None
4 stars
I gave this a chance in spite of being fairly tired of the hype about startups, and I'm glad I did. It's a bit long, and some of the stories go nowhere --- some are, essentially, "I went to college, I started a company, it lasted a while and then it went out of business", spread over four pages --- but there are more than enough interesting stories here to make for a worthwhile read.
I'm ambivalent about the focus on (largely consumer) computing startups. On the one hand, this gives the book coherence and continuity. Key players who help found a company in one chapter show up in the next chapter as a major backer of a later company, giving insight into the social structure of the computing business and helping to tie together what might otherwise be a disjointed set of unrelated interviews. On the other hand, the …
I gave this a chance in spite of being fairly tired of the hype about startups, and I'm glad I did. It's a bit long, and some of the stories go nowhere --- some are, essentially, "I went to college, I started a company, it lasted a while and then it went out of business", spread over four pages --- but there are more than enough interesting stories here to make for a worthwhile read.
I'm ambivalent about the focus on (largely consumer) computing startups. On the one hand, this gives the book coherence and continuity. Key players who help found a company in one chapter show up in the next chapter as a major backer of a later company, giving insight into the social structure of the computing business and helping to tie together what might otherwise be a disjointed set of unrelated interviews. On the other hand, the focus on the relatively young and small computing business means that the insights you get about starting a business here are definitely not guaranteed to be applicable to other industries.
If you care about the history of the computing industry, pick this up.
