Every resource founders actually use, in one library.

What founders use most, ranked by how many answers lean on it.

1. Automattic's founder explains, in his own words, why they pay candidates to do real work before hiring and largely skip the... ma.tt (Matt Mullenweg's blog) Essay · Short read · Starting Up Hiring by Audition, Expanded Matt Mullenweg
2. A concrete script of process and judgment questions a non-technical founder can ask and actually understand the answers to. It... Lightmatter Article · Medium read · Starting Up How to Interview Engineers When You're Not Technical (Part 1) Greg H.
3. A tidy rundown of alternatives to whiteboard puzzles: portfolio walkthroughs, short representative tasks, and conversations... daily.dev Article · Short read · Starting Up How to Assess Technical Skills During Interviews Without Coding Tests daily.dev
4. An engineer writes candidly about how non-technical founders get burned, using a case study of a developer who billed excessive... Medium Essay · Medium read · Starting Up How to Vet and Hire Engineers as a non-Technical Founder Jared Wright
5. A compact three-part filter for a first technical hire: can they reliably ship, do they use current tools well, and did you get... Medium Article · Short read · Starting Up Non-technical guide to evaluating engineers Mike Lerner
6. A focused chapter aimed squarely at the non-technical reader, on reading communication, asking a candidate to explain why a... Gun.io Article · Short read · Starting Up How to Assess a Developer's Skills Without Technical Knowledge Gun.io
7. A broad, readable primer covering portfolio reviews, trial projects, and leaning on advisors, written for founders with no... DigitalOcean Article · Medium read · Starting Up Technical hiring for non-technical founders DigitalOcean
8. Directly titled to this question, it argues for defining the one problem you actually need solved, hiring a pragmatic... Metamindz Article · Medium read · Starting Up How to Hire Your First Developer When You Can't Code Metamindz
9. Mullenweg's HBR first-person account of switching Automattic to paid tryouts after charming interviews kept misfiring. It is... Harvard Business Review Article · Medium read · Starting Up The CEO of Automattic on Holding Auditions to Build a Strong Team Matt Mullenweg
10. Wasserman studied 10,000 founders and found the counterintuitive result: founders who give away more equity to attract strong... Noam Wasserman Article · 12 min read · Starting Up Rich versus King: The Core Concept Noam Wasserman
11. The short HBR version of Wasserman's research if you do not want the whole book. It lays out the rich versus king tradeoff... Harvard Business Review Article · 10 min read · Starting Up The Founder's Dilemma Noam Wasserman
12. A full handbook on option pools and employee grants built on data from thousands of startups. It answers the practical... Index Ventures Article · handbook · Starting Up Rewarding Talent Index Ventures
13. A practical system for balancing salary and equity so comp stops being a recurring negotiation. It helps you decide how much... First Round Review Article · 15 min read · Starting Up A Counterintuitive System for Startup Compensation Molly Graham
14. A focused guide on the early employee side: how to size grants for your first several hires and set up the option pool. It... Pear VC Article · 12 min read · Starting Up How to Structure Startup Equity for Early Hires Pear VC
15. From an India and Southeast Asia cap table platform, this walks through the common approaches to splitting between co-founders... Qapita Article · 10 min read · Starting Up How to Navigate a Cofounder Equity Split Successfully Qapita
16. This is the clearest statement of the exact idea in our answer: a spec describes how the product works entirely from the user's... Joel on Software Essay · 10 min read · Starting Up Painless Functional Specifications, Part 2: What's a Spec? Joel Spolsky
17. Part 2 tells you what a spec is, this one covers who writes it and how they build agreement without authority, walking through... Joel on Software Essay · 12 min read · Starting Up Painless Functional Specifications, Part 3: But... How? Joel Spolsky
18. The healthy counterweight to over documenting. 37signals argues that a thick spec creates false agreement (everyone reads the... Getting Real (37signals) Essay · 6 min read · Starting Up There's Nothing Functional about a Functional Spec 37signals
19. A simple, powerful sentence template for describing what a user is trying to do: when [situation], I want to [motivation], so I... Intercom Blog Article · 8 min read · Starting Up How we accidentally invented Job Stories Paul Adams
20. Story mapping is the technique for laying out the user's journey left to right and slicing off the smallest first version,... Jeff Patton & Associates Essay · 20 min read · Starting Up User Story Mapping Jeff Patton
21. This is the whole thesis in one story. Reed, a non-technical founder, stitched together Typeform, Stripe, and a simple site to... Tara Reed, Lean Startup Co. Article · 12 min read · Starting Up How I Built My Startup Kollecto With No Code Tara Reed
22. A clear, credible how-to for a non-technical founder building a first MVP without hiring anyone. It maps common no-code tools... Harvard Innovation Labs Article · 10 min read · Starting Up No-Code, No Problem: Building Your First MVP Without an Engineer Harvard Innovation Labs
23. This grounds the whole idea in the Indian context, where founders in cities beyond the metros are launching products without a... Scroll.in Article · 12 min read · Starting Up India's no-code boom has empowered a new wave of entrepreneurs Scroll.in
24. A short, plain chapter that makes the case for keeping money and dates fixed while trimming features. It is the cleanest... 37signals Essay · Starting Up Getting Real: Fix Time and Budget, Flex Scope 37signals

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