27 Mar 2013

The Launch Pad by Randall Stross

Preview:

Twice a year in the heart of Silicon Valley, a small investment firm called Y Combinator selects an elite group of young entrepreneurs from around the world for three months of intense work and instruction. Their brand-new two- or three-person start-ups are given a seemingly impossible challenge: to turn a raw idea into a viable business, fast.

Each YC session culminates in a demo day, when investors and venture capitalists flock to hear pitches from the new graduates. Any one of them might turn out to be the next Dropbox (class of 2007, now valued at $5 billion) or Airbnb (2009, $1.3 billion).

Randall Stross is the first journalist to have fly-on-the-wall access to Y Combinator. He tells the full story of how Paul Graham started this ultra exclusive institution, how it chooses among hundreds of aspiring Mark Zuckerbergs, and how it teaches them to go from concept to profitability in record time.

 

Narrated by:

Rene Ruiz

 

Link:

http://www.randomhouse.com/audio/catalog/display.php?isbn=9780449807873

 

About the Author:

The Launch Pad is the third book HeI’ve written about Silicon Valley startups. The first was published almost twenty years ago, in 1993: Steve Jobs & the NeXT Big Thing, a story of a startup that struggled and struggled. From the misery of those dark years, Jobs learned much that would serve him well when he returned to Apple.

The other earlier book on startups was eBoys (2000), a fly-on-the-wall account of the workings of then-young Benchmark Capital. Work on it happened to coincide exactly with the dot-com boom in the Valley and its end.

In 2004, the New York Times invited him to write a column, “Digital Domain,” for its Sunday Business section. His charter is defined broadly and early on the column’s schedule was moved from monthly to biweekly, which gave him the chance to offer observations about Valley experimentation quickly, something that book production does not permit.

The invitation from the Times came after doing work for The New Republic, U.S. News & World Report, and Fortune. It was sheer good luck that the editors at the Times and these earlier homes have been open-minded about allowing a historian to set to work as a journalist.

He was born in 1954, grew up in Topeka, Kansas, and Denver, Colorado, and received his undergraduate education at Macalester College, in St. Paul, Minnesota. He lives with his family in Burlingame, California.