Founders at Work - the book
Posted on April 24, 2007
I’ve decided to write about a book that had an excellent exposure amongst bloggers. I know some smarter and better bloggers have reviewed the book so far, but it is the kind of book that you can’t let go and read in 2 days. It’s Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston
I actually bought the book following the very nice reviews, and now it’s the time to make now. If don’t know already, its a collection of interviews with some very famous entrepreneurs.
Tully we take for granted great tools that we use today like Paypal, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Shoops, Apple, Blogger… But the interesting thing is that behind every each tool we have a great entrepreneurship experience - which we are not aware of in the day by day life. Each of these services or products have been a start-up once, with all the problems, crisis, ups and downs at some point.
I’m not going to talk about each of the businesses presented in the book (you should buy
It seems that most of these companies were started by young people, during college or University. That’s not actually a must in creating a great company, but there are some advantages:
- No family and commitments. Very good for spending nights working
- Innovation. Sometimes lack of proper tools is the path to success in creating a product
There are a lot more things to it. As I’ve found some very interesting ideas at http://www.teenbizideas.org I’m going to write a separate thing about teen entrepreneurship.
Working long hours. Considering that some people believe entrepreneurship as being a way to have more free time, and being your own boss - well, you will find that most of these great companies and services were created by their founders working till 3 o’clock each night or having sleepless weeks.
Unsure future. As everybody knows Hotmail, Paypal and the others - now successful services - it’s quite strange to think that the founders didn’t know if they are going to make it. But yes, they struggled with the idea of failure or at least of an unsure future. Some of them didn’t even started as a business (or willing to sell something) they had a nice idea that turned into a company. Yahoo didn’t start as a company, but as a directory of resources for the Universities studies.
Bad payments. OK, most of these founders are really rich now. But they didn’t use to be when running their businesses. They worked their butts for each 50k funding from VC, borrowed from friends and family to sustain their businesses.
Some products didn’t sell. Another thing is that some companies were not really acquired because they had a lot of paying customers and strong revenues. Nope, some were just top-of-the-art technologies that never found a way to monetize. Or at least this is what I understood 
Raising money. Most of them managed to raise money, before, during and after the Internet crash. If the business is good, somebody will come and finance it. They didn’t know how to make business plans, but they learned. They got refused and tried again.
Mistakes They talk about mistakes. Wrong business plans, wrong deals with VC, legal issues.
Location. I’ve came to the conclusion that location is very important, and for a technology company we have Seattle and Silicon Valey. First, it’s easier to get inspired if you pass by Google headquarters each day, and hear about technology each and every way you look. Second, VCs are there.
It’s really an inspiring book if you want to read about how Entrepreneurs have made it. Or if you are not into raising capital, making a big business, have a look over http://www.bootstrapme.com/ and see how you could start a business with low/no funding.
Related posts- Trouble finding innovative business ideas?
- Adobe Romania, a nice(r) place to work
- Employee commitment in bootstrapped versus externally funded companies
- Self publishing a book can be easy
- Interviewing the Author of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur book
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[...] thoughts. First would be Jessica Livingston’s book “Founders at work” (my review here). Jessica has collected an impressive set of stories and interviews how big boys (now) actually [...]