I finally made time to read Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston

Wow! What an interesting and insightful book! It’s just one of those books that you wish you had read when they hit the shelves, and it leaves you with strange but exciting feeling that you could not possibly have gained the knowledge within from any other source.

From The Horses’ Mouth

The book contains candid one-on-one interviews between the author and 32 entrepreneurs, most of whom have built the most successful tech businesses in the world today.

Lessons On Relevance

What struck me is the fact that most of these success stories originally started out with a different business idea from what eventually made them successful. The challenges they faced and their accidental discoveries make you realise that the tech business world could easily have been a different place than what we know and take for granted today.

My favourite stories are from the early days of computing (Lotus, Apple Computer, Adobe Systems, Software Arts, WAIS, and RIM). There isn’t a single interview that I did not find interesting.

The Rocky Road

I was bowled over by the humorous escapades of Paul Graham (Y-Combinator) and Evan Williams* (Blogger.com) – Things went horribly wrong yet these folks kept going even with little or no money.
*Evan Williams sold Blogger.com to Google and went on to co-found twitter.com with Biz Stone

Not many people can claim to have inspired new University programs. These folks can and I recommend this book to anyone in the tech business and everyone who isn’t.

Be warned, once you start reading itll be hard to put this book down

Have you read it yet? What are your thoughts?