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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

My other lists

Feel free to checkout my other lists:

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

Communication

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:

Culture

Ethics

Being good is an adventure far more violent and daring than sailing round the world

G. K. Chesterton

Financing

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

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.

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

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

  • UX Case Studies: a list of growth and UI case studies. The comics format is very engaging.

Hiring

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

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:

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.

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

Pricing

Prioritization

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

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

  • 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

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

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

Other lists

  • Road to Scale: a curated knowledge library for every stage of your startup journey.