Founders at Work

Stories of Startups' Early Days

By: Jessica Livingston

Narrated by: Chelsea Kwoka, full cast

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 start-up, to learn how it's done.

But ultimately these interviews are required reference for anyone who wants to understand business, because start-ups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that start-ups do what businesses do - create value - more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful start-ups so insanely productive? Listen to this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.

©2008 Jessica Livingston (P)2021 Upfront Books

Wish I had listened to the book sooner.

Fills the gap between what you know about startups and everything you need to know about startups but didn’t know to ask.

Real

Much better than condensed business books that would take the founder's words and turn it into generic lessons around terms like "resilience", I enjoyed rather hearing the entire story from the founders themselves, very enlightening

The Experience of founders

The Experience of founders are so rich of lesson learned. So many different stories and different way to solve problem.

So much insights for one book

Book has so many valuable information that it feels like you read 10 books in one

excellent stories from the trenches.

Although some of the conclusions are questionable because the founders had only one company under their belt the stories are priceless.