Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

Introduction

Some kind of magic happens in startups, especially at the very beginning, but the only people there to see it are the founders. The best way to understand what happens is to ask them, so that's what I did.

In this book, you'll hear the founders' stories in their own words. Here, I want to share some of the patterns I noticed. When you're interviewing a series of famous startup founders, you can't help trying to see if there is some special quality they all have in common that made them succeed.

What surprised me most was how unsure the founders seemed to be that they were actually onto something big. Some of these companies got started almost by accident. The world thinks of startup founders as having some kind of superhuman confidence, ...