Startups Open Sourced

by Jared Tame

Over the past few months, I’ve been working on what I consider to be a great collection of interviews with founders of some of the most exciting startups. These interviews are more candid than anything I’ve read anywhere else.

In Startups Open Sourced, I interview 33 startups. Of these 33 startups, 20 of them are funded by Y Combinator, so this is approximately 10% of all the startups Y Combinator has funded since 2005.

I saw an e-mail this morning PG sent the YC founders mailing list that said the YC team was pretty busy until May 3rd doing interviews. I thought, “this seems like a good time to finally launch this book.” I think this is particularly helpful to YC applicants, since I ask a lot of founders about their experience applying and going through Y Combinator. I was hoping to launch sooner, but this has taken a lot more time than I anticipated. I have probably read this book from cover to cover about 10 times now, but I still find myself going back to it to read some of the founders’ stories. That’s probably a good sign.

Collectively, these startups have raised approximately $90 million from investors, which actually isn’t a lot of money. These startups are operating in a relatively lean way, but they are creating jobs and many of them are very profitable at this stage.
What’s in the book?

In the interviews, I ask the founders a lot of different questions. Most of the topics are around:

How founders got their start in entrepreneurship
What kinds of classes founders were taking in college
How founders came up with their ideas
How founders met their cofounders
How founders obtained user growth
How founders raised money and their overall experience and recommendations (including applying to Y Combinator, tips for the interview stage)
How founders achieved revenue
Points where founders doubted themselves or thought they would fail
How founders dealt with the trough of sorrow
Founders’ biggest challenges
How founders stay motivated
How founders hire and find talent

Genres: Startup, Nonfiction

ebook

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Leo Polovets · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great collection of interviews with young startup founders. Most of the interview subjects are still in their 20s, and yet they’ve already managed to start well-known companies like foursquare, Airbnb, and Grooveshark. What I liked about the book was that the interviewer asks very similar questions during each interview, and yet the answers to those questions are very different. Some founders finished college and worked at a big company for a few years, others dropped out of college because they couldn’t wait to do their own thing. Some knew their cofounder for years, others had partnered up on a whim. Some were very disciplined and had a clear target from the beginning, others worked on whatever they fancied and went wherever the wind took them. It was interesting to see that there’s is no single right path that is required to start a successful company and it was fun reading about the different paths that various entrepreneurs had taken.

[Mark Karp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now as of 2018, how many of these companies have bit the dust!

[Joshua Ng · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read for all to-be-entrepreneurs!

[Jaret Manuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you dig startups, dig this compilation of stellar interviews.

[Eric Schapp · Rating 3 out of 5]

Starts off strong; probably could have cut 5 or 6 of the interviews.

[Anand]

Lot of insights into Founders' mind, struggles, success, failure and all this together - being entrepreneur!

[Alexey · Rating 3 out of 5]

First few interviews (with the creators of really successful startups) are revealing and interesting but the rest are not so insightful. Anyway, an interesting professional read.