Startup Sundays: Founders At Work
Since yesterday I made the point that "business success" books were invariably problematic, I thought I would continue that theme with today's startup resource.
"Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days" was written in 2007 or so by Jessica Livingston, one of Y Combinator's founding partners. Its goal is to simply interview a bunch of founders of successful startups for their own stories about how and why things turned out the way they did.
As I've noted, the problem with business success literature is the insistence on an underlying narrative and the focus on various cherry-picked facts to support that narrative. It's a problem with literature and human communication in general, but it's especially painful to live through when you're a reader looking for an underlying theory of operations and how to apply that theory.
Many things in life do not work this way, however, where an underlying set of axioms drives us by necessity towards a logical, reasoned success state. That's a very difficult lesson for many people to understand, so authors looking to sell books that people read are forced to go back to narrative form.
Livingston manages to skate this by giving out a bunch of stories, each told by the people involved. That means conflict in the explanations offered and an overall story that doesn't necessarily hold water across-the-board, but that's a feature, not a bug; it strikes me as an honest book. It's like the Plex book, only much better.
This book is a classic and is highly recommended for any engineering-type person interested in forming a successful startup. I thought it was worth about ten times what I paid for it.
From Space-X to a new inside-out Wenkel engine for DoD, it's been an amazing week for inventors.
Hey @bdkoepke , @dmrq70 , @fforfun , @MikeDwyer , @stevenMsmith , @AgileJazz , @XxWolfBanexX , @HappyDawn , @katamen , @SmileSyndicate , @DanielBMarkham
I've moved!
Locals is turning off their free accounts and I've decided that I'd rather go back to maintaining my own site than sign up for any more "free" services that end up changing the conditions of service later.
The new site is just like this one, only no "locals" in the name. It's https://danielbmarkham.com
Please give it a shot, and please let me know if you have any problems signing up. I think I have the configuration down but you guys will be the first 100 or so to sign up, so there'll probably be some snags.
Daniel
danielbmarkham.com
Hey @ShiroiKami , @osio , @btbytes , @QrzZDE2e , @jslezak , @gtramontina , @planti , @kavalau , @NzDan , @dadsfsadf
I've moved!
Locals is turning off their free accounts and I've decided that I'd rather go back to maintaining my own site than sign up for any more "free" services that end up changing the conditions of service later.
The new site is just like this one, only no "locals" in the name. It's https://danielbmarkham.com
Please give it a shot, and please let me know if you have any problems signing up. I think I have the configuration down but you guys will be the first 100 or so to sign up, so there'll probably be some snags.
Daniel
danielbmarkham.com
Hey @markthien , @vikdutt , @mavenllc , @Dauugavpiils , @rmonaghan , @Vic8888 , @GeorgiaLogCabin , @godfrey , @yumaikas
I've moved!
Locals is turning off their free accounts and I've decided that I'd rather go back to maintaining my own site than sign up for any more "free" services that end up changing the conditions of service later.
The new site is just like this one, only no "locals" in the name. It's https://danielbmarkham.com
Please give it a shot, and please let me know if you have any problems signing up. I think I have the configuration down but you guys will be the first 100 or so to sign up, so there'll probably be some snags.
Daniel
danielbmarkham.com
