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A list of articles, books, videos related to entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship resources

Table of Contents

Introduction

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

Items:

  • šŸ§° : list of resources
  • šŸ“– : book
  • šŸŽž : video/movie extract/movie/talk
  • šŸ™ : slides/presentation
  • ā­ļø : must-read

Generic resources

Books and playbooks

Articles

Topics

Acquisition

Attention to details

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

Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder

Attitude

B2B

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

Data (analytics)

Decision-making

Design

Tools and resources:

Patterns:

Culture

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

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

Founders

See also the section about CEO

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, donā€™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 whatā€™s possible is to tell themselves that all the good ideas are taken. Yet, people have been saying this for hundreds of years ā€” literally ā€” and companies keep starting and competing with different ideas, variations, and strategies.
    • The iPhone wasnā€™t first, it was better. Microsoft wasnā€™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 donā€™t. Fortunately, there seems to be ample evidence that this isnā€™t true.
  • Donā€™t think to write, write to think
  • Know Your Customersā€™ ā€œJobs to Be Doneā€, HBR, Clayton M. Christensen

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. ā€” Harrington Emerson

You canā€™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 ā€” your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. ā€“ Steve Jobs

Funding

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

Tim Oā€™Reilly, Oā€™Reilly Media founder, and CEO

Growth

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 ā€” 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.

ā€“ 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 doesnā€™t mean donā€™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" ā€“ 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

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 donā€™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 itā€™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 ā†’ get customer reactions quickly ā†’ learn quickly ā†’ 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 management

Product managers:

Product-market fit

  • šŸŽž 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?

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.

ā€“ Jason Cohen

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

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 organizationā€™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 donā€™t like freemium; I want to learn from people who care enough to pay, not from the 20x more who donā€™t.
    • ā€œMVPsā€ are too M to be V. Theyā€™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 thereā€™s a business, not to validate that your idea is good or that a pain exists
    • People donā€™t value their time. They will do crazy things to save $2
    • If you canā€™t double your prices, youā€™re in a weak market position
    • A good strategy is to be the System of Record for something
    • Itā€™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 Writerā€™s Block is high standards. Type garbage. Editing is 10x easier than writing.
    • ā€œEveryone thinks of changing the world. No one thinks of changing themselves.ā€ ā€”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

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

Wireframing

Writing

See also my other lists.

Other lists

My other lists