People and situations are different, but the formula stays the same: "Work hard, fail, work hard, stay focused, succeed."
One person found this helpful
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Ted H
4.0 out of 5 stars Great stories for the tech geeks amongst us.
Reviewed in Australia on February 3, 2020
Verified Purchase
Really cool info, it is a little on the dry side reading wise.
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Alexandros Papadopoulos
5.0 out of 5 stars Learn from the best. Actually learn from the most ridiculous mistakes, the best ever did :)
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 23, 2016
Verified Purchase
Are you an entrepreneur? Are you about to launch a startup? Then this book is for you.
You will learn to ignore all conventional business rules and follow your instinct. You will read of numerous idiotic mistakes the most sucesful companies on the planet did when starting up, thus you will become more confident.
If they managed to become so successful after all these mistakes, then you actually stand a chance after all.
Did Adobe truly got it's name after a random map choice???
Did Yahoo operate from a flooding basement for a few months???
Was Paypal unable to make a simple transaction at it's first VC presentation???
Then I can make it.
Then you can make it.
Then we all stand a fair chance for success.

More than providing me with knowledge, this book gave me confidence. Confidence that I can can overcome my mistakes.
2 people found this helpful
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