Subject
31 entries
Entrepreneurship
Bookmarks
Everything Y Combinator Teaches in 10 Minutes
A 10-minute YouTube distillation of everything Y Combinator teaches its founders — make something people want, talk to users, launch fast, and focus on growth. Essential startup operating principles in minimal time.
Ideas.rip: startup idea repository
ideas.rip is a curated repository of startup ideas across technology, health, B2B SaaS, and other sectors — a browseable catalog for entrepreneurs looking for validated problem spaces to explore or build in.
BLS-3G: A Qualitative Review of a Business Incubation Facility
A qualitative review of BLS-3G, a business incubation facility in Davao City, Philippines, using the Hackett and Dilts incubator-incubation concept map. The facility struggles with low occupancy, weak community integration, and thin advisory experience — a useful case study in what early-stage incubators typically get wrong.
Starter Story: Bootstrapped Business Case Studies
Starter Story is a database of bootstrapped business case studies — interviews with founders across hundreds of industries explaining exactly how they built and grew their businesses, revenue included. The indie hacker's version of Harvard Business School case studies.
Small Bets: Daniel Vassallo's Indie Entrepreneurship Framework
Daniel Vassallo's Small Bets is a community and framework for indie entrepreneurs built around making many small, reversible bets instead of one big all-in venture. The antidote to survivorship-bias-driven startup thinking.
50 Questions for Co-Founders
A structured set of 50 questions designed to help prospective co-founders align on values, roles, equity, and working styles before committing to building a company together. Useful as a due-diligence checklist since most startup failures trace back to co-founder misalignment on issues that could have been surfaced upfront.
Pretotype It: Make Sure You Are Building the Right It Before You Build It Right
Alberto Savoia's Pretotype It introduces pretotyping — testing whether you should build something before investing in how to build it, using cheap simulations of the user experience. It's a practical antidote to premature perfectionism and prototype sunk-cost traps, bridging the gap between an idea and validated demand.
Heuristics to Generate Startup Ideas
Avichal Garg's heuristics for generating startup ideas — a practitioner's framework from a VC who also built companies. Focuses on structural forces (market timing, technology shifts, regulatory changes) that create windows for new entrants.
Two Books That Turned a 26-Year-Old Programmer Into a Billionaire
An Entrepreneur's Handbook article about the two books that most influenced a young billionaire programmer — likely covering mental models and systems thinking as frameworks for decision-making. The article is paywalled but the premise is evergreen.
The Hacker's Guide to Startup Fundraising
Fletcher Richman's practical guide to startup fundraising from the Galvanize blog — covering seed rounds, angel investors, term sheets, and the psychological dynamics of the fundraising process. A practitioner's account from inside the tech education and startup ecosystem.
Danielle Fong: A Time for Urgency
Danielle Fong's talk at the Nantucket Project on the urgency of clean energy — referencing a dramatic decline in some metric (likely solar costs or storage costs) that had "gone basically to zero." A physicist-founder making the case for aggressive timelines on energy transition.
The Bootstrapper's Bargain
Inc. Magazine on the tradeoffs of bootstrapping — the freedom and discipline that come from building without external capital versus the speed and resource advantages of VC funding. A 2013 take on a perennial startup debate.
The Single Most Unfair Advantage a Person Can Get
Ivan Mazour's blog post arguing that public speaking ability is the single most unfair competitive advantage — it multiplies every other capability, yet most people avoid developing it systematically. A sharp take on asymmetric skill investment.
Finding Ideas For Your Next Project
Nathan Barry's guide to finding project ideas — specifically for designers and developers who want to build products. The advice: find problems you already have, look at intersections of your skills, and ship small things to learn fast.
A Founder's Constant State of Rejection
A FounderDating post on the psychological reality of founding a startup: you are constantly being told no, and building resilience to that is a core founder skill. Honest about the emotional cost that startup advice usually papers over.
Elon Musk's Mission to Mars — Wired
Wired's 2012 Q&A with Elon Musk on SpaceX's Mars mission — a document of his stated ambitions before they seemed plausible. Musk articulates the multi-planetary species argument and SpaceX's approach to reusable rockets while Falcon 9 was still new.
The Fight — Dustin Curtis
Dustin Curtis's short motivational essay urging readers to pursue their ambitions without waiting for the perfect moment. Written with characteristic bluntness: you have nothing to lose, and the regret of inaction is worse than failure.
Always Be Closing: Y Combinator and The Art of the Pitch
Tim Ferriss's breakdown of Y Combinator's pitch methodology from Demo Day — what makes YC founders compelling presenters and how they structure the art of the two-minute company pitch. A practical look at how one of the most influential startup accelerators trains founders to sell.
The Pressure of Crowdfunding Success
NYT piece on how successful Kickstarter campaigns created intense pressure on hardware and product entrepreneurs to deliver — many had raised money before fully validating manufacturing, supply chain, or costs. The dark side of crowdfunding as premature public commitment.
From Programming to Business: Lesson 0
A blog post on transitioning from engineering to business thinking — the 'Lesson 0' framing signals it's about unlearning as much as learning. The core shift: from solving specified problems correctly to defining which problems are worth solving at all.
How Serial Innovators Find the Best Problems to Solve
Fast Company on how serial innovators identify which problems to work on — drawing on research by Claudio Feser and others showing that the problem selection step is where great innovations diverge from incremental ones.
Stop Asking "But How Will They Make Money?"
Andrew Chen arguing that 'but how will they make money?' is a lazy question that misses the point of early-stage consumer products. Companies like Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr built massive user value before solving monetization — and that sequencing was correct.
How to Find Startup Ideas
Wesley Tansey's framework for finding startup ideas focuses on personal experience as the most reliable source — problems you've lived with are more likely to be real and worth solving than problems imagined for a market. Scratch your own itch, then validate it's not just you.
The Dirty Secret Behind the Incubator Boom
VentureBeat's 2012 exposé on the incubator bubble — by then hundreds of programs were copying Y Combinator's model but producing almost no successful companies. The economics of most incubators served the operators, not the startups.
Is Stanford Too Close to Silicon Valley?
Ken Auletta's New Yorker investigation into whether Stanford University has become too entangled with Silicon Valley — raising questions about whether the pursuit of startup equity compromises academic independence and the university's long-term mission.
A VC Reflects on Instagram, the Dot-Com Bust, and What It All Means
A VC's post-Instagram-acquisition reflection comparing the 2012 tech environment to the dot-com era — examining whether the $1B Instagram acquisition signaled froth or justified the new economics of zero-marginal-cost consumer products.
Entrepreneurship's dirty little secret
Alan Gleeson's contrarian take that entrepreneurship is oversold as a career path — arguing that actively discouraging unfit founders would produce better outcomes than the blanket glorification of starting a company. An uncomfortable but useful corrective to startup culture's hero narrative.
Founders Beware: Accelerators Offer Upside, But Only If You're Ready
VentureBeat's warning to founders that accelerators like Y Combinator are net-positive only if the startup is already in the right position — not a place to figure out your idea or find your market. The hidden precondition most accelerator marketing omits.
Y Combinator: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund
Y Combinator's Requests for Startups — the list of problems YC specifically wants founders to attack. A useful lens on what tier-one investors see as structurally important problems rather than just market opportunities.
Paths to $5M for a Startup Founder
Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo founder) mapping the concrete financial paths to $5M for a founder — acquisition, IPO, lifestyle business, or secondary sales. Useful for calibrating expectations about what outcomes are actually achievable at different levels of equity and dilution.
How Big Data Is Going to Change Entrepreneurship
Summary of the 2012 Stanford entrepreneurship conference on Big Data — panelists argued data was growing faster than Moore's Law, creating the next oil economy, with advertising and insurance as the most immediately impacted sectors. An early articulation of what became the data economy thesis.