Founders at Work Stories of Startups - Early Days By Jessica Livingston
Rizwan Buttar
Chief Innovation Officer @ Pharma Trax | Patient Safety, Drug Surveillance
ABOUT BOOK
Founders at Work (2007) is a revealing look at what went on in the early days of over 30 influential US startups. In their own words, the founders of landmark companies such as Hotmail and Blogger.com tell their stories about the many ups and downs and twists and turns it took to make their ideas a reality. They also share the lessons they learned and the insight they’ve gained looking back on the trials and tribulations of those chaotic early days.
ABOUT AUTHOR
Jessica Livingston is one of the founding partners of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, which has advised and invested in a number of successful startups including Dropbox and Airbnb. In 2015, she became a financial backer for OpenAI, a nonprofit dedicated to the responsible and safe development of artificial intelligence.
What the most successful startup founders have learned along the way ?
Back in the late 1990s, there was a gigantic startup boom that resulted in the bursting of the “Dot Com Bubble” in the early 2000s. A great many companies collapsed as funding dried up, but it wasn’t long before a new wave of startups emerged, many of which were part of the Web 2.0 movement that focused on user-generated content.
Around 2006, author Jessica Livingston talked to the founders of many startups from the early days before the first Mac to early Web 2.0 companies like Flickr and Blogger. These casual conversations were transcribed for Livingston’s book and focus less on exact dates and numbers, and more on the ups and downs and lessons learned from launching your own startup.
Although technology has changed in leaps and bounds since 2007, the stories of these pioneering entrepreneurs and the ideas that drove them are still highly relevant today. And while some of these businesses and technologies are the stuff of history, there’s truth to the saying that we can't understand our future without first understanding our past.
KEY IDEAS
What completely different products Paypal and Flickr started out as;
How many millions Yahoo paid for a collection of website bookmarks in 2005;
Why investor money isn’t always the best option.
What completely different products Paypal and Flickr started out as;How many millions Yahoo paid for a collection of website bookmarks in 2005; and
Why investor money isn’t always the best option.