Editors' Rating
Published: 19 Jun 2008
Some are born to found companies, some achieve it, and some have it thrust upon them. In Founders at Work, Jessica Livingstone interviews 32 company founders about the most hair-raising and entertaining phase of building a company: the startup.
Starting a company is free – if you have a friend who's a lawyer, Arthur van Hoff tells her. You may not remember van Hoff, but you might well remember his company, Marimba, and his fellow Sun escapee Kim Polese, two of the four co-founders who each put in $25,000. The four, particularly Polese, got a lot of press attention at the time for doing a 'mystery' startup. Everyone assumed they had a really clever plan they were keeping secret but, van Hoff says, in fact they had no idea what they were going to do at all.
'I've learned that the first idea you have is irrelevant', he adds. 'It's just a catalyst for you to get started. Then you figure out what's wrong with it and you go through phases of denial, panic, regret. And then you finally have a better idea and the second idea is the important one.'
You can see this principle at work in many of the profiles that fill this book. Max Levchin started Paypal to do cryptography on handheld devices. Evan Williams' second company, Pyra, was meant to do web-based, collaborative project management; it spawned Blogger.com as a hobbyist sideline that eventually took over the whole company. Mike Lazaridis founded RIM as a contracting company; when they were asked to write a wireless data network they thought up Blackberry. Flickr was a feature that Caterina Fake and her husband, Stewart Butterfield, wrote while they were waiting for parts of their actual product, Game Neverending, to get finished. TripAdvisor.com was meant to be a database for travel agents to use rather than a consumer site.
The biggest single exception may be Brewster Kahle. He was first known for WAIS, a pre-web effort at internet-based information gathering, which he sold to AOL, and second for Alexa, which is the basis of Amazon.com's recommendation system. But his dream all along was the Internet Archive.
Other company founders that Livingston interviewed for this book include Chuck Geschke (Adobe), Steve Wozniak (Apple), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Ray Ozzie (Iris, Groove), Craig Newmark (Craigslist), Ann Winblad (Open Systems, Hummer Winblad), and less familiar names who founded companies like Six Apart, Hot or Not, Firefox, Lycos, Tivo, WebTV, delicio.us and 37signals, plus the creator of Gmail and the first non-founding employee of Yahoo!
Livingston, who is a founding partner of a seed-stage venture herself (Y Combinator) does a pretty good job of interviewing all these people and winkling out of them candid accounts of the key moments in their businesses' growth. On the other hand, she provides no analysis or commentary of her own, not even an introduction. That is supplied by Paul Graham, a fellow partner at Y Combinator and founder of Viaweb, the first application service provider (although the book does not tell you this). To decide whether it's more important to have a garage or a suit in founding a company, you'll have to read the interviews for yourself.
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