[ecuzzillo]

I would definitely read (and even buy) Founders at Rest; in Founders at Work, you get a bunch of stuff about what successful founders do, but you don't know which stuff is necessary and which stuff is coincidental. You need a bunch of negative data points to make a really correct assessment about necessary and sufficient conditions for startup success.

[davidw]

That's one of the points in 'The Black Swan'. People concentrate way too much on success stories without looking at the failure stories.

[SwellJoe]

"People concentrate way too much on success stories without looking at the failure stories."

By what definition of "too much"? I see nothing wrong with focusing on studying the best--the ones that made it. Those are the people to emulate. Why spend your limited time studying the ones that failed? Sure, learning from mistakes is great. But I suspect I'm going to weather the storm better if I learn about mistakes from people who made it through to the other side--rather than from people who blew it and ended up bankrupt. I really don't think I'd like to be facing a problem and thinking, "Oh, wait, I read about this...it turned out horribly...we're dead!" Much better to think, "Well, Evan Williams had exactly this problem with Blogger. And look how that turned out! Just gotta keep plugging away."

Just a thought. I don't really think we need a lot of post-mortems while we're in the early stages. Maybe later when we have a huge success on our hands and want to know how to avoid becoming the next SGI (Google uses SGI internally to mean, "company that has huge success and then made huge mistakes", because Google has actually moved into nearly all of the old SGI buildings in Mountain View as SGI has atrophied into a shell of itself--seeing how business and management heavy Google has become in the past year makes me think they didn't think hard enough about SGI...).

[altay]

I started one of those YC-funded companies that "crawled off somewhere and died."

After that happened, I spent a couple of months staring at walls, feeling sorry for myself. During that time, I listened to everything at venturevoice.com, read Founders at Work, and kept thinking "man, these success stories are inspiring, but what I need right now are some goddamn failure storiesX." (If you're in the same position, I highly recommend this book: http://tinyurl.com/362eg5 )

Anyways, you're both right. Founders at Rest: Stories of Losers Who Fucked Up and Gave Up would be boring and depressing. But interviews with successful people about their failures -- e.g., Evan Williams' Blogger saga -- would be fascinating and inspiring. The classic story arc doesn't let the hero succeed right off the bat. First he hits a low point, then pulls himself up by his bootstraps.

One of these days I'll write that book. Right now, though, I'm too busy working on my next startup.

Don't forget, Microsoft wasn't Bill Gates' first company.

[rms]

Have you thought about writing the story of your first startup? A lot of us would be very curious to get a different perspective of the Y Combinator experience.

[altay]

http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html

Reasons #2, 7, 8, 14, 16, and 18. ;-)

[davidw]

"I see nothing wrong with focusing on studying the best--the ones that made it. Those are the people to emulate."

What if the failures are doing a lot of the same things? You just can't get a complete picture without examining the failures, too.

It's probably better to be optimistic, because being realistic is likely to simply be depressing, but still, for those curious about the system as a whole, you can't just look at success.