Founders At Work

There are certain things that just make me feel good. The book "Founders At Work" by Jessica Livingston, a founding partner at Y Combinator is one of them. The book is in interview format, with Jessica as interviewer. I've gone through the Apple (Steve Wozniak), Gmail (Paul Buchheit), Viaweb / Yahoo Stores (Paul Graham), del.icio.us(Joshua Schachter) sections, and something strikes me about what drives these people. As I expected, these people are all independent thinkers. But what was interesting is that they just refuse or are deeply unconvinced by conventional wisdom that would keep most people working a safe, normal job.

While Steve Wozniak wanted to remain at HP for his career, even after creating the Apple I, his driving passion was creating good computers and having other people use his creations and recognising his skills. Not even Steve Jobs could convince him to leave HP for Apple when they had enough seed money. It was a friend and someone involved in Apple's founding that pointed out to "Woz" that he cold be an engineer at Apple - that was it. And he was in for the company ever since. His all consuming passion for technical prowess led to 2 revolutions in the personal computer market, the Apple I and Macintosh I & II (although he had less influence on the Mac). It's ironic that while he stayed (and wanted to remain) at HP, in about a year he designed the hardware and software for the Apple I computer, essentially another company, just to prove his technical chops. This is someone driven by passion.

Paul Buchheit of Gmail had more of a certain care free attitude about his career. He wanted to enjoy his work and have smart people around him. Buchheit was simply getting bored in his position at Intel. So he applied to google because it looked like a fun company with some smart people there. He as employee number 23, so his hiring was before google became famous.

Paul Graham started Viaweb with a friend of his, Robert Morris. Paul is a good old-fashioned straight talker. He tells it like it is (or should be) even if that flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Viaweb software made online e-commerce stores back in 1995; The days when the internet wasn't even known to most people. Like Steve Wozniak, he eschewed the business side of IT and just wanted to make good software that people wanted. There was a point where thier company got thier first rejection for venture capital, and instead of doing mroe marketing, they wrote more software that improved the product. That actually sounds like avoiding the problem, but it worked out in the end. They were eventually bought out by Yahoo, but took the independent (though tortuous) path to avoid being controlled by angel investors that wanted to control the company. This being the beginning of the dot com boom, most managers and investors had visions of grandeur, wanting to manage and control their product to the next success story - most of them apparently didn't know a thing about technology.

The dichotemy between the suits and the people who actually create value for the company continued with Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us. On this topic, one of the illuminating questions the interviewer asked him was "What do you think about technical founders versus businesspeople founders?". His answer starts with "I have never had a great deal of trust for people who don't execute on core ideas.". The idea, as he later goes on to explain, was that you have to actualise your ideas for you to know if they have any real value. He is very suspicious of people who have ideas and constantly get others to build it for them. Another interesting aspect of del.icio.us was that it was designed as a product that he and his friends could use. This wasn't something he initially planned to "launch". It just spread by word of mouth until it reached thousands of users, all without any marketing. This doesn't mean marketing isn't important, but like Steve Wozniak, Paul Graham and Paul Buchheit, he wanted to make a product that made his life easier and that was missing in the marketplace. It's all pretty convincing coming from the founders themselves.

As I contemplate more and more the constraints on creativity and fun and productivity that a corporate programming job imposes, I'm beginning to feel that my affinity for the founder's, and DIY's ethic of creating something of value just for the value of it, should be more than an affinity.

Think of your most recent or most creative idea that actually does something that others find useful. Based on "Founders At Work", you should build your better mousetrap:

i. because it can be done better
ii. because you know you can create that better product
iii. because you believe in your dreams and ideas and are impassioned by them.

I felt so alive deciding to look for material on how to run a start-up and finding "Founders At Work". I've talked before about how important culture is, especially for our own feeling of personal freedom. I already started to regain that sense of intellectual freedom and discovery I had at earlier points in my career. Imagine if I actually started a company!!!

Posted by Timothy Washington on 2007.05.30| Original post

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