Founders at Work
Summary
Livingston, a co-founder of Y Combinator, interviewed thirty-two founders about the early days of their companies, deliberately concentrating on the period before success was apparent. The subjects include Steve Wozniak, Paul Buchheit on Gmail, Max Levchin on PayPal, Sabeer Bhatia on Hotmail, Mitch Kapor, Ray Ozzie, Craig Newmark, Caterina Fake on Flickr, Joe Kraus on Excite, Evan Williams on Blogger and Joshua Schachter on Delicious.
The interview format preserves specifics that retrospective accounts remove. Levchin describes PayPal's fraud problem and the technical response in detail. Buchheit describes building Gmail as a side project and the internal opposition to launching it. Fake describes Flickr emerging as a feature of a failing game. Several describe pivots that were not called pivots at the time, and near-death financing episodes that later summaries omit.
The recurring patterns Livingston identifies include determination mattering more than intelligence, the frequency with which the eventual product differed from the original plan, the ordinariness of the founders relative to their later reputations, and the near-universal presence of a period where the company nearly failed.
The book was published in 2007, so the companies described are from the 1970s through the early 2000s and the technical and funding conditions have changed considerably. The selection is entirely of successful companies, which means the patterns cannot distinguish what caused success from what merely accompanied it. The interviews are lightly edited and some are more forthcoming than others. Its value is the primary material about the early period, which almost no other source preserves at this level of detail.
Key takeaways 8
- The product a company eventually succeeded with usually differed substantially from the one the founders originally intended to build.
- Persistence through periods where the company appeared to be failing was the trait most consistently present across these founders.
- Most of these companies had a near-death episode, usually involving funding, that is absent from later accounts of their history.
- Founders repeatedly ignored advice from experienced people who told them their idea would not work.
- Technical founders solving their own problem produced several of these companies, and the market discovery came afterwards.
- Launching an incomplete product and responding to what users did was more common than developing a complete product before release.
- Internal opposition inside larger companies, rather than external competition, was the main obstacle for products built within them.
- The founders described here were not exceptional in ways visible at the time, which undermines retrospective accounts that treat their success as predictable.
Who should read it
Founders who want primary accounts of the early period from people who were in it, before the narratives were cleaned up.
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