The founder canon, actually retained.
The essays every entrepreneur cites, broken into digestible lessons and sealed in with a quiz. Free, no signup. Built to sharpen how we think.
One email when new modules drop. Nothing else.
Product
The Only Thing That Matters
by Marc Andreessen
Andreessen's argument that market beats team and product, and that a startup's life divides cleanly into before product/market fit and after. The only thing that matters is getting to PMF, and you should do whatever is required.
How to Get Startup Ideas
by Paul Graham
PG's guide to where real startup ideas come from: notice problems instead of brainstorming ideas, prefer problems you have yourself, dig wells not craters, disable schlep blindness, and live in the future so the missing pieces become obvious.
The Mom Test
by Rob Fitzpatrick
How to talk to customers and learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you. Fitzpatrick's rules for getting real data out of conversations instead of polite encouragement.
How to Talk to Users
by Eric Migicovsky (YC)
The Pebble founder's YC Startup School talk on user interviews: why founders should talk about the user's life instead of their idea, the five questions that work at any stage, and how to weigh what users do against what they say.
How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find PMF
by Rahul Vohra (First Round Review)
Product-market fit is usually described as a feeling. Rahul Vohra turned it into a number you can measure and move: survey users, segment for who loves you, split the roadmap between doubling down and fixing gaps, then re-survey. Superhuman took its score from 22% to 58% in three quarters.
Competition Is for Losers
by Peter Thiel
Thiel's argument that capitalism and competition are opposites. Profits only survive under monopoly, so the goal of every startup is to escape competition entirely: start with a tiny market, dominate it, and expand from a position of strength.
Startup Playbook
by Sam Altman
YC's operating manual condensed: a clear idea with a 'why now', relentlessly resourceful founders, a product a small group loves, growth as oxygen, and execution as the only thing that turns any of it into a company.
Good Product Manager / Bad Product Manager
by Ben Horowitz
Horowitz's blunt internal memo from his Netscape days, written to train PMs by contrast: what a good product manager does, line by line, against what a bad one does. Still the clearest job description for the role ever written.
Growth
How to Build a Growth Team
by Andrew Chen
Why shipping more features doesn't grow your product, and how to build a team that applies the scientific method to your KPIs instead. Drawn from Uber's growth org and interviews with Slack, Dropbox, Airbnb, and Facebook.
Startup = Growth
by Paul Graham
A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Not a new company, not a tech company, not a funded company. PG shows how that one definition explains everything: what to work on, how to measure a week, why VCs exist, and why acquirers overpay.
Traction: The Bullseye Framework
by Gabriel Weinberg & Justin Mares
Most startups die from lack of customers, not lack of product. Weinberg and Mares map 19 traction channels and give you the Bullseye process for finding the one that actually moves your numbers.
The Four Fits of Growth
by Brian Balfour
Why product-market fit alone doesn't build a $100M company. Balfour's framework: market-product fit, product-channel fit, channel-model fit, and model-market fit must all align and work as one system, illustrated with HubSpot as the running example.
The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs
by Andrew Chen
Chen's law: over time, every marketing channel decays toward terrible performance. Why the first banner ad got a 78% clickthrough and Facebook ads got 0.05%, the three forces behind the decay, and what to do about it.
1,000 True Fans
by Kevin Kelly
Kelly's 2008 essay arguing you don't need millions of customers to make a living. A thousand people who buy everything you make, paying you directly, is enough. The math, the caveats, and why it applies to niche products as much as artists.
Hooked: The Habit Loop
by Nir Eyal
A distillation of Nir Eyal's Hooked: the four-step loop (trigger, action, variable reward, investment) that turns products into habits, when habit-building actually applies, and the ethics test for whether you should build one at all. A teaching aid; the book has the full research and examples.
Sales
Founder-led Sales
by Pete Koomen (YC)
Koomen sold Optimizely to $100M ARR as a technical founder with no sales background. His playbook: do the first sales yourself, treat sales as talking to users, run a real funnel, charge from day one, and learn to spot the deals that will never close.
Obviously Awesome
by April Dunford
A distillation of April Dunford's book on positioning: why great products die from being misunderstood, the five (plus one) components of deliberate positioning, her 10-step process condensed, and the three styles for picking a market you can win. This is a teaching aid; the book itself is worth the read.
Fundraising
Mindset
Do Things That Don't Scale
by Paul Graham
Startups don't take off by themselves; founders make them take off. PG's canonical essay on manual recruitment, delighting early users, and why the unscalable work you're avoiding is the actual job.
1997 Shareholder Letter
by Jeff Bezos
The letter Bezos reattached to every annual report for decades. Written when Amazon was a money-losing bookstore, it lays out the operating system: long-term thinking, market leadership over quarterly optics, bold bets, customer obsession, frugality, and Day 1.
Founder Mode
by Paul Graham
PG's 2024 essay sparked by Brian Chesky's talk: the standard advice to 'hire good people and give them room' quietly breaks founder-led companies, and there's a different mode of running one that nobody has written down yet.
How to Be Successful
by Sam Altman
Altman watched thousands of founders and distilled 13 patterns behind outlier success: compound yourself, believe almost to the point of delusion, think independently, get good at sales, take cheap risks, focus, work hard, and own equity instead of selling hours.
How to Get Rich (without getting lucky)
by Naval Ravikant
Naval's famous tweetstorm turned podcast: wealth is assets that earn while you sleep, and the path there is specific knowledge, accountability, and permissionless leverage, not hours worked.
How to Operate
by Keith Rabois (CS183B)
Keith Rabois ran operations at PayPal, LinkedIn, and Square. His Stanford CS183B lecture compresses that into a system: think of the company as a machine you build, manage like an editor rather than a writer, delegate by task-relevant maturity, hire barrels not just ammunition, and instrument everything with paired metrics.
The Struggle
by Ben Horowitz
Horowitz names the darkest part of being a founder: the stretch where nothing works and you doubt everything, including yourself. Every great CEO went through it. There's no formula out, but there are moves that help.
Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
by Paul Graham
There are two ways of using time, and they don't mix. PG explains why a single meeting can wreck a maker's whole day, how to protect deep work with batching, and how founders end up running both schedules at once.