Business Startups Entrepreneurship

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days (Summary)

by Jessica Livingston

Before Apple was the most valuable company in the world, it was just Steve Wozniak's hobby project. His employer, Hewlett-Packard, formally rejected his design for the personal computer five separate times. His co-founder, Steve Jobs, had to beg him to quit his day job to start the company. The early days of world-changing companies are never the clean, linear stories we're told; they are sagas of rejection, doubt, and accidental genius.

Your First Idea Is Almost Always Wrong

Many legendary companies didn't start with their breakthrough idea. Success came from listening to early users and being willing to completely abandon the original plan for a better one that emerged from the market.

Stewart Butterfield's company was building a quirky online game called 'Game Neverending.' The game was a flop, but a side-feature they built for sharing photos became a hit with their small user base. They scrapped the game and focused on the photo tool, which became Flickr, later acquired by Yahoo for over $20 million.

Ignorance Can Be a Superpower

Many founders succeeded precisely because they didn't know what was supposedly 'impossible.' Lacking deep industry experience, they weren't constrained by conventional wisdom and could attack problems from a completely fresh perspective.

Max Levchin of PayPal admits that if he and his co-founders had known more about the finance industry and the astronomical rates of online fraud, they would have been too scared to even start the company. Their naivete forced them to invent a novel fraud detection system from scratch that experts thought couldn't be built.

Launch Something Awful, Quickly

The interviews consistently show that waiting for a 'perfect' product is a recipe for failure. The key is to launch a minimum viable product to get real user feedback as quickly as possible, even if it's embarrassing.

Craigslist was never a grand vision. Craig Newmark started it as a simple email list to his friends about cool events in San Francisco. It was crude, simple, and had no business model, but its raw utility caused it to grow virally long before it was ever considered a 'product'.

Co-founder Conflict Is the Real Killer

More startups die from co-founder disputes than from competition or product failure. The book's interviews reveal the intense stress of the early days and how critical a stable, trusting relationship is for survival.

Ron Wayne, Apple's third co-founder, famously sold his 10% stake back to Jobs and Wozniak for just $800 after only 12 days. He was older and risk-averse, and he couldn't handle the potential financial liabilities and personality clashes, walking away from what would have become billions.

Go deeper into these insights in the full book:
Buy on Amazon
Listen to the full audio book with an Audible Free Trial.
As an Amazon Associate, qualifying purchases help support this site.