Baby's First Merger (and Other Tales of Business Start-Ups)

The Business Press Maven has conquered the world of business journalism criticism. Now, every other weekend, it's on to books...

When it comes to the health of any business, like any marriage, the beginning matters most. It sets the tone and stands as a time from which to draw strength and guidance whenever wider circumstances get rough. In Couples Therapy 101, they teach analysts to open up a conversation with a teetering couple by getting them to talk about how they met. But little that's written about businesses isolates those key moments: the birth pangs, the lost-in-love blindness, the challenges surmounted.

That's why Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days (Apress) stands as a proud recipient of The Business Press Maven "Help" label. Author Jessica Livingston, by the way, is a venture capitalist with a dark secret in her past: an English degree from Bucknell. In all seriousness, real-world experience plus some sort of past relationship with words is a better combination than we see in most business tomes, where one or both are often missing.

That may be one reason why Livingston went with a tactic I liked: running nothing but transcripts of her interviews with these CEOs about the early days of their companies. In profiles, CEOs are, as any reader of mine knows, often deified. But when all you see is the transcript, there is less chance to build a lucky guy into a genius by using subliminal little biases and turns of phrases. The author can still do it, both by letting the CEO ramble or by asking questions like: "Tell me how you always tell the truth and so wisely?" But an investor can see that -- and won't see it here.