title: Danny Leshem's startup resources

general:
    - Entrepreneurship is a Craft # Entrepreneurship is neither science nor art, it’s a craft
    - The Differences Between Starting a Business and Starting a Startup # Startup ≠ Business
    - Startup = Growth # Paul Graham’s thoughts on startups
    - Startup Playbook # Sam Altman’s thoughts on startups
    - How to Start a Startup (video, 20 × 45m) # Y Combinator’s startups course in Stanford
    - The Hard Thing About Hard Things (book) # Ben Horowitz’s startup experience
    - Zero to One (book) # Peter Thiel’s thoughts on startups

founders:
    - What is a Talent Stack? # A unique combination of "pretty goods" makes you rare and valuable
    - Early-Stage Startup Experience Is Unlikely to Help You as a Founder (Hebrew, unrolled) # Effective career paths for future founders
    - Failure is a Signal # first-timers > failed second-timers
    - How Much Should Founders Pay Themselves? (Hebrew, unrolled) # A first-order model for founder compensation

ideation:
    - The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius # Paul Graham on obsessing about something that matters
    - Top Down and Bottom Up Companies # Chris Paik on two genotypes of companies

filtering:
    - The Only Thing That Matters # Marc Andreessen on Team, Product, and Market
    - Market Always Wins # More on Team, Product, and Market
    - Five Ways to Build a $100 Million Business # Magic triangle: ACV, GTM, scale (also: Five Years Later)
    - The Two Types of SaaS Value Propositions # Solving a pain > Improving performance

validation:
    - The Minimum Viable Testing Process for Evaluating Startup Ideas # Identify and test your risky assumptions
    - The Mom Test (book) # How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you
    - The 20 Interview Rule # Interview 20 potential customers before you write a line of code
    - Levels of PMF # A Framework for B2B Product-Market Fit

product:
    - The Herbie Model (video, 2m) # Mike Maples on iterating towards product-market fit
    - The Complete Guide to the Kano Model # Noriaki Kano’s feature prioritization framework
    - The Six Star Review (video, 6m) # Brian Chesky on creating delightful products
    - How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit # A simple alternative to NPS
    - A/Z Testing (Hebrew) # Iris Shoor’s approach to early-stage experiments
    - How to Measure Product Retention # Intro to cohort anlaysis

culture:
    - Culture Is a Product (video, 3m) # Dharmesh Shah on defining and maintaining company culture
    - Netflix Culture # Reed Hastings on creating a culture of excellence and high performance
    - Culture Code: Creating A Lovable Company # Dharmesh Shah's Culture Code deck for HubSpot
    - Scaling Agile @ Spotify # Spotify’s squads and guilds model (or watch this 26m video: 1, 2)
    - Why Amazon is Eating the World # Jeff Bezos’ method for optimizing Amazon on all levels
    - Buffer Transparency # Buffer’s radically transparent work culture
    - Strong Opinions Loosely Held Might be the Worst Idea in Tech # Adding a degree of uncertainty to your statements
    - Amazon’s 2015 Letter to Shareholders (Invention Machine part) # One-way and two-way door decisions

HR:
    - Hiring: The Lake Wobegon Strategy # Peter Norvig on Google’s rule for growing without compromising on quality (also: paper)
    - A Counterintuitive System for Startup Compensation # The case for formulaic compensation
    - How We Decide What to Pay Our Team # Buffer’s open salaries philosophy (also read: 1, 2)
    - Closing the Information Gap on Employee Option Grants # Eden Shochat’s fair and honest ESOP offer letter
    - Rewarding Talent # Index Ventures' founder's guide to stock options
    - Gallup's Employee Engagement Survey # The most effective way to measure employee engagement
    - Moneyball - Firing People (video, 3m) # Firing professional people in a conscious and clear way

fundraising:
    - How VCs Think: The Psychology That Drives Investing Decisions # Gigi Levy-Weiss on the VC mindset
    - Secrets of Sand Hill Road (book) # Scott Kupor on venture capital and how to get it
    - Venture Deals (book) # The technical aspects of raising from VCs
    - The Bessemer Memos # Retrospective collection of investment recommendation memoranda (also read: Anti-Portfolio)

bootstrapping:
    - Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts (unrolled) # Lessons learned from competing with Asana

SaaS:
    - Best of SaaStr # Jason Lemkin on everything SaaS
    - The SaaS Metrics That Matter # David Sacks on SaaS KPIs (also: SaaSGrid)

cyber:
    - Cybersecurity Framework (Hebrew, unrolled) # Cybersecurity startups are not like other startups

ai:
    - The Bitter Lesson # Computation trumps domain expertise in the long run
    - AI Founder's Bitter Lesson # The case against vertical AI products (continued here: 2, 3, 4)

governance:
    - Your Board of Directors is Probably Going to Fire You # Running your board in a way that will not get you fired

investing:
    - Power Laws in Venture # Modeling venture returns
    - Why Do VCs Insist on Only Investing in High-Risk, High-Return Companies? # Implications of power-law on venture capital
    - What AngelList Data Says About Power-Law Returns in Venture Capital # Power-law returns and portfolio construction
    - Betting on the Ponies: Non-Unicorn Investing # A framework for angel investing
    - Playing Different Games # How Tiger Global is disrupting venture capital
    - The Three-Body Problem # Finding the new stable points in venture capital
    - The State of VC in 2023 # Sam Lessin on the death of the “factory farmed” unicorn narrative