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Zusammenfassung von Founders at Work

Name: Founders at Work
Rating: 4.1 (78 reviews)
Author: Jessica Livingston

Jessica Livingston

Stories of Startups’ Early Days

4.1 (78 Bewertungen)

22 Min.

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What’s in it for me? Find out what the most successful startup founders have learned along the way.

Back in the late 1990s, there was a gigantic startup boom that resulted in the bursting of the “Dot Com Bubble” in the early 2000s. A great many companies collapsed as funding dried up, but it wasn’t long before a new wave of startups emerged, many of which were part of the Web 2.0 movement that focused on user-generated content.

Around 2006, author Jessica Livingston talked to the founders of many startups from the early days before the first Mac to early Web 2.0 companies like Flickr and Blogger. These casual conversations were transcribed for Livingston’s book and focus less on exact dates and numbers, and more on the ups and downs and lessons learned from launching your own startup.

Although technology has changed in leaps and bounds since 2007, the stories of these pioneering entrepreneurs and the ideas that drove them are still highly relevant today. And while some of these businesses and technologies are the stuff of history, there’s truth to the saying that we can't understand our future without first understanding our past.

In these blinks, you’ll find

what completely different products Paypal and Flickr started out as;
how many millions Yahoo paid for a collection of website bookmarks in 2005; and
why investor money isn’t always the best option.

Many startups, like Paypal and Blogger, didn’t end up with the same idea they started out with.

In talking to the founders of numerous startups, the author found some interesting commonalities between some of the most successful of the past few decades. Among the most obvious is the fact that many big startups ended up with an idea or product very different than the one they started out with.

Take Paypal, for example. You know Paypal as one of the more popular ways to transfer money and make payments online, but co-founder Max Levchin didn’t set out to help people do that.

In the late 1990s, Levchin was working on software for early handheld computer devices like the Palm Pilot. It all started when he created an emulator that generated single-use security passwords, which at the time, people had to buy bulky, expensive devices to do – or even several devices for different passwords and systems. Levchin’s emulator software made all those devices obsolete, putting the technology right into your Palm Pilot.

But the market for this service wasn’t that big around the turn of the millennium, so Levchin thought, what kind of information do people need to keep secure on their devices? The answer was credit card information, which then led to software that let you securely “beam” money from one Palm Pilot to another.

Soon, Levchin and his co-founder Peter Thiel were gaining around 300 users a day, but they maxed out at around 12,000 users. Far more popular was the online money transfer demo on their website. This demo had attracted around 1.5 million users, so it was clear where PayPal’s attention needed to be: web-based money transfers. And once that shift was made, they were soon gaining 20,000 users a day, leading to Ebay eventually purchasing PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002.

Blogger.com is another example of success coming in a different way than expected. Evan Williams and his co-founders started Pyra Labs in 1999 to make project management software. The blog was just one tool with which they were working.

But in working on that tool, they made it super easy for any person, from any computer, to log in, write and instantly publish their work for all to see. It had nothing to do with project management, and Williams nearly went broke in the process, but thanks to his determination and the generous fans who loved the software, Blogger.com ended up a success story. It gained a million users, started generating revenue and was acquired by Google in 2003.

Having an innovative idea can make it difficult for people to see the potential for success.

Another commonality among many early startups was that their ideas weren’t always so well-received, at least not initially. Innovative ideas can seem confusing or too tricky to understand for people, which is problematic if your idea needs funding to develop.

This was the problem for Steve Perlman and his WebTV idea. In 1995, Perlman was already a respected figure in Silicon Valley, having helped Apple develop the first Mac with a color display. Yet Perlman had difficulty selling his idea for interactive TVs that involved more than just changing channels.

When launching a startup, a good team can be more important than a good idea.

Not all startups began with a great idea. Sometimes they didn’t have any idea at all!

This was certainly the case for Joe Kraus, co-founder of Excite, an early web search tool. In 1993, Kraus teamed up with five friends from Stanford University, and they proved that sometimes having an idea isn’t as important as having a good team.

Yahoo and deli.icio.us show how a personal project can become hugely valuable.

The idea for Hotmail came when the founders were annoyed at not being able to access their email outside of the office firewall. Indeed, many startups began as solutions to personal problems, until the founders realized that millions of other people could also benefit from their idea.

The most famous example may be Yahoo, which started out as a collection of online footnotes in the form of web links for all the references being made in the PhD thesis papers of two Stanford grad students, Jerry Yang and David Filo. Quickly, the site grew, with new categories and links being added based on suggestions by enthusiastic fans.

Sometimes, as with Apple and ArsDigita, simpler is better.

Oftentimes, the best solution to a problem isn’t going to be some complex tool that comes with a 500-page user manual. Like Joshua Schachter using descriptive tags to help organize his bookmarks, the best solution is often simple and easy to use.

Simplicity has always been at the heart of Apple, even in its earliest days when engineer Steve Wozniak was working in his apartment, putting together the first Apple computers.

Too much investor money can hurt a startup, so find other ways to generate revenue or stay cheap.

As Philip Greenspun found out, venture capital often comes with strings attached, whether it’s the addition of investor-approved executives or handing over shares in the company or a percentage of the profits. So, if you’re launching a startup and want to stay in control of your business, many founders recommend that you reduce costs or find a way to avoid bringing in new investors.

Joel Spolsky knew about Greenspun’s dilemma with investors, and he founded Fog Creek Software with the aim of following ArsDigita’s lead while avoiding their mistakes.

As Paul Graham has discovered, it’s best to be honest while making something people really need.

Of all the advice given by the founders with whom the author spoke, one of the most repeated was how important it is for entrepreneurs to listen to their customers. With this in mind, the emphasis should be on creating something of real value to others.

Certainly, this was what Paul Graham, of Viaweb and Y Combinator, advises. In fact, “Make something people want,” was the phrase printed on Y Combinator t-shirts. As Graham sees it, the very basis of a startup should be about creating a product or service that makes other people happy and then converting that happiness into money.

With Flickr, the timing was right for photo sharing.

Sometimes the stars align, and your product comes out at just the right time to compliment all the other things that are going on in the zeitgeist. Certainly, this was the fortunate case for photo sharing software Flickr.

Caterina Fake and her husband Stuart Butterfield didn’t plan on this timing, as Flickr is another case of a successful product not being the startup’s original idea. In 2002, Fake and Butterfield began working on Game Neverending, a videogame partly inspired by the popular pet games like Tamagotchi, where a user takes care of a virtual pet and gives it toys while trading items with other users.

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Worum geht es in Founders at Work?

Founders at Work (2007) is a revealing look at what went on in the early days of over 30 influential US startups. In their own words, the founders of landmark companies such as Hotmail and Blogger.com tell their stories about the many ups and downs and twists and turns it took to make their ideas a reality. They also share the lessons they learned and the insight they’ve gained looking back on the trials and tribulations of those chaotic early days.

Bestes Zitat aus Founders at Work

Reduce. Do as little as possible . . . If youve got two things that you want to put together, take away until they go together. Dont add another thing.

—Jessica Livingston

Wer Founders at Work lesen sollte

Entrepreneurs and aspiring inventors
Business students
Anyone looking for inspiration

Über den Autor

Jessica Livingston is one of the founding partners of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, which has advised and invested in a number of successful startups including Dropbox and Airbnb. In 2015, she became a financial backer for OpenAI, a nonprofit dedicated to the responsible and safe development of artificial intelligence.

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