Table of Contents
Key #1: not trying to come up with a million-dollar idea, but thinking of a mistaken question.
Key #2: it's about being elastic-minded, not super-smart.
Key #3: Simplicity takes effort-- genius, even.
Why a startup’s initial business plan doesn’t matter that much (Marc Andreessen)
MIT 15.818 Pricing (Catherine Tucker / MIT OCW) ⭐
Startup Pricing 101 (Kevin Hale)
Pricing your Product (Sequoia)
There are Only 3 Pricing Strategies for Your Startup (Tomasz Tunguz)
The Winning Pricing Strategy for Earliest Stage Startups (Underscore VC)
Pricing Lessons from Working with 30+ Seed & Series A B2B Startups (Tyler Gaffney)
How to Determine the Best SaaS Pricing Strategy for Your Startup (Lighter Capital)
A Rake Too Far: Optimal Platform Pricing Strategy (Above the Crowd)
How to do Market Segmentation (Bill Aulet)
Market Segmentation with SensAble Technologies: Part 1 (Bill Aulet)
Market Segmentation with SensAble Technologies: Part 2 (Bill Aulet)
What is a Beachhead Market (Bill Aulet)
How to Select a Beachhead Market (Bill Aulet)
Define your Beachhead Market through Customer Interviews (StartupSOS)
How to Create an End User Profile and a Persona for Your Startup (Vlad Bodi)
Part 1: Intro (MIT Entrepreneurship 101)
Part 2: What is an End User Profile? (MIT Entrepreneurship 101)
Part 3: How to Build an End User Profile (MIT Entrepreneurship 101)
Part 4: Why Build an End User Profile? (MIT Entrepreneurship 101)
Part 5: Conclusion (MIT Entrepreneurship 101)
Part 1: Meet Raffaele Colella, Founder of Cannonball (MIT Entrepreneurship 101)
Part 2: How to Find Your Persona (MIT Entrepreneurship 101)
Part 3: What is Cannonball? (MIT Entrepreneurship 101)
Part 4: What is a Persona and How Do You Find It? (MIT Entrepreneurship 101)
Part 5: Who is Cannonball's End User? (MIT Entrepreneurship 101)
Part 6: Who is Cannonball's Persona? (MIT Entrepreneurship 101)
Part 7: How to Make a Detailed Persona Profile (MIT Entrepreneurship 101)
Part 8: How to Treat Early Persona Feedback (MIT Entrepreneurship 101)
Part 9: Persona Explained (MIT Entrepreneurship 101)
Part 10: Advice & How Persona Drives Strategy (MIT Entrepreneurship 101)
Part 11: Conclusion: How to Find Your Persona (MIT Entrepreneurship 101)
Who is your Customer? (Bill Aulet)
How to Talk to Users (Eric Migicovsky)
You Have a Great Idea and Nobody Cares (Richard Banfield)
Debrief on PMR (Bill Aulet)
PMR Tips: 15 Points of Wisdom for Better Interviews from a Pro (Bill Aulet)
The only thing that matters (Marc Andreessen)
Product/Market Fit (Marc Andreessen)
Zero to Product/Market Fit (Andrew Chen)
The real Product Market Fit (Michael Seibel)
How To Find Product Market Fit (David Rusenko)
12 Things about Product-Market Fit (Tren Griffin)
The Product Market Fit Journey (Adam Fisher)
The Product Market Fit Cycle (Carlos E. Espinal)
How to Determine Product Market Fit in Your Industry (HubSpot)
The Road to a $100M Company Doesn’t Start with Product (Brian Balfour)
PMF: What it really means, How to Measure it, and Where to find it (Eric Jorgenson)
How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product Market Fit (Rahul Vohra)
How to know if you've got product-market fit (Lenny Rachitsky)
The Never Ending Road To Product Market Fit (Brian Balfour)
A Quantitative Approach to Product Market Fit (Tribe Capital)
Product Channel Fit Will Make or Break Your Growth Strategy (Brian Balfour)
Finding Language/Market Fit: How to make customers feel like you’ve read their minds (FRR)
Startup Pitch Decks (Cirrus Insights)
Starting your fundraising pitch deck (Stripe)
Pitching your early stage startup (Patrick McKenzie)
How to design a better pitch deck (Y Combinator)
How to Build Your Seed Round Pitch Deck (Y Combinator)
The YC Seed Deck Template (Y Combinator)
How to convince investors (Paul Graham)
What questions to ask during pitch meeting (Alex Morgan)
VC Feedback for passing on Everpix (Everpix)
The Art Of the Investor Pitch Deck (Blake Armstrong)
How to raise money (Paul Graham)
How to raise money before launch (Delian)
Raising money for a startup (Khan Academy)
Your Cap Table is your Life (Carlos E. Espinal)
Letter of Intent (Feld)
How To Read A Startup Term Sheet (SVB)
What Seed Financing Is For (Fred Wilson)
Getting a seed round from a VC (Khan Academy)
A Guide to Seed Fundraising (Y Combinator)
Raising a Seed or Series A Round (Unusual VC)
Series A Fundraising Guide (Marathon VC)
Safe Financing Documents (Y Combinator)
Model Legal Documents (NVCA)
Bootstrapped my startup to 10 million users with $0 funding. AMA! (Indie Hackers)
What we look for in founders (Paul Graham)
Trends in VC Financing (CooleyGo)
Investor Herd Dynamics (Paul Graham)
Open Source Deal Memo Template (Point Nine Capital)
All revenue is not created equal: The keys to the 10x revenue club (Bill Gurley)
How to value a startup - 9 methods explained (StephNass)
A visual introduction to VC financing (Venture Dealr)
When Is a “Mark” Not a Mark? When It’s a Venture Capital Mark (Scott Kupor)
VC Math 101: Pre-money, Post-money, Seed, Series A, B, C, D, up rounds and down rounds (amattn)
YC Founders Made These Fundraising Mistakes (Y Combinator)
Venture Insanity Calculator (Grid)
Finance as Strategy: When and How Startups Should Build a Finance Function (A16Z)
The Art of Startup Finance (Entrepreneurship)
The ultimate guide to financial modeling for startups (EY)
Building A Startup Financial Model That Works (Visible VC)
Startup Costs: Expenses You Should Include In Your Plan (SVB)
Startup Financial Models (Kruze)
Startup Financial Models - SaaS (StephNass)
The red flags & magic numbers investors look for in your startup’s metrics (Andrew Chen)
How to set KPIs and Goals (Y Combinator)
Nine Business Models and the Metrics Investors Want (Y Combinator)
Startup Metrics You Need to Monitor (Visible VC)
A Founder’s Guide to Startup Metrics (Baz Banai)
10X: Metrics for Early Stage Startups (Daniel Gross)
12 KPIs you must know before pitching your startup (Phil Nadel)
Recruiting - The 3rd crucial startup skill (For Entrepreneurs)
Avoid falling into the trap of "credentialism" (Youtube / Gary Tan)
How to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with (Marc Andreessen)
Hiring, managing, promoting, and firing executives (Marc Andreessen)
How to interview an Executive (Delian)
LinkedIn’s Head of Recruiting on Handling Salary Negotiations (Linkedin)
How To Choose A Co-Founder (Elad Gil)
How to Fire A Co-Founder (Elad Gil)
Why you won't find a tech cofounder (Indie Hackers)
How to Split Equity Among Co-Founders (Michael Seibel)
Startup Equity Calculator (Foundrs)
Leaving it all on the field (Jeff Jordan / A16Z)
When & How to Fire an Employee at a Small Startup (Elad Blog)
How to Work Together (Y Combinator)
How to Build a Better Startup Team (Stanford GSB)
People Challenges Can Sink Startups (Stanford GSB)
Motivating Employees Without Fear (Kevin Hale)
When & How to Fire an Employee at a Small Startup (Elad Gil)
How to Create an Employee Handbook (Y Combinator)
Handbook for new Employees (Valve)
Rewarding Talent Handbook (Index Ventures)
How to Offer Stock Equity to Your Employees (Y Combinator)
Equity Compensation Guide (Holloway)
Buffer Salary Formula (Buffer)
Your Board of Directors is Probably Going to Fire You (Jerry Neumann)
Running your startup (Patrick Collison / Stripe)
‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups (First Round)
Building a High Performance Organization (Ray Stata)
Growing with your company's complexity (Irrational Exuberance)
Make Operations Your Secret Weapon - Here’s How (First Round Review)
Building a Startup That Will Last (HBR)
Scale up a Startup: The Importance of Operations (Raul O. Chao)
At a Tech Startup, Operations Must Wear Many Hats (AbstractOps)
What Is Operations In A Startup? Don’t Worry, It’s Simple… (Paul David Mather)
The Effective Engineer (Edmond Lau)
What Qualities Make a Good Startup Engineer? (Effective Engineer)
A Look at WhatsApp: Engineering for Success at Scale (Facebook)
The Engineer to Manager Transition (David Loftesness)
Become an effective software engineering manager (LeadDev)
What Makes Great Startup Engineering Leaders? (Talent Snap)
Building an Engineering Team [Triplebyte]
How to build a startup engineering team (Increment)
How to develop a healthy startup engineering culture (Inside Spendesk)
Cultivating a high performance engineering team (Stephen Kiers)
Building a Top-performing Startup Engineering Team (Plotly)
How I Structured Engineering Teams at LinkedIn and AdMob for Success (First Round)
Building and Motivating Engineering Teams (Camille Fournier)
Scaling engineering organizations (Stripe)
Building Product (Michael Seibel)
How to Plan an MVP (Michael Seibel)
Let's talk product-led growth (Sandhya Hegde)
If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good (Paul Buchheit)
Turning Products into Companies (Michael Skok)
How to build learning and fun into your applications (Daniel Cook)
The ultimate product management cheat sheet for startup CEOs (Journal)
Product Management in Startups: MVP to 4.0 roadmap and PM tasks (Slidebean)
Being a Product Manager at an Early Stage Startup (Product Coalition)
Product Management: Startup founder vs. Product Manager (Product Rise)
The PM’s Guide to Working With Engineers (Abhishek Chakravarty)
Tools for Practical Design (Y Combinator)
Designers in tech — who does what? (Maja Bergendahl)
Cheat sheet: Understanding the role of design in startups (John Zeratsky)
The Ultimate Guide to the Founding Designer Role (First Round Review)
Scaling Product & Design at Airbnb (Y Combinator)
The Role of a Designer in Early-Stage Startups (UX Collective)
The Job of the ‘Product Designer’ and its Importance in a Startup (UX Collective)
Biased by Design (BbD)
How to sell (Tyler Bosmeny)
Entrepreneurial Selling: What's Your Story? (Craig Wortmann)
Entrepreneurial Selling: The Story Matrix (Craig Wortmann)
Entrepreneurial Selling: Art of Conversation (Craig Wortmann)
Entrepreneurial Selling: Entrepreneurial Sales Model (Craig Wortmann)
How To Write Cold Emails In Startup Sales (Devin Dixon)
How to Cold Email Investors? (Y Combinator)
Cold Email Hacks (HubSpot)
Early Stage Sales (Stanford)
Entrepreneurial Sales (Chuck Eesley)
Entrepreneurial Sales and Marketing (Chuck Eesley)
Don't sell features and benefits (Sandler)
How To Become A Customer Acquisition Expert (Brian Balfour)
New Sales Models (David Sacks / Yammer)
The Enterprise Sales Learning Curve (Khosla Ventures)
Building a Scalable, Predictable Sales Machine (Mark Roberge)
The Sales Acceleration Formula (Mark Roberge)
Scaling the Sales Force (Stanford)
How to Hire the Right VP of Sales for Your Startup (Amy Volas)
On Combining Bottom-up Adoption AND Enterprise Sales (A16Z)
The “$20M to $500M” Question: Adding Top Down Sales (A16Z)
Go-To-Market Strategy (Bill Aulet)
Go-To-Market Strategies (Michael Skok)
Go-To-Marketing Strategies for Startups (Kim Walsh)
Why "Growth" (Brian Balfour)
Seek Authentic Growth (Brian Balfour)
Growth for Startups (Y Combinator)
How to build a growth team – lessons from Uber, Hubspot, and others (Andrew Chen)
How to Set Up, Hire and Scale a Growth Strategy and Team (Y Combinator)
How to Set Up, Staff and Scale a Growth Program (Y Combinator)
Here's What a Real Growth Strategy Looks Like (First Round)
Alex Zhu (TikTok) on Igniting Viral Growth & Building a User Community (Greylock)
Growth Hacking for Startups and Venture Capital (Andrew Chen)
What to look for when you’re hiring a Head of Growth (Andrew Chen)
When "Grow Your Revenue!" Is Wrong (Daniel Gross)
Why Figma Wins (kwokchain)
Six rules of hiring for growth (Lenny Rachitsky)
All About Pivoting (Dalton Caldwell)
Startup Failure Post-Mortems (CBInsights)
Why Startups Fail (Tom Eisenmann)
The Hidden Patterns of Startup Failure (NfX)