Book Brief: Founder’s Tale

Raising & Losing Millions in the Internet Bubble

Brief Summary

Title:** Founder’s Tale: How I Raised & Lost Millions: The Story of a Swedish Startup room 33 Author: Zed Haque Published: 2023 by ZH+ What it Teaches: Founder’s Tale tells the story of Swedish mobile Internet startup room33 through the eyes of its founder. Lessons learned include mistakes made in raising money, structuring governance, and managing through different phases of growth. When To Use It:** Room33’s downfall came amidst the bursting of the Internet bubble, when startup funding dried up and many startups failed. The lessons are just as applicable to today’s entrepreneurs, especially those riding the current AI wave.

Brief Review

I probably met Zed Haque in 1993 or 1994. He was an engineering student at the University of Tulsa, and we’d often have students over to our home. I was manager of new product concepts at WilTel, building some of the industry’s first websites, and we brought him in as an engineering intern.

A few months later, WilTel was acquired. The new CEO told my boss and me to shut down “that Internet stuff,” thinking it was a passing fad. We thought he was wrong, so we resigned and started Oklahoma’s first web development firm, inviting our whole web team, including Zed, to join us.

In these early days of the Web, multimedia and interactivity were becoming more integral, but they were not always easy to implement. Zed experimented with the just-introduced Java programming language and various Perl scripts and databases to help us create dynamic websites for our growing portfolio of customers.

Alas, he’d fallen in love with a Swedish woman and followed her home after graduation. Classic Zed. Originally from Bangladesh, he’s spent his career jumping into new cultures and new opportunity spaces with equal comfort.

Founder’s Tale was originally written in Swedish in 2002, translated and republished in 2023. It traces the full arc: searching for a credible mobile Internet business idea, bootstrapping an MVP, raising funding, handing off to second-generation leadership, and eventually going bankrupt when the bubble burst.

At 126 pages, it probably could’ve used an editor. But the writing flows well, the stories are often funny or genuinely exciting, and Zed doesn’t hold back. He acknowledges his own role in the failure while spreading the blame where he thinks it belongs. That honesty is what makes it useful.

Bottom Line

Founder’s Tale gives you a first-person view of what it actually felt like to lead a startup through the Internet boom and bust. The setting is Sweden, the technology is early mobile Internet, but the mistakes are universal. Worth the few hours it takes to read.