Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston
This review was published originally on Amazon.com
The author, an English major who currently runs a well-known venture capital firm (or venture nursing/nurturing house in my opinion) together with her star partners after the publication of the book, is the right person to write such a book. Is it possible to have in depth conversations with a diverse group of successful tech startup founders individually? Yes, it is through this book. Someone paid $2.63 million to have a lunch with Warren Buffet. If you want to gain insight of tech startups, what would you pay to chat with 32 successful startup founders? That is the value of this book.
Let me quickly point out that all startups in the book are tech startups; more specifically, information technology (mostly software, some hardware) tech startups. I am a tech person, but I do not want techies to monopolize the word "startup” so the title of the book could be more precise.
The biggest strength of this book is its diversity – diverse backgrounds, personalities of founders and diverse paths of their success or ultimate failure of some. This is very important because some people tend to jump to conclusions from one or two instances. Conclusions based on under-sampling are ubiquitous. This book provides ample evidence to show that all roads lead to Rome with only a few basic laws that cannot be violated.
Not surprisingly, almost all the founders in the book have some strong opinions, and they are not afraid of expressing them including criticism of others. It would be great (probably a lot of work) to append some comments from those criticized, and independently checked facts. For example, the founder of ArsDigita blames the management team brought by VC for the ultimate collapse of ArsDigita. I am inclined to believe his accusation of the incompetence of the management team. I have seen my share of such incompetence. However, I am not sure that was the only cause or even the primary cause of the collapse. ArsDigita was a product of the dot-com bubble, and the bubble burst. His gigantic swing of opinion regarding programmers from love to aversion is disturbing.
I think everyone probably has different favorite chapters. If I recommend this book to my friends, I will tell them that the following chapters are must-read:
Ch3. Wozniak of Apple, Ch15. Graham of Viaweb, Ch18. Newmark of Craigslist, Ch.21. Geschke of Adobe.