Founders features thirty two interviews from the past twenty five years with the founders of startups and key employees of tech companies. The work is chockfull of interesting tidbits and practical lessons for would be or current entrepreneurs. Often overly technical people are not thought of as socially adept but most of these people are likable or interesting tech types. Hardly any of them characterize a cut-throat--though they are extremely competitive--mentality but many of them make decisions based on, somewhat surprisingly, a personal understanding of ethos.
The founder’s ethos is rooted in providing a needed service for themselves, users, or customers. They listened closely to user preferences and built something of value for them, and sometimes unwittingly, a profitable company ensues. Evan Williams relates how Blogger was the second idea for Pyra, and how the founders focused on their pet project, leaving their original product behind. Paul Graham, Co-founder of Viaweb, relates how he initially did not set out to found a company but inadvertently stumbled on a great product. Mitchell Kapor, Co-founder of Lotus Development, only pestered Personal Software with his ideas but ended up with “the killer app killer (p. 89)” by developing Lotus 1-2-3 and crushing VisiCalc, the leading application of its day.
Products evolved and the founders adjusted quickly, as in the case of PayPal and TiVo, and for Flickr and Blogger, the authoritative idea got in the way of the eventual product. For several founders, a good idea that helped themselves solved problems of their users so there already was a ready and willing client base, e.g., Hotmail, Del.ici.ous, Craigslist, and Firefox.
However, the book does not relate simple business common sense, pay attention to your customers. The devil, as they say, is in the details, and the execution of startup success is not a simple track to easily follow. The `as told to’ nature of the interviewees, actual stories of their challenges and strategies is captivating.
The founders share certain characteristics in common: hard-working, bright, responsive, innovative, and efficient. The startups' founders created value for their customers and in this, there is a major lesson here to learn for technologists in companies large and small. These founders demonstrate how to take a great idea and how these ideas evolve to fruition.
The book is valuable then for understanding the process of taking a key technical insight to completion. All of their methods may not work at larger companies, since these are startups, but in the course of the work larger companies passed on ideas that proved to be advantageous and money-making. Larger companies could learn a great deal about programmers and how to take their ideas respectfully to profit from them.
Several founders were unsure about starting a startup--Mitch Kapor, Steve Wozniak, and Mena Trott--or, were unsure about what their product should be: Joe Kraus and Max Levchin. Charles Geschke, while working at Xerox PARC, could never convince Xerox that PostScript was useful, thus, he started Adobe Systems. Critically though, these founders were quick studies, learned quickly, and moved to their own startups. The bottom line is that the founders came out ahead. Wozniak, most well-known of all, worked for HP while developing both Apple I and Apple II.
There are numerous points where the stories are charming. One of the best is offered by Ann Winblad of Open Systems who related her story of chutzpah:
So I get in front of these 60 or 70 guys and these guys are probably all in their 50s and I’m in my 20s, and we had a ‘blue light special,’ where we said, ‘If you give me a check today for $10,000, you can have unlimited rights to one of our modules.’ . . . . I went home with, I think, like 12 or 15 of these $10,000 checks in my purse (p. 301).
Livingston interviews the tedious as well, as in the case of one of the thorniest and most difficult stories: Phil Greenspun’s detailed description on the rise and fall of ArsDigita.
A final instructive lesson is the process of angel and venture capital funding: particularly in the case of ArsDigita. You will not find an in-depth analysis of venture capital but funding for ArsDigita led to its demise, oddly enough. The experience of the founder, Greenspun, among the other founders, offer insights on when to not accept, to be open to, or to garnish venture funding.
The conversational style of writing is unfortunately one of the weaknesses of the work as well. The prose could be improved without compromising the actual ideas of the speakers. The interviews seem to have been transcribed directly without editing. The repetitive reading of "yeah" for example proves grating. “Yes” is still accurate but proper as a substitute. Editing is needed: "of" should be off (p. 335).
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