Pick the Next Founders At Work
"Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days" by Jessica Livingston of Y Combinator is one of the most enjoyable "work" books that I've read in a while. It's a collection of interviews of startup founders of mostly recent tech companies like Blogger (Evan Williams) and Del.icio.us (Joshua Schachter).
A lot of the content I have read before, but rarely from the founder's perspective. Its fascinating to hear when they felt at their lowest and in some cases when they turned a corner and felt successful. You'll also get a multitude of opinions on VCs, business plans and some insights into starting your own company. If you're considering a start-up or just want to do a start-up vicariously check out the book.
You can check the full list of interviews here. If you have some suggestions about who she should interview for the sequel there's a thread discussing it on Y Combinator News.
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Yeah, i've gotten quite a bit out of the book. The ViaWeb discussion was really interesting. The cautionary tale of ArsTechnica was especially interesting; I don't recall having heard it before.
"Founders at Work" is an excellent book. Too many business books get lost in detail or in trying to drive home a point. This one on the other hand, let the founders speak for themselves, and the varying experiences, backgrounds, etc was an excellent choice.
Why not vote/digg the "Next" Founders At Work? A social/collaborative list for the upcoming book sequel? Hmmm...
not great on names so heres my list via companies
love it or hate it there has to be an a story at mySpace
skype
Bill Gates/Paul Allen
Linus Torvalds
gabe newell - Valve software
This was an outstanding series of interviews. I read it twice and on the second pass through posted once a day on each story sharing our perspective having bootstrapped our own tech startup over the past year. That digest can be found here->
http://www.grid7.com/founders-at-work-digest
The Spolsky post in particular drew quite a bit of fire from the MS crowd as we have quite a different philosophy on development.
sean
oh and as far as nominations for the next Founders series:
-Feedburner
-StumbleUpon
-LinkedIn (not sure why Reid Hoffman wasn't in the last one)
-Digg (same for Jay and Kevin)
-Photobucket
-threadless or cafepress
-Macromedia (before Adobe)
-iStockPhoto
-Amazon web services
-Bit Torrent
-Facebook
-Myspace
-Joost/Kazaa/Skype
-Last.fm
-Wordpress
-Napster/Plaxo
-Priceline
-Prosper
-Real Networks
-Reddit
-Rhapsody
-Sales Force
-Slingbox
-SugarCRM
-Technorati
-Verisign
-Wikipedia
-Writely
-YouTube
-Zimbra
if they got 70% of those, that would be a killer lineup!
sean
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jared [05.25.07 03:16 AM]
yeah.. i read it few weeks back. i like the interviews related to web companies... hotmail, blogger, viaweb, delicious, etc...