Founders at Work

The book Founders at Work arrived in the mail yesterday and I dived right into it. The book is a series of interviews of founders like Blogger, SixApart, Adobe, Apple (Woz!), Hotmail, and a bunch of other startups that changed the way we live and interact. The underlying narative is: entrepreneurship is all about tactics, guts, not knowing that things are not done “this way,” and making do with not enough money. In other words there are a lot of lessons for church planters in this book as well.

Some thoughts from the book.

1. Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) on how he decided whether to tell venture capitalists the real idea he wanted to get funded. “If they passed the litmus test of not rejecting us for the wrong reasons and said, ‘OK, we don’t mind that you’re young, we don’t mind that you don’t have management experience, only when they would start poking holes in the actual idea would we share the Hotmail idea with them.”

2. Woz (Apple). “All the best things I did at Apple came from (a) not having money, and (b) not having done it before, ever.”

3. Evan Williams (Blogger.com) on how he raised money to buy more servers. “We posted it on our website, and it said, ‘Hey, we know Blogger is really slow. It’s because we need more hardware. We don’t have the money to buy it, so give us money, and we will buy more hardware and we’ll make Blogger faster.’”

4. Paul Graham (Viaweb): On raising money: “The advice I would give is to avoid it. I would say spend as little as you can because every dollar of the investors’ money you get will be taken out of your ass…”

5. Catarina Fake (Flickr): “So Flickr started off as a feature. It wasn’t really a product. It was kind of IM in which you could drag and drop photos onto people’s desktops and show them what you were looking at.”