Book review: Founders at work
Tuesday, April 17th, 2007I 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.
