How Innovators Connect

Some say it’s all about the idea. Some categorize it as an invention. Others question the validity of an innovation that is based on imitation. Irrespective of the view one may take, we can all agree that Innovation is paramount to our existence. Without it, we would be living rather stagnant lives.

How Innovators Connect is an attempt to showcase Innovation through the experiences of about 40 successful innovators in Silicon Valley and India. Among the various conversations with Innovators who’ve made a difference, there was a resounding confirmation that the process of innovation demands connectivity, and cannot be performed in a vacuum. We discovered that each of the innovators we spoke with shared connectivity traits. And, although they all had different approaches to connecting and valued different types of connections, there was a common set of principles shared by everyone. We’ve used these core principles as the framework with which to explore the process of innovation and to share some very thought-provoking stories of innovation.

Rohit Agarwal, techTribe's CEO and Founder, is co-authoring an upcoming book, How Innovators Connect, with Patty Brown, former executive editor of Optimize and Information Week Magazines. The book is scheduled to be released in March (and will be exclusively available in India). This Tribe will contain the latest and greatest updates on the book (as we make available select passages and notes that you might enjoy reading). We encourage you to ask questions or otherwise interact with Rohit on topics featured in the book. Rohit is currently doing a lecture series around the book.

The book contains examples from the nearly 40 interviews that he and Patty did with Sillicon Valley and Indian entrepreneurs to draw upon their experiences as they went about innovating and set up some very successful and some not-so-successful companies. There are lessons to be learnt, esp. at this juncture when we are seeing the first generation of entrepreneurs in India.

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Founders at Work - Stories of Startups' Early Days

2000 was basically the year of fraud, where we were just losing more and more money every month. At one point we were losing over $10 million per month in fraud. It was crazy.

—Max Levchin, founder of PayPal, page 6

All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really
great, I'd never once done that thing in my life.

—Steve Wozniak, founder of Apple, page 36

Microsoft made a buyout offer for Excite in late '95, and even then I had Microsoft's CTO, Nathan Myhrvold, yelling at me, "Search is not a business. People are just going to search a few times and then bookmark what they want to go to."

—Joe Kraus, founder of Excite, page 68

I originally had my parents moderating, since they were retired, and after a few days I asked my dad how it was going. He said, "Oh, it's very interesting. Mom saw a picture of a guy and a girl and another girl, and they were doing..." So I told Jim, "Dude, my parents can't do this anymore. They're looking at porn all day."

—James Hong, founder of HotOrNot, page 380

Founders at Work is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.

Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?

Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful one, to learn how it's done.

But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businesses do—create value—more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.

For More Information CLICK HERE