Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

by Jessica Livingston

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Livingston, a founding partner of Y Combinator, interviews 32 founders of iconic tech companies (Apple, PayPal, Hotmail, Flickr, Lotus, Adobe, TiVo, Craigslist) about the scrappy, chaotic early days before product-market fit. The book argues that startup success is less about grand strategy and more about stubborn founders pivoting through rejection, technical crises, and funding droughts until something works.

Published:: 2007
Pages:: 488

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In the Conversation

In this collection, Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days references 3 other books.

It draws on Hackers and Painters, Crossing the Chasm and The Innovator's Dilemma.

Scroll down to read the exact passages where other authors reference this book and what they say about it.

What This Book Draws On

The books Livingston references and why each one mattered to the argument.

Livingston's husband Paul Graham wrote the foreword and YC essays that became Hackers and Painters, and this book operationalizes his thesis that great startups come from great hackers by letting those hackers tell their own origin stories

References

Hackers and Painters

by Paul Graham

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The founders repeatedly describe the chasm-crossing problem Moore named in Crossing the Chasm, recounting how they moved from enthusiast early adopters to mainstream customers

References

Crossing the Chasm

by Geoffrey Moore

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Many interviewees (Kapor, Woz, Bricklin) exemplify Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma by showing how scrappy startups attacked incumbent blind spots in PCs, spreadsheets, and online services