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Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

Jessica Livingston · 17 HN comments
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Amazon Summary
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.
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Hacker News Stories and Comments

All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this book.
I don't have a good failure story. I'm a semi-regular reader of https://www.failory.com/interview-failure though so I think there might be a market. At least if you can identify a couple of patterns (e.g. filters in the left pane of https://www.failory.com/cemetery). In the interviews I often see entrepreneurs pointing to (marketing?) their new projects which might get outdated fast.

I did enjoy Founders At Work (https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/...) 5 years after it got published. Not sure if a list of company names on the cover would work for failures.

josh_carterPDX
Thanks for the links. I'll check them out!
This is discussed at length in the first chapter of Founders at Work. The chapter is written by Max Levchin (co-founder of PayPal) and discusses his bitter feud with Elon Musk over Musk's desire to convert systems over to Windows. Interestingly Musk is never mentioned by name.

https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/...

davidgerard
This was also in Eric Jackson's history of PayPal. Jackson was a marketing guy, so had no technical dog in the fight, but he wrote this particular fight up.

Jackson was the guy who realised that PayPal and eBay had massive synergy and worked super hard to get PayPal in there. Eventually leading to eBay buying them out, and Musk and Thiel going from merely rich to actually billionaires.

"Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days" is a good collection of stories: https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/...
Simorgh
I quite enjoyed this book because it gave insight into the hard work and dedication that characterised many individuals, such as Max Levchin, the co-founder of Paypal.

As an aside, I also recommend Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton. This book details the tumultuous roller-coaster ride that was the early days of Twitter. I feel it is an essential read to truly understand the mentality, minds and drive of many within the start-up world.

rpeden
Peter Seibel's Coders and Work also provides an interesting perspective. As the title implies, it focuses more on developers than founders...although in some cases, the developer being interviewed was also a startup founder.

Some of the interviews give an interesting look at the early days of some companies, too. I found jwz's interview provided some good insight into the early days of Netscape, as well as the reasons why the company started to go downhill.

walterbell
Susan Lammer’s 1986 Programmers at Work is available online:

https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/2008/01/11/all-right...

I know you didn't ask for books but here are some interesting ones. The first two cover individuals and the last two cover the works of others.

Coders At Work (https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Program...)

Founders At Work (https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/...)

Architecture of Open Source Systems (https://www.amazon.com/Architecture-Open-Source-Applications...)

Architecture of Open Source Systems - Vol 2 (https://www.amazon.com/Architecture-Open-Source-Applications...)

Nov 16, 2015 · nosequel on Jessica Livingston
http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/d...

As you wished.

bootload
thx @nosequel, I've got this book and have to re-read it asking that question. What I was thinking was a book more along the lines of specifically defining the characteristics then giving examples.
Slightly meta here - but I think everyone here (including myself) is just being pedantic about the article. If you want to know what makes successful businesses reading 1 or 2 articles about one on globally distributed publications is not going to give you the whole picture.

Founders at Work is a good example of painting a better picture -> http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/d...

simonebrunozzi
I love that book, and I fully agree with your comment.
Sadly I don't really read quite as much as I used to; but following are the books I read this year (though none of them were released this year).

- Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Problem...

Excellent book covering interviews with founders of companies that became really big. I thought this book was really insightful and inspirational.

- Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

http://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Programm...

I just started this book, but already like it - the format is the same as the Founders at Work book but on the developer side of things.

- World Changers: 25 Entrepreneurs Who Changed Business as We Knew It

http://www.amazon.com/World-Changers-Entrepreneurs-Changed-B...

It was a good book, but not as inspirational as the Founders at Work book. Some of the stories are good, but since the majority of the people are not in my sector, the book just wasn't as interesting to me.

- Ready Player One

http://www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-Cline/dp/03078...

An excellent story that really made me nostalgic to my younger years - definitely recommend this one.

- The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death: A Novel

http://www.amazon.com/Mystic-Arts-Erasing-Signs-Death/dp/034...

I have a weak spot for Charlie Huston books - he's not the best author (sorry Charlie), but his books are really easy to approach. This is one of his best ones and is about crime scene cleaners - a nice departure from all the Joe Pitt vampire novels.

- World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

http://www.amazon.com/World-War-Oral-History-Zombie/dp/03073...

It's OK... I read it half way through and then once I got busy I just couldn't get myself to pick it up again. I will finish it eventually.. just not yet.

- Hyperion

http://www.amazon.com/Hyperion-Dan-Simmons/dp/0553283685

A friend recommended this book to me - I could not get past the first chapter.

ericfrenkiel
I'm a huge fan of Dan Simmons, and his Hyperion series is well worth the time. Once you make it beyond the first few pages of Hyperion, I guarantee you'll be hooked. There are a total of 4 books in the series and each is truly a masterpiece in science fiction.

I would also recommend "The Terror," which is a historical fiction piece loosely based on the first expedition to the North Pole.

Simmons has won multiple awards in Science Fiction and leaps across categories with aplomb. I highly recommend any of his work!

nhebb
I read Hyperion a few months ago, and I only read to the end so that I wouldn't be left with that nagging feeling of leaving a book unfinished. Much like the Grammy's and the Emmy's, I've found that book awards may be a good indicator of what other people like, but often not a good indicator of what I like.
"Incidentally, this is one of the reasons that crunch time is a failed development methodology, as I’ve mentioned in past posts on this blog; developers get tired and start making stupid mistakes."

Totally. Strangely enough, Founders at Work (http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Problem...) is chock full of startup founders extolling the virtues of overwork. Is this some survivorship bias or does overwork in startups really lead to shipping sooner and achieving product/market fit faster?

It's never been my experience that sustained overwork of software developers leads to actual, measurable productivity increases due to the "two steps forward, one step back" phenomenon. Yeah, you can ship a feature "sooner" but it'll be buggy and disappointing to the end users (probably causing them to hesitate to pay - are you really achieving product/market fit with a buggy product?)

We encourage every developer to find a sustainable pace (it's different for everyone) with the guidance that it's almost always less than 50 hours a week. Why is it that software companies think that overworking software developers is a net positive?

cpeterso
If your business or project plan requires herculean overtime, then maybe it's not a very good plan. :)
mgkimsal
Or maybe that's your moat. "The only people who'd even be capable of competing with me have to have a team of people willing to work 140 hours/week with no pay for 9 months - once I crack this I'll have no competitors!"
mark-r
And then 8 months later you find out about a group that had the same plan, but got started a month before you did...
eliben
I think it's important not to reason in absolutes. Taking an obviously multi-person, multi-year project like Starcraft and arbitrarily setting a 2-month deadline "because some code is there from Warcraft II" is not good use of crunch-time. If you and a friend have an idea and can pull out a prototype in a week, then overworking that week may be not a bad thing (as long as it's not followed by another such week).
MattRogish
That's a good point. I believe the research (and my experience) suggests overwork can provide benefit in the short run (2-3 weeks) but much after that and you get diminishing and then negative marginal returns - followed by a "time off" recovery period.

Strategically used, overwork can provide benefit but it sounds like Starcraft was a year-long overwork, which is a disaster. Many of the "Founders at Work" stories glorify overwork and make it sound like it was part of the norm of the culture, so it seems like it was much longer than a few weeks.

Which is why I'm confused - either long-running overwork caused these companies to succeed, or it was not bad enough to cause them to fail?

Hence also why most people don't realize that Paypal was the side effect of a company that originally was created to handle fraud. Source: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1430210788/

To take this to the next step, this is also why I believe Paypal is one of the very few companies that has been able to scale online payments. I'd love to see anyone challenge their ability to balance customer service with fraud prevention at scale.

jacquesm
Starting a new payment service, even from the point of view of a company specializing in fraud prevention is a lot harder now than it was in the past. You're basically entering an arms race that has been going on for a decade+ as a rookie or at best a semi adept. Likely your main contribution to the field before folding is target practice.

Gittip should work with a party that is already in the possession of the required knowledge or they'll be shutting down. This post raised their visibility as rookies considerably and you can expect the sharks to move in now that there is blood in the water.

whit537
Thanks, I started a ticket for this:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/357

- The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steven Blank. [1]

- Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston. [2]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/09...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Problem...

hga
While I haven't read it (it came out after I'd left the "game"), what Four Steps.... covers is absolutely critical, I've seen and been in too many startups that failed due to failing in Customer Discovery in one way or another.

In earlier times, here are the books I found to be particularly useful: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021570

Others have endorsed E-Myth and I'll note that what's most valuable in Walking the High-Tech High Wire is in part their Customer Discovery story....

abbasmehdi
purple cow and how is that?
hajrice
^^ Great books. Also checkout the books about the lean startup by Eric Ries (there's like 3-4 of them now).

I would also recommend the ultimate sales machine. Even though I've only read 20 pages since I started reading it one month ago (yes, I run a startup), it's really interesting and helpful.

The book I've learned most from is Founders at Work: http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Problem....
Johngibb
I feel like in the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that this is pg's wife's book.

I second the recommendation, however ;)

While I'm at it. I'll tell you about some other's I have read.

- Getting Real by 37 Signals http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ - Rework by 37 Signals http://37signals.com/rework/

These are great and really get your mind thinking about alternatives to what most people believe.

- Sarah Lacy's Once your lucky, twice you're good. http://www.amazon.com/Once-Youre-Lucky-Twice-Good/dp/1592403...

This isn't a technical book, but can really get you motivated to succeed reading the stories of previous successes! It also gives a bit of an insight into the internal workings of a start up in the early stages. It highlights networking as an important factor!

- Start up success guide - http://www.amazon.com/Startup-Success-Guide-Books-Profession...

This book was quite good, but felt a bit dated in comparison to Rob Walling's 'Start up book'.

Finally 'Founders at work' is definitely worth a read. http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Problem...

Jul 27, 2010 · jmatt on You Can’t Take It With You
I think Coders at Work and Founders at Work did a pretty good job with this.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1430219483/

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1430210788/

My inspiration is Steve Wozniak. To this day, I try to write software with the same thinking he used when he built the Apple II. Get a clear picture of what you want, keep it as simple as possible, stand on the shoulders of giants but build your own tools when you have to, and keep all the details in your head. (This last one has made a huge difference in my work.)

You have no excuse not to read about this because Chapter 3 of Jessica Livingston's "Founders at Work" is one of the best treatments of Woz and is on line here:

http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html

Then check out

"IWoz"

http://www.amazon.com/iWoz-Computer-Invented-Personal-Co-Fou...

"Founders at Work"

http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Problem...

Apr 24, 2009 · edw519 on How Woz Gets Things Done
Nice article. I think a better topic would be, "How Woz Got Things Done." For a quick read, try Chapter 3 of "Founders at Work", which is well worth the price of the whole book.

http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Problem...

This is Jessica Livingston's (of YC) interview of Woz. Specifically I love the way he talked about designing the Apple II. Even though it was hardware, it totally applied to the design and development of software. Perfectly suited to natural optimizers (aren't we all) who want to keep their finger on the pulse of every detail of their project.

This changed the way I treated my own work. No detail is too small and there's always plenty of room in my personal memory for whatever I need to remember. It's made a big difference.

robg
Agreed, that is a great chapter. JL's lead-in also sums it up perfectly - Woz is a hardware guy and it shows through in his thinking. But the notion of always thinking about and refining our models is what still sticks with me.
wallflower
Jessica Livingston posted her interview of Woz on the Founders at Work website. It's one of my favorite in the book because you really get a sense of the pure hacker/engineering genius Woz is. If you do not already own it, consider buying the book through edw519's link - it's an amazing trove. I bought my copy at Powell's Bookstore in Portland.

http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html

edw519
Thanks for the link, wallflower. I forgot about that. (Buy the book anyway. You just don't know which chapter might change your life.)

This pretty much sums it up for me:

"When you design with very few parts, everything is so clean and orderly you can understand it more deeply in your head, and that causes you to have fewer bugs. You live and sleep with every little detail of the product."

10ren
I was going to object to your "finger on the pulse of every detail of their project", because as complexity increases, it eventually becomes overwhelming and too difficult to understand, and you have to construct intermediate representations to handle the complexity - that is, a form of modularity, not for coding it, but just for understanding it.

But then I saw your quote here, about the need to understand it, and the having very few parts makes that possible, by limiting the complexity.

edw519
He says it far better than I. Hell, he does everything far better than I, even dancing. (Does he drink beer or play foosball?)
davi
It's because I could never build anything, I just competed with myself to come up with ideas that nobody else would come up with.

Avoided local maxima of the at-that-time-doable, while still making -- completing designs on paper = iterating faster. Iterate more times than competition on paper, never build anything, then when time comes to build, you can supersede competition.

This approach may only work for perfectly logical, deterministic systems, like computers.

access_denied
This comment is a positive example of what I want to see here on HN. It's not just commenting or adding an association one had. It's developing the material further. He really said something. That's good.
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