The ultimate reading list for founders

 

Every great company begins with a way of seeing the world differently. Behind the biggest breakthroughs are years of accumulated ideas, from philosophy and science to business and technology. This collection gathers some of the most valuable thinking from founders, investors, and thinkers who have helped shape how we build, create, and solve problems.

 

Articles

Founder Mindset, Mental Models & Big Ideas

• The days are long but the decades are short
• Willingness to look stupid
• Staring into the abyss as a core life skill
• Impact, agency, and taste
• The Most Precious Resource is Agency
• On agency
• The top idea in your mind
• How to think for yourself
• The four quadrants of conformism
• The anatomy of determination
• Crony Beliefs
• The tyranny of ideas
• Some things I believe by Nat Friedman
• Some examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together
• It's a torturous chaos until it isn't
• Excuse me, is there a problem?
• Searching for outliers
• The Illusion of Knowledge
• In Praise of Idleness
• Startups are an act of desperation
• Put Something Back
• The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
• The Map Is Not the Territory
• What is First Principles Thinking?
• Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform
• Theory of Constraints 101
• Where Do Prices Come From?
• I, Pencil

 

Fundraising, Metrics & Finance

• 16 Startup Metrics
• Startup Metrics for Pirates
• Fundraising Advice to Avoid
• How Funding Rounds Differ
• The Burn Multiple
• All Revenue is Not Created Equal: The Keys to the 10X Revenue Club
• Everything we measure at Equals
• Preparing a board deck
• Sequoia Capital Pitch Deck Template
• Good VCs, bad VCs

 

Strategy, Competition & Growth

• The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan
• Tesla Master Plan, Part Deux
• Tesla Master Plan Part 3
• The Pmarca Guide to Startups
• The idea maze
• Defensibility & Competition
• Competition Is for Losers
• How startups beat incumbents
• Two Powerful Mental Models: Network Effects and Critical Mass
• The Case for the Fat Startup
• Startup = Growth
• How to start a startup
• The Dumb Idea Paradox: Why great ideas often start out by sounding dumb
• Five ways to build a $100 million business
• 1000 true fans
• No Science, No Startups: The Innovation Engine We're Switching Off

 

Product & Product-Market Fit

• Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager
• Know your customers' "Job to Be Done"
• We Don't Sell Saddles Here
• Your target market isn't demographic
• Willingness-to-pay: Creating permanent competitive advantage for the right reasons
• If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good
• Rarely say yes to feature requests
• The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs
• Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?
• Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit - Lessons for Building Horizontal Products
• How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product Market Fit
• How we launch at Supabase

 

Leadership & Management

• Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO
• The second job of a startup CEO
• Founder mode
• How To Be Successful
• Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey?
• Stubborn Visionaries & Pigheaded Fools
• Do things that don't scale
• There are no small changes
• Be Impatient
• Principal–agent problem
• Two-factor theory

 

Team, Culture & Communication

• The 37signals Guide to Internal Communication
• The 37signals Guide to Making Decisions
• Group Chat: The Best Way to Totally Stress Out Your Team
• How we make decisions at Coinbase
• Netflix Culture
• The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to "The Office"
• On Nonviolent Communication
• I can tolerate anything except the outgroup
• Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think
• Collaboration sucks

 

Hiring, Equity & People Ops

• How to hire
• What's going on here, with this human?
• Omens of exceptional talent
• Employee Equity
• A No B.S. Guide to Startup Stock Option Grants
• Carta Job offer letter
• Benefits at Startups
• Onboarding at Startups
• Letter of Resignation

 

Engineering & Technical Leadership

• The Startup CTO's Handbook
• #define CTO
• #define CTO OpenAI
• What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?

 

Company Case Studies, Playbooks & Reflections

• Spotify Scaling
• Reflections on OpenAI
• Reflections on Palantir
• What I Miss About Working at Stripe
• The Story of Shazam: The Startup Days
• How Apple is organized for innovation
• Every Jeff Bezos' Letter to Shareholders Since 1997
• An "Owner's Manual" for Google's Shareholders
• A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100
• Uncanny Valley
• Lifehacks
• 50 things we’ve learned about building successful products
• 32 things we’ve learned about building a startup that scales

 

Blogs

• Paul Graham Essays
• Sebastian Bensusan Blog
• Steve Blank Blog
• Tomasz Tunguz Blog
• Patrick Collison Blog
• Elad Gil Blog
• Sam Altman Blog
• Des Traynor Blog
• Marc Randolph Blog
• Steve Jobs Archive
• Chris Dixon Blog
• Y Combinator Library
• Joel on Software
• Lenny Rachitsky Blog
• Naval Ravikant Blog
• Marc Andressen Blog
• Greg Brockman Blog
• Stratechery by Ben Thompson
• Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letters
• Roger Martin Blog
• SaaStr Blog

 

Speeches

• This is water
• You and Your Research
• Personal Renewal
• Cargo Cult Science by Richard Feynman
• The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking
• The Psychology of Human Misjudgment
• Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Address 2005
• Man in the arena - Theodore Roosevelt
• A Lesson on Elementary Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business
• Drew Houston - MIT Commencement Address, 2013
• Great Talks Most People Have Never Heard

 

Books

• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
• Sam Walton: Made in America
• The Mom Test: How to talk to customers
• Thinking in Systems
• The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership
• High Output Management
• The Lean Startup
• How Google Works
• Shape Up by Basecamp
• The hard thing about hard things
• What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture
• Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It
• No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
• The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company
• The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company
• Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
• Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace
• The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness
• The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
• The Innovator's Dilemma, with a New Foreword: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
• Crossing the Chasm
• Parkison's Law & Other Studies in Administration
• Principles: Life and Work
• Founder Books

 

Employee Handbooks

• The 37signals Employee Handbook
• How to succeed in Mr Beast production
• Cal.com Employee Handbook
• GitLab Handbook
• Valve Handbook for New Employees
• HubSpot Culture Code

 

Playbooks

• Startup Playbook by Sam Altman
• An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Employee Equity

 

Courses

• CS183: Startup - Peter Thiel Class Notes

 

Resources

• Safe Financing Documents

 

Videos

• Patrick Collison on Hiring at Stripe and the Role of a Product-Focused CEO
• How to Hire by Keith Rabois
• Brian Chesky on Launching Airbnb and the Challenges of Scale
• Ben Horowitz On What Makes a Great Founder
• Sam Altman on Y Combinator and What Makes The Best Founders
• Lecture 1 - How to Start a Startup (Sam Altman, Dustin Moskovitz)
• Lecture 13 - How to be a Great Founder (Reid Hoffman)
• Lecture 14 - How to Operate (Keith Rabois)
• Lecture 15 - How to Manage (Ben Horowitz)
• Lecture 16 - How to Run a User Interview with Emmett Shear
• Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT
• How The Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio
• How to Get and Evaluate Startup Ideas
• Michael Seibel - Building Product
• How to Find Product Market Fit - Stanford CS183F: Startup School
• Paul Buchheit at Startup School 08

 

Podcast Channels

• Lenny's Podcast
• David Senra
• Y Combinator
• a16z
• Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
• Greylock
• Stanford Graduate School of Business
• Lex Fridman