Jessica Livingston – Founders At Work: Stories of Startups Early Days

Description

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.

Table of contents (32 chapters)

• Max Levchin

  Pages 1-16

• Sabeer Bhatia

  Pages 17-29

• Steve Wozniak

  Pages 31-59

• Joe Kraus

  Pages 61-71

• Dan Bricklin

  Pages 73-88

• Mitchell Kapor

  Pages 89-102

• Ray Ozzie

  Pages 103-110

• Evan Williams

  Pages 111-125

• Tim Brady

  Pages 127-139

• Mike Lazaridis

  Pages 141-151

• Arthur van Hoff

  Pages 153-160

• Paul Buchheit

  Pages 161-172

• Steve Perlman

  Pages 173-190

• Mike Ramsay

  Pages 191-203

• Paul Graham

  Pages 205-222

• Joshua Schachter

  Pages 223-232

• Mark Fletcher

  Pages 233-246

• Craig Newmark

  Pages 247-255

• Caterina Fake

  Pages 257-264

• Brewster Kahle

  Pages 265-280

• Charles Geschke

  Pages 281-296

• Ann Winblad

  Pages 297-307

• David Heinemeier Hansson

  Pages 309-316

• Philip Greenspun

  Pages 317-344

• Joel Spolsky

  Pages 345-360

• Stephen Kaufer

  Pages 361-375

• James Hong

  Pages 377-385

• James Currier

  Pages 387-393

• Blake Ross

  Pages 395-404

• Mena Trott

  Pages 405-417

• Bob Davis

  Pages 419-426

• Ron Gruner

  Pages 427-446