Startup Carton

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A curated collection of the best free resources for new founders and entrepreneurs. In a carton — where the world's greatest startups once fit and even started from.

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1. Start Here

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You are not too late (Kevin Kelly)

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The Challenge of the Future (Blake Masters & Peter Thiel)

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Startup = Growth (Paul Graham)

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Usually successful startups happen because the founders are sufficiently different from other people that ideas few others can see seem obvious to them. Perhaps later they step back and notice they've found an idea in everyone else's blind spot, and from that point make a deliberate effort to stay there. But at the moment when successful startups get started, much of the innovation is unconscious.

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"Startup" is a pole, not a threshold. Starting one is at first no more than a declaration of one's ambitions. You're committing not just to starting a company, but to starting a fast growing one, and you're thus committing to search for one of the rare ideas of that type. But at first you have no more than commitment. Starting a startup is like being an actor in that respect. "Actor" too is a pole rather than a threshold. At the beginning of his career, an actor is a waiter who goes to auditions. Getting work makes him a successful actor, but he doesn't only become an actor when he's successful.

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The real question is not what growth rate makes a company a startup, but what growth rate successful startups tend to have.

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When I first meet founders and ask what their growth rate is, sometimes they tell me "we get about a hundred new customers a month." That's not a rate. What matters is not the absolute number of new customers, but the ratio of new customers to existing ones. If you're really getting a constant number of new customers every month, you're in trouble, because that means your growth rate is decreasing. The best thing to measure the growth rate of is revenue. The next best, for startups that aren't charging initially, is active users. That's a reasonable proxy for revenue growth because whenever the startup does start trying to make money, their revenues will probably be a constant multiple of active users

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The fascinating thing about optimizing for growth is that it can actually discover startup ideas. You can use the need for growth as a form of evolutionary pressure. If you start out with some initial plan and modify it as necessary to keep hitting, say, 10% weekly growth, you may end up with a quite different company than you meant to start. But anything that grows consistently at 10% a week is almost certainly a better idea than you started with.

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It's hard to find something that grows consistently at several percent a week, but if you do you may have found something surprisingly valuable. If we project forward we see why. weekly yearly 1% 1.7x 2% 2.8x 5% 12.6x 7% 33.7x 10% 142.0x A company that grows at 1% a week will grow 1.7x a year, whereas a company that grows at 5% a week will grow 12.6x. A company making $1000 a month (a typical number early in YC) and growing at 1% a week will 4 years later be making $7,900 a month, which is less than a good programmer makes in salary in Silicon Valley. A startup that grows at 5% a week will in 4 years be making $25 million a month.

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The only thing that matters (Marc Andreessen)

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How to Build the Future (Elon Musk)

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Building a Startup (Mark Zuckerberg)

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Work on stuff that matters (Tim O’Reilly)

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Advice for First Time Founders (Y Combinator)

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50 Entrepreneurs share priceless advice (Blockshelf)

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Be careful not to lose twice (Both Sides of the Table)

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Biggest Mistakes First-Time Founders Make (Michael Seibel)

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How I Burned 10 Million Dollars So You Don’t Have To (Matt Munson)

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Lessons for early stage founders (Calvin French-Owen)

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The 20-year-old entrepreneur is a lie (Meredith Somers / MIT Sloan)

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Climbing the wrong hill (Chris Dixon)

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Grow the puzzle around you (Jessica Livingston)

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Why not to do a startup (Marc Andreessen)

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You Probably Shouldn’t Work at a Startup [Evan Armstrong]

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2. Ideas

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Why smart people have bad ideas (Paul Graham)

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How to get startup ideas (Paul Graham)

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How to brainstorm great business ideas (Courtland Allen)

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Ideas for startups (Paul Graham)

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How To Decide What To Build (Daniel Gross)

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Isaac Asimov Asks, “How Do People Get New Ideas?” (MIT Technology Review)

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Big Breakthrough Ideas and Courageous Entrepreneurs (Marc Andreessen)

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Evaluating a Business Idea (Russ Siegelman)

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How to Evaluate Startup Ideas (Kevin Hale)

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Idea Evaluation (Stanford)

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People, Products, and Epiphanies (Google Design)

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The Myth and Magic of Generating New Ideas (Dan Rockmore)

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Vinod Khosla on How to Build the Future (Y Combinator)

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How the most successful B2B startups came up with their original idea (Lenny)

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3. Strategy

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4. Primary Market Research (PMR)

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5. Product Market Fit (PMF)

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6. Pitch Decks

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7. Deals, Terms & Fundraising

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8. Finance

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9. Metrics

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10. Recruiting

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11. Team

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12. Operations

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13. Engineering

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14. Product

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15. Design

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16. Go-To-Market (GTM)

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GTM Basics

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Experimentation

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Growth

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Growth Fundamentals

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Network Effects

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Product-led Growth (PLG)

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Sales-led Growth (SLG)

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PLG, SLG or both?

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Community-led Growth (CLG)

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Building a team for Growth

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Growth Operations

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Growth Hacking & Tactics

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17. Sales

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18. Branding

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19. Marketing

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20. When Things Don't Go As Planned

Soft Skills

🔠Frameworks 🦁Leadership 🗣️Communication 🤝Negotiation ✍️Writing 💡Creativity 🧗Discipline / Perseverance / Grit 🧠Learning (and learning how to learn)🥸Problem Solving

Founder Stories

🧵Startup Lessons Learned

Resources

📄General 📑Startup Docs 🗂️Newsletters 🧑‍💻No Code Tools 🔋Useful Goodies 🗃️Themes

VC Perspective

🪘VC Nuggets

Created with love by @afletsas.

Last updated: 22 Feb 2024

Startup Carton

Table of Contents

Soft Skills

Founder Stories

Resources

VC Perspective