The point I was trying to make is that they take other people's work, and present it to the world in a different form.

Compare 'Founders', to something like Walter Isaacson "Jobs" - both of them had lots of interviews, with transcribing, and edits - but I got a lot more out of 'Founders' (as did everyone I know) than Issacon's book. Issacson supposedly had 100% access with his relationship to Steve Jobs, but I don't know if Issacson didn't know what questions to ask, how to ask them, how to make his subject comfortable, what the important parts were to capture, or (my opinion) - just didn't really care about his subject that much. It was a huge disappointment for me.

Founders is a delight, and I attribute that pretty much 60% to the author, 40% to the interview subjects, and 0% to Paul Graham.

If Livingston had been assigned to write Jobs's Biography it would have blown our minds. And, of course, you would have said it was good because she was related to Paul Graham.

My reading is that Isaacson cared more about Steve Jobs as a human being than as a living case study for entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs. Steve Jobs commissioned the biography so his kids would have a better idea of who he was as a human being, not so you and I could learn his secrets for building a startup and being a CEO. (That project was internal to Apple: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/06/business/la-fi-apple...)

It would have been entirely possible to accomplish both missions. Tell the story of unblinking-dropout-denying-father-commune-living-india-visiting-fruit-eating-acid-dropping steve, at the same time that you tell the story of how he built Apple, Next, Pixar, and Apple 2.0, and what it meant to him.

I don't think there was a single follower of Steve Jobs that was very satisfied with Issacson's Biography. I didn't even really feel like it told me about Steve Jobs the person.