Book review: Founders at work
I recently finished a new book called Founders At Work by Jessica Livingston (available here on Amazon).
This book is a series of interviews which Livingston conducted with 32 different entrepreneurs and as such represents a very original resource for would-be entrepreneurs. The list included the stories of companies such as Paypal, Hotmail, Apple, Excite, Yahoo! and many more.
As a regular reader of similar literature, on balance I enjoyed the book. However it was by no means perfect. As the text is a verbatim repetition of her interviews, it is often difficult to follow and you quickly find yourself reading the book for one or two hidden gems of advice in the text. The interview with Steve Wozniak is a perfect example of this, there are several pages of text which describe how Steve worked tirelessly to reduce the number of chips on his circuit board designs. Whilst stories are ancedoctally interesting, they consume a significant proportion of the text and detract from the valuble lessons which we entrepreneurs would benefit from. They make struggling through the book a challenge and certainly make it harder to draw out the key lessons.
Whilst I would recommend that anyone who is in the process of starting up an online business would do well to read this book, frankly the nature of the text means that some effort and commitment is required to really draw applicable conclusions from it. The book would really have benefited from some sort of analysis performed by Livingston which helped guide the reader to the key lessons from each of the founders.
Overall – OK.
July 14th, 2007 at 18:45
So can you recommend maybe your top 5 business books you have read? Ones I can buy off Amazon etc.. And are aimed towards the UK market if possible? Might make a good blog post and be good link bait ;o) Thanks
July 20th, 2007 at 12:26
Lee – a great idea. I’ve actually just spent the last 2 months out of the country, but back now and ready to start blogging again.
July 21st, 2007 at 21:43
Look forward to reading your recommendations ;o)
July 28th, 2007 at 12:12
Hi,
I bought this one too, as I normally enjoy entrepreneur type books but this one like you I just found myself skimming, a lot of the stories were just pain dull. Now I don’t think the stories were really dull its just the way this book has been written. I expected a lot from this book but didn’t even finish it.
September 7th, 2007 at 09:44
Hi,
I guess it would be a great post if you could extract those points and lessons learnt, and list them by stories.
Regards.