Building companies
Founders at Work
Interviews with founders of Apple, PayPal, Hotmail and others about the early days.
Key concepts
- Early days are messy for everyone, including famous companies
- Determination matters more than brilliance
- Many great products began as something else
- Founders win by talking to users and shipping fast
How I use it
The story I remember best is Max Levchin’s, about PayPal’s early days beaming money between Palm Pilots. The team spent the night before the big demo still fighting the product, with spare devices lined up because the demo could not fail. I laughed when I read it, because that is exactly what it feels like.
You think everything is ready, and something still goes wrong. So you prepare plan A, plan B and plan C: the backup device, the hidden slide in the appendix, whatever the answer is.
I lived a version of it with AISYNG at Web Summit Lisbon. The functionality had been there for months, but we had changed the interface so I could talk people through it. I saw the final demo for the first time in the Uber on the way to the expo.
Connected books
Shoe Dog
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Elon Musk