Entrepreneurship resources

Introduction

This repository offers a list of resources (books, articles, videos, etc.) related to entrepreneurship.

Items:

🧰 : list of resources
📖 : book
🎞 : video/movie extract/movie/talk
🏙 : slides/presentation
⭐️ : must-read

Generic resources

Books and playbooks

The Startup Playbook, Sam Altman (President of Y Combinator)
Summary: How to Start a Startup (YC)
Founder Books: a compilation of books recommended by 100+ entrepreneurs.
YC Startup Library

Articles

12 Things I Learned from Chris Dixon about Startups
The 10 most common entrepreneurial mistakes I’ve seen students make
- Not really getting what a startup is
- Focusing on a junk market
- Why aren’t you starting TODAY?
- Pirates are in rare supply these days
- You have to put in more intensity
- Alter Ego vs. Alter Zero
- True fans vs. Too good friends
- Good money vs. bad donations
- Do you really want to be mentored? Incubated!?
- Is a startup really what you want right now?
Product lessons from Dan Robinson (ex-CTO of Heap)
- You need to determine whether the pizza is burnt (e.g. did you execute poorly) or if the pizza was a bad idea.
- You should only do two things at your startup: “write code [and] talk to users.”
- The best way to build a useless product for months is by letting your excitement influence the conversations you have with users.
Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy, Jason Cohen
- Didn’t talk to customers (and listen)
- No market need / Bad market
- Did not select a target audience, and clearly communicate the value proposition to them
- Too many things had to go right
- Founders / investors broke up
- Had no differentiation in the market
- Refused to seek the truth / refused to see the truth / refused to learn
- Launching too early / Launching too late
- Premature scaling
- Selling to the Enterprise before $20M ARR
- Unworkable business model / cannot be profitable
- Writing code instead of winning customers
- Expanding the target market before winning the target market / moving too quickly to the second product
- Lack of passion / endurance

Topics

Acquisition

The red flags and magic numbers that investors look for in your startup’s metrics – 80 slide deck included!, Andrew Chen
Why the worst users come from referral programs, free trials, coupons, and gamification, Andrew Chen
The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs, Andrew Chen

Analysis

cxli233/FriendsDontLetFriends: Friends don't let friends make certain types of data visualization

Attention to details

Make every detail perfect and limit the number of details to perfect.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder

Attitude

B2B

The “One Big Customer” Trap
- Don’t target large customers first
- Avoid scope of work (SoW)
- Don’t be “open for business” until you have multiple customers
- Spread revenue across customers
- Don’t eat your seed corn
How to test a B2B startup idea

Bootstrap

50 Big Companies that Started with Little or No Money

CEO

Communication

Compensation

Executive Compensation, Andreessen Horowitz

Competition

The Real Competition is the Water

The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.

Henry Ford

Customer obsession

Why asking your customers what they want doesn't work
- “If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.”
- What job did you hire that product to do?
What is CSAT

Data (analytics)

Analytics Academy, Segment. Contains lots of processes and ideas about how to be data-driven.
Building a data team at a mid-stage startup: a short story

Tools and resources:

LisaDziuba/Awesome-Design-Tools
Interface In Game: a collection of video games UI, very useful for inspiration

Patterns:

Never Use a Warning When you Mean Undo, A List Apart
16 little UI design rules that make a big impact

Disruption

What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong, Stratechery

Culture

Inside PayPal, Vincent Chan
The Curse of Culture

Entrepreneur

🎞 Steve jobs on Thinkers And Doers
- The thinkers are also usually the doers.
The 100 Best Bits of Advice from 10 Years of First Round Review, First Round
27 Years Ago, Steve Jobs Said the Best Employees Focus on Content, Not Process.
Projects and Companies, Sam Altman

Ethics

Being good is an adventure far more violent and daring than sailing round the world – G. K. Chesterton

Execution

Building Faster
- Force Clear Priorities
- Focus on what will and won't change
- Don't think too far ahead
- Try Order of Magnitude Timeboxing
- Debug The Never-ending Tasks
- Clear Goals for Code Review
- Notice when you're talking past each other
- Pick the right tools
Things you're allowed to do

Experimentation

Experiments at Airbnb: a classic article about A/B testing
- The outside world often has a much larger effect on metrics than product changes do.
- How long do you need to run an experiment?

Financing

The 40% Rule, AVC: "your annual revenue growth rate + your operating margin should equal 40%"

Focus

Why Evernote Failed to Realize Its Potential
- In 2011, Evernote started dispersing itself with irrelevant products (e.g., Evernote Food, Moleskine partnership).
- In contrast, the main app was plagued with bugs.
Before Growth
- I think the right initial metric is “do any users love our product so much they spontaneously tell other people to use it?”
- Until that’s a “yes”, founders are generally better off focusing on this instead of a growth target.

Founders

Finding an idea

How To Decide What To Build, Daniel Gross (partner at Y Combinator).
Are you put off building something because it already exists?: a great discussion on HackerNews. * "Next time you come up with that great idea, don’t Google it for a week. Let your mind fester on the idea, allow it to grow like many branches from a trunk."
Startup idea checklist
First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge
- Socratic questioning can be used to establish first principles through stringent analysis.
- A common way that people limit what’s possible is to tell themselves that all the good ideas are taken. Yet, people have been saying this for hundreds of years — literally — and companies keep starting and competing with different ideas, variations, and strategies.
- The iPhone wasn’t first, it was better. Microsoft wasn’t the first to sell operating systems; it just had a better business model.
- Reasoning from first principles allows us to step outside of history and conventional wisdom and see what is possible. * Many people mistakenly believe that creativity is something that only some of us are born with, and either we have it or we don’t. Fortunately, there seems to be ample evidence that this isn’t true.
Don’t think to write, write to think
Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”, HBR, Clayton M. Christensen
Creativity faucet: Increase your creativity

As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble. — Harrington Emerson

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. – Steve Jobs

Funding

Don’t Take VC Funding - It Will Destroy Your Company

Money is like gasoline on a road trip. You don't want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations.

Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media founder, and CEO

Growth

UX Case Studies: a list of growth and UI case studies. The comics format is very engaging.
Ask HN: Where and how do you find your early adopters?
10 lessons on using the flywheel effect to grow your business
What to do when product growth stalls, Andrew Chen
- Admit it when people don’t want your product
- When retention sucks, but you haven’t growth hacked yet
- It makes me happy when I see strong retention numbers with a flat growth curve.
- Polish your the UX flows that matter to growth — signup, inviting, payment — and ignore your hardcore user features
Superlinear Returns, Paul Graham

Handbook

Early Stage Startup Handbook

Hiring

Checkout the hiring section on my charlax/engineering-management.

Good Job Descriptions: good job descriptions from the most loved companies

Investor relations

What I Learned Reading 1,000 Investor Reports provides a simple & effective investor report.

IP (Intellectual Property) and patents

How to Change the World: Defensibility, Guy Kawasaki
Counterpoint: Patents and Defensibility, Guy Kawasaki

Learning

It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e., the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.

– Elon Musk

Marketing

Check out the Sales section as well.

The Best Elevator Pitch Examples, Templates, and Tactics, Kurian Tharakan
Writing copy for landing pages, Stripe Atlas
The man who produced Steve Jobs’ keynotes for 20 years
goabstract/Marketing-for-Engineers
How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1,000 users
The Pitch Deck
Avatar Marketing: Sell to Carol, Jason Cohen
The mid-market briar patch (Peter Thiel calls it the "black hole")
🎞 How The Savannah Bananas Creates The Most Unforgettable Experience In Baseball HISTORY, Jesse Cole

Resources:

Mental models

Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform

Meta: advice about advice

Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs
- Do you think Musk copied that strategy from the business school he never went to? Do you think Brian Chesky of Airbnb heard that strategy from a friend?
- The most satisfying thing about being an entrepreneur is that you can do what you think makes sense. That doesn’t mean don’t get advice. But get advice from people who know you, who you know, and most importantly, learn how to apply that advice.

@awilkinson: "Here's the number I used to win the lottery" – Entrepreneurs giving advice

Metrics

Success & Velocity
- You need two kinds of metrics in your business: success and velocity.
- Success metrics tell you whether you hit your goals
- Velocity metrics tell you how likely you are to hit future goals
Selecting the right product metrics, Jason Cohen
- See example framework here: https://longform.asmartbear.com/product-metrics/007e7325.svg
- A product sits in the middle of a chain of events. Start by plotting those events in time, by actor, and the so-called "value" we might measure
- Distinguish between metrics you are satisficing ("guardrails", e.g., cost, uptime, MTTR, etc.) vs. maximizing (e.g., NPS, usage, DAU/WAU, features)
- It can be a good idea to work on satisficing KPIs only when it slips in violation territory (e.g., outside of SLA error budget).
- Putting metrics in context solves the debate between metrics that the team can impact immediately, and the one business stakeholders care about. Revenue remains (usually) the most important metric, but it's clearer that it can lag by a few weeks or months (Blackberry's revenue continued increased for two years after the iPhone launched).
- A team must honestly and clearly measure both direct results and lagging outcomes. Not yet achieving the outcome is not a complete failure (luck is always involved), but a learning that will shape future work.
- The diagram makes clear that there should be a balance between customer-visible work (creating value through new features) and invisible ones (tech debt, reliability, security).
- If the customer’s business doesn’t thrive, they’ll stop paying for your software, no matter how good the software is. While of course the customer’s business is again a multi-factor, lagging metric, where nearly all the factors are outside of your control, it’s still ultimately the greatest form of value. Even if you can’t control it, you can notice the attributes of customers who tend to thrive, and direct your marketing, sales, and features towards that subset of the market, yielding higher growth and retention, and likely higher profitability.
Do You Have Lightning In a Bottle? How to Benchmark Your Social App
- WAU, DAU, DAU/MAU ratio
- L-ness curve
Measure what matters. Even if you don’t fully control it
Do You Have Lightning In a Bottle? How to Benchmark Your Social App, Andreesen Horowitz

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Considering App vs. Website? Build a Website.
Avoiding The Wrong MVP Approach
Signs You Aren't Really Building a Minimum Viable Product
- A MVP is not a minimal product, it is a strategy and process directed toward making and selling a product to customers.
- You should start with the riskiest assumptions that you can test and try to make them fail.
A Smart Bear, I hate MVPs. So do your customers. Make it SLC instead.
- MVPs are too M and almost never V.
- An experiment should be Simple, Lovable and Complete.
"Sony was founded in 1946. Its first product was an electric rice cooker. Here are some early products from 11 other well known companies."
For God’s sake, follow the Lean Startup Method
Your customers hate MVPs. Make a SLC instead.

The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time.

-- Eric Ries, Lean Startup

MVP, despite the name, is not about creating minimal products. If your goal is simply to scratch a clear itch or build something for a quick flip, you really don’t need the MVP. In fact, MVP is quite annoying, because it imposes extra overhead. We have to manage to learn something from our first product iteration. In a lot of cases, this requires a lot of energy invested in talking to customers or metrics and analytics.

-- Eric Ries, Lean Startup

Mindset

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt

Pitch decks

Funded pitch decks
30 Legendary Startup Pitch Decks And What You Can Learn From Them
The Only 10 Slides You Need in Your Pitch, Guy Kawasaki
Start House
On the Road to Failure: presentations and pitch decks by the largest business failures and corporate frauds

Pivoting

Knowing When to Pivot, Stanford eCorner

Predicting the future

Navigating the unpredictability of everything, Jason Cohen
- A strategy is required, even when it’s wrong
- The customer (behavior) is always (directionally) right
- Build a moat
- Have more than one way to succeed
- Bet on what will not change
- Decide quickly → get customer reactions quickly → learn quickly → make new decisions quickly.

Pricing

Pricing model at GitLab
🎞 Startup Pricing 101: Growth, Marketing, Monetization, Y Combinator
It’s Price Before Product. Period.
- Have the Willingness-to-Pay talk early.
- Curb your instincts to please customers by giving away too much value unless people will pay for it.
- Slapping on a price just before going to market is a recipe for failure.
- Investigate how you charge as much as what you charge
- Don’t try to serve every segment
Nine Rules from Monetizing Innovation
Pricing Your Product, Sequoia
Pricing determines your business model, Jason Cohen

Prioritization

See also the Prioritization section on my engineering-management list

RICE: Simple prioritization for product managers
My Billion Dollar Mistake: why having a prioritisation process is key to keeping your edge.
Prioritization as a Superpower
It just doesn't matter, Signal vs. noise
- Most of the time you spend is wasted time on things that just don’t matter. If you can cut out the work and thinking that just doesn’t matter you’ll achieve productivity you’ve never imagined. It’s there if you just don’t pay attention to the things that don’t matter.
The Complete Guide to Goal Setting (Backed by Science), Mark Manson
- The means with which you pursue your goals are often just as important, if not more important, than the goal itself.
- A supposedly golden rule of goal setting is being able to measure progress towards your goal as precisely as possible. But it turns out the goals that are easiest to measure—external goals—are often the ones that bring us the least satisfaction.
- This is why it’s sometimes more valuable to fail at a goal than to succeed—the failure teaches us what we should be pursuing instead.
Backlog size is inversely proportional to how often you talk to customers

Processes

Startup bibles: curation of internal processes and resources that successful companies have publicly shared, including pitch deck.

Product Architecture

Modularity Theory - Christensen Institute : Christensen Institute
- Modularity standardizes the way by which components fit together — physically, mechanically, chemically and so on. The parts fit and work together in well-understood, crisply codified ways.
- Interdependency between parts requires the same organization to develop both components if it hopes to develop either component.

Product management

Free Resources for Product Management
Don’t trust agile alone to build successful products, UI patterns.
- Too much focus on what and when to build without asking why, creates tunnel vision.
Shape Up: free book about product management from Basecamp.
Building Products
- A product succeeds because it solves a problem for people. This sounds very basic, but it is the single most important thing to understand about building good products.
Scaling Product Delivery: The "Dirty" Secret of High Performing Product Teams
My favorite product management templates
Effective Product Management
Top 10 Reasons for Slow Velocity, Silicon Valley Product Group
- Lack of strong product owners
- Lack of strong project management
- Not including lead engineers during product discovery
- Lack of product vision and focus
- Inflexible product architecture / technical debt
50 Short Product Lessons
Simple Product Management Tricks
- Perform an effort/impact analysis
- Timebox hard-to-estimate work
- Write playbooks before automation
Product-Driven versus Customer-Driven
How to develop product sense
- Observe people interacting with products
- Deconstruct everyday products
- Learn from great product thinkers
- Be curious about changes in technology and your domain
Product development guiding principle: Use quality to generate speed
"Elon Musk explains the 5-step process he tries to implement in his companies to ensure efficient engineering: 1. Make your requirements less dumb 2. Try very hard to delete parts or processes 3. Simplify/optimize 4. Accelerate cycle time 5. Automate

Product managers:

A Letter To A New Product Manager, The Coinbase Blog
Forget the MBA. Here’s the fastest way to become a product manager
What distinguishes the Top 1% of product managers from the Top 10%? (Quora)
How to Hire a Product Manager, Ken Norton (and its 10th birthday look back)
Startups don’t need product managers who are visionaries
Pixar’s Rules of Storytelling Applied to Product Managers & UX Designers
Decoding Product Management — A skill matrix to grow, coach, assess, and hire world-class PMs
Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager, Ben Horowitz.
PM Starter Pack: how to get started in product management
A pause to revisit: What’s the Product Manager’s role?
- The Product Manager’s ultimate responsibility is to create a solution that is valuable, viable, feasible, and usable.
- The Product Manager’s role is to understand customer problems very well, rally the team to build the winning product, and then iterate until it gets it right.
7 uncommon opinions after 10 years of product management

Product-market fit

🎞 How to Find Product Market Fit, Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and CEO of Segment.
The First 100 Course: a very complete handbook about getting to 100 customers.
I'm Walking Away From the Product I Spent a Year Building: failing to find a product-marking fit.
Excuse me, is there a problem?, Jason Cohen, A Smart Bear. Offers a scoring method to validate a problem:
- Plausible: Do 10M people or 100k companies have the problem?
- Self-Aware: Do they know & care they have the problem?
- Lucrative: Do they have substantial budget to solve this problem?
- Liquid: Are they willing and able to buy right now?
- Eager: Do they want to buy from you, specifically?
- Enduring: Will they still be paying (or paying-it-forward) a year from now?
The 4 Levels of PMF, First Round

If a person does not already believe they have a problem, they will not be surfing the Internet looking for a solution, and even if they happen upon your website somehow, you cannot get them to spend money to solve a problem they don't think they have.

– Jason Cohen

Product marketing

"Macintosh launch brochure too good to not post in its entirety. I read every word of this 100,000 times as a boy.

Prototyping

The joy of sketch(ing)
- Sketching stops you wasting your effort
- Sketching encourages you to focus on the steak, not just the sizzle
- Sketching opens up design to everyone
- Includes practical tips.
📖 Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design, Bill Buxton
Sketching: the Visual Thinking Power Tool, A List Apart * Includes practical tips and references.
Prototyping, Usability.gov
- High-Fidelity and Low-Fidelity Prototyping
- Creating Paper Prototypes

Rituals

The First Gusto Polish-a-thon

Sales

The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen
Three Sales Mistakes Software Engineers Make
How Jeff Johnson sold Nike's first shoes
- Every time Johnson sold a pair of shoes he’d create an index card for that customer. He’d jot down all manner of minutiae details: shoe size, shoe preference, favourite distance, etc…
- Johnson used this handcrafted database to keep in touch with customers. He’d send birthday cards, training tips, notes of encouragement before big races.
23 rules to run a software startup with minimum hassle
- Recurring revenue is the way to go
- Stick everybody on a month-by-month plan
- Don’t do freemium
- Don’t apply for grants
- No patents
- Don’t do trade shows/conferences
A Simple Sales Methodology for B2B SaaS Startups
Five ways to build a $100 million business, The Angel VC
Growth Handbook: How startups run B2B sales
🎞 Enterprise Sales Basics, Y Combinator
🎞 B2B Sales Q&A: B2B, B2B Sales, Y Combinator
Why Big Deals Are Bad for Startups, Y Combinator
🎞 Enterprise Sales Basics, Y Combinator
How to sell a B2B product

Check out those list of resources:

First Round Sales blog articles

Scaling the business

Scaling to $100 Million
- ARR is the North Star
- Win by Wide Margins
- Know Your Worth
- Plot Your Way to the Next Milestone
- Run the Public Playbook

Scaling the team (org & management)

Slack & comms

Security

Software as a service (SaaS)

11 years of SaaS product strategy

Speed

Speed as a Habit

Stories of startups

From Show HN to Series D
What I Learned Co-Founding Dribbble
- Choose your partner wisely
- Start with a t-shirt
- Your first 100 members are critical
- Pave the cowpaths
- Persistent iteration over flashy launches
- Grow thick skin. Quickly.
- Trends come and go and come back again
- People and relationships are what’s most important
- Stay sharp with side projects
- Identify when you’re being stubborn
- Write, teach, and share what you’re learning
- Don’t take funding
- Take care of yourself first
- Knowing when to let go
Lessons for early stage founders by Calvin French-Owen
Stripe: Thinking Like a Civilization
The Airbnbs: a great story about perseverance.
I just shut down my first startup. Here’s my retro
- Start by getting obsessed with the problem space, not the end vision
- Start asking customers to pay something, anything, upfront
- Stop trying to convince investors to have conviction
We built the fastest CI in the world. It failed. Here’s what we learned
Stocketa
Orion – From idea to launch in 45 days
Part II: The failure points from $5m to $100m in ARR

Strategy

A New License to Future Proof the Commoditization of Data Integration lays out the rationale behind Airbyte's business model and open sourcing strategy.
- If it helps individual contributors or small teams, then it should be free and open source; if it serves an organization’s needs, then it should be monetized.
- They use the Elastic License v2 (ELv2) to prevent "some huge companies [from taking] the Airbyte project and start offering a clone of Airbyte Cloud".
Value disciplines explained with examples: pick one of customer intimacy, operational excellence, product leadership
Kung Fu, Jason Cohen
- I don’t like freemium; I want to learn from people who care enough to pay, not from the 20x more who don’t.
- “MVPs” are too M to be V. They’re a selfish ploy, tricking people who thought they were customers into being alpha testers
- A startup has to be so excellent at one or two key things, that they can screw up everything else up and not die.
- If you have more than three priorities, you have none.
- Your values are tested only when the decisions are tough
- Pricing determines everything else
- Price so that 100-200 [clients] is enough for all the founders to work full-time.
- Early on, your job is to validate that there’s a business, not to validate that your idea is good or that a pain exists
- People don’t value their time. They will do crazy things to save $2
- If you can’t double your prices, you’re in a weak market position
- A good strategy is to be the System of Record for something
- It’s more powerful to be 10x better at one thing, then to shore up ten weaknesses.
- Design is important, yet many of the $1B+ SaaS public companies have poor design. So, other things are more important.
- The only cause of Writer’s Block is high standards. Type garbage. Editing is 10x easier than writing.
- “Everyone thinks of changing the world. No one thinks of changing themselves.” —Leo Tolstoy.
The three kinds of leverage that anchor effective strategies, Jason Cohen
- Reversing weakness is hard, painful, likely to result in something merely neutral, not great, and is at high risk of failing completely
- Leveraging differentiated strengths
- Leveraging durable differentiated strengths
What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble's Surprising Turnaround?
In Defense of Strategy

Support

Customer service is a choice, Seth Godin
- "You can’t cost cut your way to greatness."

Surveys

Some good points about wording customer surveys, Jason Fried

Teams

Small teams: a list of small teams that achieves large things

Toolkits

Techstars' entrepreneur toolkit

UX

UX Design

See also the relevant section on my professional-programming list

Top 10 Application-Design Mistakes, Nielsen Norman Group
Jakob Nielsen's Ten Usability Heuristics (PDF) and article, 1994
- Visibility of system status
- Match between system and the real world
- User control and freedom
- Consistency and standards
- Error prevention
- Recognition rather than recall
- Flexibility and efficiency of use
- Aesthetic and minimalist design
- Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
- Help and documentation
A comprehensive (and honest) list of UX clichés
Why Everyone Should Read Customer Support Emails
4 Rules for Intuitive UX
- Obey the Law of Locality
- ABD: Anything But Dropdowns
- Pass the Squint Test
- Teach by example
10 Usability Heuristics Every Designer Should Know
📚 Selected Books on Design, User eXperience, Mobile, Accessibility & more, Stéphanie Walter. Includes books about UX research, UX design, psychology, information architecture, content strategy, web design, typography, methods, collaboration, mobile, accessibility...
BATUX - Using a UX process to redesign Batman’s classic outfit: a very engaging way to learn about the UX process.
Sketching: the Visual Thinking Power Tool
Eigensolutions: composability as the antidote to overfit