Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

Apparently sprinters reach their highest speed right out of the blocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing down. The winners slow down the least. It's that way with most startups too. The earliest phase is usually the most productive. That's when they have the really big ideas. Imagine what Apple was like when 100% of its employees were either

For a lot of entrepreneurs, they see something and they say, "I have to have this," and that will start them building their own.

The default of how you do these things is very powerful, if you've been in the industry for a long time. So we were sort of beneficiaries of our naïveté. We thought, "We don't know how to do this; let's just invent it."

We would constantly try to come up with ones that the other person wouldn't be able to solve. I'm really into puzzles. I'm not a very quick solver, so I tend to take a long time. Not always, but on occasion, I will take a lot longer than an average time to solve it, but I almost always will succeed.

Livingston: Way back then, how did you guys divide the work between you? Wozniak: We actually never talked about it even once. If there was any engineering to do, hardware or software, I did it, because Steve could do stuff, but he couldn't do it as well as I. So never once did he even try. Never did he look at a circuit and suggest anything. I don

They started using the Apple II. It was just open to all these things. We made it easy for anyone to do what they wanted to do. And I think that was one of the biggest keys to its success. We didn't make it a hidden machine that we own—we sell it, it does this, you got it—like Commodore and RadioShack did.

Livingston: Did you feel that way about Peter when you started? Levchin: We hit it off really quickly. I have this IQ bias—anybody really smart, I will figure out a way to deal with.

They wanted 30 percent of the company, which would value us at $1 million. It was an intense negotiation; I threatened to go to the other VCs if they didn't pony up the money. We finally settled on a 15 percent split with them and they valued the company at $2 million post money. But they'd put in a right of first refusal. Since I was a young entre

This book can help fix that problem, by showing everyone what, till now, only a handful people got to see: what happens in the first year of a startup. This is what real productivity looks like. This is the Formula 1 racecar. It looks weird, but it goes fast.

Even up to the time when Excite was several hundred people and we were the fourth largest website in the world, it didn't feel real. It doesn't feel like you're really doing something huge. On some level it feels like you're fooling people—like, are we really doing this? It's the whole sausage and sausage factory problem: when you're outside and yo