Founders at Work

Ron Conway Collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. (Source)

Paul Graham Probably the single most valuable book a startup founder could read. (Source)

Andrew Chen General Partner/Andreessen HorowitzRecommends this book

Ryan Holiday AuthorNow this one is certainly a little less historical than the others, if only because most of the profiles are about companies founded in the last ten years. Written by Jessica Livingston, a founder of YCombinator, the book profiles some of the hottest and most successful startups in Silicon Valley history. It shows how the founders manage to create massive growth, usually with very few resources. Now I’m not saying that companies like Hot or Not compare with the accomplishments of Pericles or Da Vinci, but you can certainly see how this book captures a moment in time—and its leading men and... (Source)

Alexis Ohanian Co-founder/RedditA bunch of really great interviews [Jessica] did with a bunch of just OGs of entrepreneurship. (Source)

Angela Pham Founders at Work is the most valuable business book I’ve ever read, which compiled transcripts from dozens of tech entrepreneur interviews before the bubble burst. (Source)

Joan Boixados Computers and Business. (Source)

Santiago Basulto Founders at Work and Coders at Work are really good ones too. They’re filled with interesting and inspiring stories. (Source)

Joel Gascoigne I read Founders at Work in the earliest few months of Buffer, before I had managed to drop my freelance work which I was doing on the side to pay the bills before our revenues grew. It was inspirational and practical at the same time, and laid out very clearly the paths that many of the biggest tech successes took to reach their prominence. (Source)

Bogdan Iordache There are quite a few good business books on technology, and I'll list below some I find to be a good starting point. Personally, I like biographies a lot and I mostly read biographies of dead people, because those are the most honest ones. So because the computer age is still very young, there won't be a lot of biographies in my list. (Source)

Craig Pearce What probably helped, ironically, was the feeling of confusion when reading the book Founders at Work: Stories Of Startups Early Days. I read the book when I first became interested in startup culture and I was under the impression there was a formula for success that all startups had followed. While reading the various stories contained within the book, I was confused when every company seemed to follow a different path to success; founders came from different backgrounds, different motivations and started at different ages. There are themes, in many of these stories, but it was the... (Source)

David Kramaley When asked what books he would recommend to youngsters interested in his professional path, David mentioned Founders at Work. (Source)