Business Management ABCs

A Review for – Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days (Recipes: a Problem-Solution Ap)

The Lowest Price we could find is $17.99 $13.99

This is the paperback edition of the award winning and best selling book, Founders at Work

“All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever.” Steve Wozniak, Apple

Founders at Work tells of the early struggles for independence and acceptance of many of modern technologys giants. Their stories are told through personal interviews that are at times hilarious, at times painful, but always inspiring. The personalities represented in this book are role models for all startup wannabes who are committed to their visions and want to know what the sacrifices (and excitement) are like.

Review:

The book, “Founders at Work,” is basically just a collection of interviews with several founders of tech companies, with one chapter for each of 32 people. If you aren’t at all familiar with the people or companies, there is a small half-page blurb on each founder. However, you should know that it seems like there was literally no editing done to the interviews, which were obviously voice-recorded, and then later written down. Some founders, like Steve Wozniak, go off on complete tangents. He talks in-depth on hardware design and different types of RAM. There’s a lot of esoteric knowledge in there that I think will lose a non-technical person. This book may be much easier to digest as a book-on-tape.

One negative: the author definitely doesn’t coddle you by explaining the world of start-ups and Venture Capital (VC), which is absolutely full of jargon. It’s never explained what Angel Investors, Limited Partners, or “becoming incorporated” are. It would have been nice to learn at the beginning of the book what the difference between an LLC (limited liability company) and a “C corporation” is. (FYI: the former can’t have stockholders.) Some terms I was able to figure out from context. An example would be that many founders had problems with VC’s and tried to avoid taking money by “growing organically,” which is never explicitly defined. It just means that they don’t take money from sources outside the company to supplement their hiring.

The founders that I most wanted to read about only took up about 10 pages each – David Heinemeier Hansson (37signals / Ruby on Rails), Paul Buchheit (gmail), Blake Ross (firefox), and Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek Software). However, a positive is that there is a wide range of founders that were included. There’s blogging companies (blogger/six apart), webmail (hotmail/gmail), search (yahoo/lycos), Apple, Adobe, and TiVo. The article that was my favorite was actually about a company I’d never heard of: ArsDigita and Philip Greenspun. The story of ArsDigita was that they wound up taking VC money and got run into the ground. Greenspun explains this all, but also goes into how a programmer should really be more than just a coder; he should be a true professional like a doctor or lawyer. For instance, a developer should be speaking directly to customers, because when you send a sales guy to do it, they can promise anything. And if you’re off in a corner coding, that’s a perfect candidate to outsource. He talks about how software developers should be good writers and communicators, and should care about quality by doing things like code reviews. Since that’s my job right now, Greenspun really struck a cord with me. Most companies could treat the profession differently; it could and should be more.

There were several pervasive themes repeated by everyone in the book. The main one was to be persistent. Also, make sure that you found the company with more than yourself, and with people you like on a personal level. And keep expenses low, so that you don’t have to take VC money.

You should do what your customers want and deliver a product that makes them happy. Or solve a problem that YOU have personally, and see if it applies to others. Don’t force yourself to follow the idea from your original business plan. And definitely don’t worry about what your competitors are doing because you’re bought out for having a large user base, and for having “buzz” (being popular).

“Founders at Work” is eye-opening to read, mainly because you learn that these techy guys starting companies aren’t all that business savy and most don’t have good communication skills, but they work through it. You don’t need an MBA to succeed; they simply hire in the sales or marketing guys. You get somebody else to be CEO/CFO/COO. It really makes you think, “hey, I could actually be doing this.”

This is why I recommend the book: it is inspiring. It could use some editing, but it’s worth a read.