Founders at Work

by Jessica Livingstone

This is a book of interviews with computer or web company founders and it is a gem, stuffed with history and interesting observations. There are too many different voices, to make it easy to sum up, each founder's experience was distinct.

But there are a few themes that surface again and again:

Two or three guys in a garage or dorm room can get a lot done if they put all they have within them into it. Being really smart, or a technical genius obviously helps, but founding a company and making it successful will eat up all your time. You need a lot of energy. Can you go on little sleep, forget about time with friends and family?

Be cheap. Bootstrap and build a product that is used as early as possible, if possible without taking money from investors. Not only will they be more willing to give you money, you also may not even need it. Release early & often, so you make something people want.

Listen to your customers and do what they need. What they tell you is more important than what your competition does. Keep them happy. If that takes nights of answering customer support mails, than that is what you do. God is in the details. Eat your own dog food: use your products yourself. (Some great companies like PayPal and TiVo are not really what they look like. They make things easy to use, because they hide all the hard parts that make them hard to copy.)

Things won't go according to plan. Things never work as expected. Things always take more work than you think. Horrible problems arise regularly and money runs out.

The right people in the founding team, people you respect, people you can trust, make a lot of difference when things get tough.