Startups Open Sourced: Stories to inspire and educate

by Jared Tame

Get inside the minds of today's leading startup founders with the most honest and candid collection of startup founder interviews. Contains interviews with 33 startups discussing the most difficult topics entrepreneurs face: creating and validating ideas, finding cofounders, obtaining users, growing revenue, staying motivated, acquisition process, and more. Companies interviewed: Grooveshark, reddit, GitHub, foursquare, Airbnb, Weebly, Greplin, AppSumo, Wufoo, Little App Factory, MixPanel, LikeALittle, Djangy, Divvyshot, Justin.TV, Blippy, Bump, WePay, DailyBooth, Gobble, KISSMetrics, Omnisio, Cloudkick, Noteleaf, One Llama, Octopart, Crowdbooster, Listia, Hipmunk, Indinero, OrangeQC, Camino Real, One

Genres: Startup, Nonfiction

430 pages, Paperback

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.