Founders At Work
Livingston publishes the collection of interviews with 32 startup founders. She says she has always liked writing, and wanted to write something that ‘gets to the heart’ of the experiences that startup founders had.
I hear these stories that they talk about, or the other people they knew who had done startups, that seem so crazy to me. Stories about how they sort of lied, not lied to investors, but pretended to look much more advanced that they were. When really they had one computer and they stole people’s monitors and put them on the desk so it would look like they had more. This was crazy, no one knows about this. And I was working at this tech, this emerging growth investment bank and I thought I should kind of know about this stuff….I sort of based on the concept of Paris reviews writers, it worked and talked about how did you it.
Wozniak interview
Livingston interviews Wozniak for Founders At Work about starting Apple. His advice for people considering starting a startup:
First of all, try to have the highest of ethics and to be open and truthful about things, not hiding. If you have to hide something for company reasons, at least explain what you’re doing. Don’t mislead people. Know in your heart that you are a good person with good goals because that will carry over to your own self-confidence and your belief in your engineering abilities. Always seek excellence: make your product better than the average person would.
Reached out to Conway
Livingston says Y Combinator reached out to Conway in its early stages, but wasn’t able to communicate to him what the firm did.
He said, “Is this in Boston? I stick mainly local.” I replied, “No, we’re in Mountain View and we’d love for you to come to Demo Day.” He said, “Is this a chance to invest in the incubator?” I replied, “No, we don’t want you to invest in us. It’s a chance to invest in the individual startups.” Then he told us he’d circle back, since he was jammed. We got the “am jammed now” from Ronco—it was so embarrassing.
She says Conway did end up coming to Demo Day in 2006, and returned to talk at the next year’s winter event.
Graham, Livingston dating
Graham and Livingston start dating. Livingston:
We met at a party in Cambridge Massachusetts randomly. It’s kind of a funny story. I actually went, he was co-hosting the party with a friend of his, I was with a guy I was taking a class at Harvard Extension School with. I wasn’t gonna go, it was a Saturday night and I didn’t have a friend to go with me so I wasn’t gonna go but I went anyway. I arrived on the doorstep, and I said “ Oh, I’m Jessica, I’m friends with Murat and I’m here for the party” and he said “Murat? Didn’t you hear? He moved to Arkansas last week to join the Wes Clark campaign. He’s not here tonight.” So, I said, “Oh my God, I’m not gonna know anyone.” I did not know one person at this party and I went in and had a great time and met, you know Paul, and Trevor, our other co-founder and just hit it off. And then Paul and I started dating and I started meeting more people who are involved in start-ups.
