Founders at Work - Stories of Startups' Early Days (Jessica Livingston; Apress, 2007)

How to form technology startups

In Finland it is a common topic for discussion that we don't have enough entrepreneurship spirit, and we should promote the forming of startups. This is hot topic not only for Finland. Also the European Union wants to encourage startups, because we seem to lag behind compared to USA.

Given this background, Jessica Livingston's book offer a lot to Finnish and European readers. Livingston tells about startups from the founders' perspective, revealing in concrete details the initial motivation and the obstacles on the way from an idea to a product. The stories are about US and Canadian technology startups, and thus the book sets a benchmark on how innovation should work in Finland and Europe.

The book consists of long interview articles, and provides fascinating reading for anyone interested in technology. Most of the startups are well known: Adobe, Apple, Blogger, Gmail, Hotmail, Lotus, PayPal, Yahoo and so on. Many of the startups were absorbed by big companies, but some were also initiated by big companies. Some managed commercial success, some didn't, and a few didn't want to scale up.

The expectations of the founders were often quite different, but many of the problems were the same: how to find the key idea, how to manage funding, how to scale operations, and how to survive after the first success.

There is no simple answer to success, but a common theme seems to be the courage to try, and the stamina to keep on finding solutions to problems which inevitable show up. Forming a new company didn't seem to be such a big deal for the founders. The real question was how to develop the initial idea into a marketable product - and in some cases, how to find an idea in the first place.

The environment for new companies is critical in the first stages: finding knowledgeable people, forming connections, getting finding, locating markets etc. We have a lot to catch up here in Finland.

The startup needs to aim for the future. It should not try to compete on existing markets. Thus, skills relevant for the future are needed, and here universities have a key role to play.

Success is dependent on the skills and stamina of the people - you have to be ready to adapt to provide value to your customers. And sometimes the end results is very different from the way the startup was initially formed.