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Entrepreneurship resources

Table of Contents

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

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

Analysis

Attention to details

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

Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder

Attitude

B2B

Bootstrap

CEO

See also the section about founders

Communication

Compensation

Competition

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

Data (analytics)

Data-driven

See also the section about OKR in my engineering-management repository.

Decision-making

Design

Tools and resources:

Patterns:

Disruption

Culture

Entrepreneur

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

See also the section about CEO

  • What We Look for in Founders, Paul Graham
    • Determination
    • Flexibility
    • Imagination
    • Naughtiness
    • Friendship
  • What we learned in studying the most effective founders, Google
    • Treat people like volunteers
    • Protect the team from distractions
    • Minimize unnecessary micromanagement
    • Invite disagreement
    • Preserve interpersonal equity
    • Keep pace with expertise
    • Overcome discouragement
  • Climbing the wrong hill, Chris Dixon
  • Founder Mode, Paul Graham
  • Coaching Founder Mode, SVPG
    • Founder mode does not mean hands-off delegation, but it also does not mean micro-managing. It is a manifestation of the passion for the customer and the problems to be solved, with the goal of collaborating closely with product teams to discover and deliver winning solutions.
    • The key to scaling successfully for a product model company is to have strong, founder-mode leaders that work to develop other strong, founder-mode leaders.

Finding an idea

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

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

Handbook

Hiring

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

Investor relations

IP (Intellectual Property) and patents

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.

Resources:

Mental models

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)

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

Pivoting

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

Prioritization

See also the Prioritization section on my engineering-management list

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

Product managers:

Product-market fit

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

Prototyping

Rituals

Sales

Check out those list of resources:

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)

Speed

Stories of startups

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

Surveys

Teams

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

Toolkits

UX

UX Design

See also the relevant section on my professional-programming list

Resources:

  • UX Frameworks: A resource to find and share frameworks for design research, synthesis, and ideation.

UX Research

Velocity

  • How to ship fast
    • Protect momentum
    • Beware of prioritization
    • Stay close to the design
    • You should be wrong sometimes
    • Only doers can plan what you work on
    • Always plan the How
    • There is no quality vs. speed tradeoff
    • Capture inspiration

Wireframing

Writing

See also my other lists.

Other lists

My other lists