Paul Graham: The Art of Funding a Startup

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005MEG11Q

by tangcius • 15 years ago

227 54 15 years ago

amazon.com

davidw2• 15 years ago

"It turns out", the secret is ... Paul Graham?

atldev• 15 years ago

Highly desirable content (from PG)...check

Supporting someone (Andrew) who provides a huge service to startups...check

Easy-to-consume format for Kindle...check

Easy-to-consume price...check

Shut up and take my money.

nhangen• 15 years ago

I watched the interview, which was great. I wonder, does this add to the interview, or just break it down?

I wish the cover listed the author...it took me a minute to figure it wasn't a book by PG.

FreshCode• 15 years ago

Wait, Paul Graham didn't write this? Do not want.

rsuttongee• 15 years ago

Amazon is listing both Andrew Warner and PG as co-authors.

gunz_rozez• 15 years ago

Always find PG's talks and blog posts engaging....might be a good read.

bigohms• 15 years ago

No preview? Only Kindle? I'd be curious to know if this eBook/MixergyNotes touches on funding ventures other than just YC.

levesque• 15 years ago

It is also available on B&N in ePub format. There seems to be a free sample as well, didn't look at it though.

I noticed one funny thing while browsing the B&N site, in the "People who bought this also bought" section : http://imgur.com/ZFAwY :)

jackpirate• 15 years ago

Why is there no dead tree version?

As much as everyone here loves their e-readers, some of us still find hardcopies more enjoyable. I, for one, won't be purchasing for this reason only.

jmtame4• 15 years ago

I'm genuinely curious why you prefer a paperback, could you elaborate? Also, wanted to ask: have you tried the Kindle app on your Mac/PC and mobile device yet?

jackowayed2• 15 years ago

I personally prefer physical books because I really fully own them. I love the Kindle experience, and if I could buy books in a DRM-free format that guaranteed that I'll be able to read on every device I could want forever, I can loan them out/resell them, etc. I'd do it (and I have--eg. Pragmatic Programmers books).

But being locked into whatever devices Amazon decides to support and not having some of the freedom isn't ok with me.

There also seems to be no quality control on Kindle books. I'm now pretty much afraid to buy any book that doesn't offer a sample of the first few pages. I almost bought Dante's Inferno on Kindle because it was ~3x cheaper, but then I downloaded the sample. The print version of this book has the Italian on the left side pages and the English on the right side. They seem to have just run that version of it through some Kindle-ifier, meaning that there was one print-page worth of Italian, followed by one print-page worth of English, repeating. Just an awful experience.

wheels2• 15 years ago

I can answer for myself:

• I read books when I want to escape computers, the internet and the distractions they bring. That's part of what I love about them.

• I don't own an ebook reader or a tablet. I don't have any plans to purchase one. I have no desire to read a book on my phone, and the only books I read on my laptop are technical books with no real value as literature.

• I like physical collections of things. I've never bought an eBook, nor music, nor movies to be downloaded. I have hundreds of CDs and vinyl records and around a thousand paper books. Books aren't simply things to read, but a physical representation of my life's history: virtually everything I've been interested in in my life is displayed on my bookshelves.

• I can give a book away. I do that a lot. Two walls of my living room are covered in bookshelves. When I'm talking to someone and there's a book I think they should read, I give it to them. I've bought my favorite books half a dozen times, because I want to have them around to give away.

• I mostly read books away from home, in places that I don't want to whoop out an expensive device (because it makes it a target for theft, because I think it looks dorky) -- parks, the subway, cafés. This is connected to the first point -- I like getting away from the distractions of the internet and being somewhere where I can just read.

• I can throw books in my bag when I'm headed to places where there's a high propensity for me to lose or have my bag stolen. Catching the subway on the way to a concert? If I lose my book that's $10 down the tubes, not $100.

gsivil• 15 years ago

While I was a kid I was going almost everyday to my father's bookshelves and I was browsing random books: science fiction novels, books about sports and their rules, encyclopedias, novels, poetry, whatever I could find. I am sure that this experience made me love knowledge more and give me a also an additional bond with my father. Maybe people do not realize that yet, but giving to a kid a GB of ebooks is not the same.

staunch• 15 years ago

Maybe I'm wrong but it looks like Andrew is taking an old interview, converting it into an eBook, adding the interviewee as an "author", and selling it?

e1ven3• 15 years ago

If it wasn't with PG's explicit consent, this would be rather dishonest. If that panned out I'd be very wary about conducting an interview with Andrew..

I'm probably being overly cynical, but I'd love to see either Mr. Warner or PG clarify that separate permission was granted for this ;(

jackowayed2• 15 years ago

I'm sure he asked PG for permission.

Hyperink, the publisher, is a YC company, which may have been part of PG's incentive for doing it.

pg• 15 years ago

It's fine with me.

rastafark• 15 years ago

Its awesome when things like this are put out into the community. I hope it gets very specific. Paul's experiences are most similar to where an early stage startup will have. A couple years back most of the information on this topic glossed over angel investing, which was the first step an entrepreneur needed to know about. Without understanding how to get past that part, knowing how to raise a series A didn't matter.

btucker• 15 years ago

Here's the table on contents in case anyone wants to get a better idea what they're buying: http://i.imgur.com/pzjj7.png The eBook is around 20 pages long.

In other news, Kindle.app only allows copy & pasting 33 words at a time... hence the screenshot.

grok2• 15 years ago

"Foreward"? Is that on purpose?

aneth• 15 years ago

I've noticed a lot of crap e-books in Amazon lately that are comprised of Wikipedia or about.com style articles and selling for a few dollars. Some of them appear to be computer generated scrapings from PDFs, or some other unreliable method.

Make a killing publishing individual Wikipedia articles as ebooks...check.

I'm wondering:

1) Does the publisher have a right to this material, and to charge for it?

2) Is this material available elsewhere on the web?

3) Does Paul Graham or anyone else get compensated?

I would encourage anyone considering buying this sort of thing to know the answers to these questions before their purchase.

guruz• 15 years ago

Didn't this site have a no-affiliate-link policy?

ceejayoz• 15 years ago

Whether it does or not, I'm flagging it for that.

1880• 15 years ago

It seems to be a normal link now.

triketora• 15 years ago

Looks like something in between a blog post and a real book. Are these Hyperink books organized like real books or just transcriptions of interviews?

AndrewWarner• 15 years ago

I should have done a blog post to explain what's up but I've become so obsessed with one part of Mixergy that I let this (and other things) slide.

pg knows about this. It was done by a YC company. My site wasn't scraped. This is more than the interview.

Also, entrepreneurs like pg are heroes. Till I'm old and unable to move, you should expect to see me experimenting with ways to get their stories out. If I knew how to draw comic books, you'd see my interviews in the comics section of amazon too.

tangcius• 15 years ago

+1 for comic books about entrepreneurship. Only found your ebook when I randomly searched for your name in Amazon.

Jun8• 15 years ago

My first reaction to this was, "OMG, a new book from pg! Why didn't I hear about this before"? The comments here cleared up things for me. I think having the word "interview" in big letters somewhere on the cover would be less misleading.

You do explain things somewhat it in the Product Description, but in a very PR way "hold the answers, etc." without mentioning the book is based on the interview. Some people here say that it's just the interview? Can you clarify if it is more than that and if that what have you added?

In addition to the blog post, I think you should have a better description on Amazon.

kqr2• 15 years ago

SmarterComics has converted quite a few business / entrepreneur books into comics:

http://smartercomics.com/

dools• 15 years ago

Hehe you should get SubStack from browserling to do some quirky comics for you, then pkrumins can publish the books ;)

6ren• 15 years ago

About Hyperink, the publisher: [...]

There's no writing required and it's a unique opportunity to build your own brand and earn royalties.

No writing. That's disruptive to traditional publishing.

jarek• 15 years ago

Not really. Ghostwriting is a well-established phenomenon.

kevingao12• 15 years ago

All - just want to re-affirm Andrew's points and provide some more clarification - we're the publisher behind the eBook, and we did partnered with Andrew/Mixergy to do it.

In short, we work with domain/subject-matter experts to publish high-quality eBooks. Some we create ourselves, some we work with publishers who already have great content (eg, Mixergy).

Since we're a startup there's still a lot that we need to improve, but one thing we're doing is making the books more interactive, and for PG's book we'll be adding video clips from the interview. Unfortunately Kindle doesn't have an easy way to provide existing customers an update, but if you did buy the book, please email me (kevin@hyperinkpress.com) and I'll share it with you.

Also, if you have knowledge on any topic that people would pay to learn more about, and want to create a beautiful, high-quality eBook to share that knowledge, please reach out to me - we're actively recruiting authors. A big thing of ours is sharing a lot of the content for free, it's not purely altruistic since that's great for building loyalty and traffic too. Thanks!

Kevin, Founder of Hyperink

PS Right now hyperink.com has almost nothing on it, we'll be launching a marketplace for our eBooks and our authors in the next 2 weeks

kevingao12• 15 years ago

Also, thanks a ton for the feedback - we're updating the product description on Nook and Kindle so that it's clear that the content is from Andrew's interview.

covercash• 15 years ago

Do you also publish to the iTunes bookstore?

magicofpi• 15 years ago

Just so you know, I think the link on your website to your author application form is wrong (it goes to https://hyperink.wufoo.com/forms/hyperink-author-application..., which says "page not found").

BrandonM• 15 years ago

Considering that you're the publisher, what is your response to this review? http://www.amazon.com/review/RMK171BE5NOQ1/ref=cm_cr_dp_perm... The third and fourth points, specifically, seem to contradict your claim that you publish "beautiful, high-quality eBook[s]."

mynameishere• 15 years ago

This is obviously a specialty book. Small audience. He probably should have charged more.

sneak• 15 years ago

PDF download link plox

perokreco• 15 years ago

I bought it and it looks terrible on my Kindle, some sentences repeat themselves and there is a "Paul Graham" string shown 3 times per page. The about Paul Graham text was actually behind his picture, so overall quality of this is extremely low.

Paul Graham: The Art of Funding a Startup

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