Explore · The library
Every resource founders actually use, in one library.
The essays, videos, podcasts, books and tools behind every answer across eChai's hubs, from starting up to go-to-market, D2C, founder money and AI, each with a note on why it is here.
What founders use most, ranked by how many answers lean on it.
- Mollick is a business professor who tests AI hands-on and reports what actually works, not what a vendor promises. The book... Penguin Random House Book · ~256 pages · Starting Up Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI Ethan Mollick
- This is the ongoing, free version of Mollick's testing: regular posts that run real experiments and show the results, good and... oneusefulthing.org Article · 10 to 15 min per post · Starting Up One Useful Thing Ethan Mollick
- A short, neutral explainer of the pattern nearly every technology follows: a burst of inflated expectations, a trough of... Wikipedia Article · ~10 min · Starting Up Gartner Hype Cycle Wikipedia
- Our answer tells you to ask builders what breaks in production, and this is a concrete checklist of what that actually means.... startupctobook.com Article · ~20 min · Starting Up Technical Due Diligence Preparation Guide (The Startup CTO's Field Guide) Gareth Price
- When you want to go deeper than headlines, this is a curated map of the resources that actually explain modern AI, sorted from... Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Article · curated list · Starting Up AI Canon Derrick Harris, Matt Bornstein, Guido Appenzeller
- A trend only matters against the real market you are selling into, and this annual report is the clearest sober picture of... Blume Ventures Article · ~130 slides · Starting Up Indus Valley Annual Report Sajith Pai and team
- A free, focused essay version of the inflection idea if you do not want the whole book yet. It explains why timing and a... Pattern Breakers (Substack) Article · ~12 min read · Starting Up How Inflections Let Startups Change The Rules Mike Maples Jr.
- This directly addresses the fork in your question: are you entering a known market or betting a new one will grow. It lays out... NFX Article · ~14 min read · Starting Up Reinventing Existing vs. Creating New Markets Pete Flint
- Data from hundreds of startup post-mortems showing how often failure traces to no real market need or a trend that never... CB Insights Article · ~20 min read · Starting Up The Top Reasons Startups Fail CB Insights
- This is the constructive version of your strategy: use a single feature or channel to pull people in cheaply, then give them a... cdixon.org Essay · Starting Up Come for the tool, stay for the network Chris Dixon
- Chen watched a whole generation of startups build on Facebook's platform and then get squeezed as the platform protected... andrewchen.com Essay · Starting Up Why developers are leaving the Facebook platform Andrew Chen
- Jin makes the case that the durable way to build on platforms is owning your audience, your monetization, and your direct... andrewchen.com (guest essay) Essay · Starting Up The Passion Economy and the Future of Work Li Jin
- This piece gives you a simple spectrum for judging how exposed you are, using the Zynga and Facebook story as the cautionary... Entrepreneur Article · Starting Up The Spectrum of Platform Risk Tiger Henderson
- A clean, structured guide to spotting where your platform exposure lives and building a more resilient business around it. It... Stripe Article · Starting Up Platform risk: How to identify it, assess it, and build a more resilient business Stripe
- Written for small builders, this walks through real cases (Reddit, Twitter, and Meta API changes) where a pricing or policy... Micro SaaS Bytes (Medium) Article · Starting Up Platform Dependency Risks: What Indie Hackers Must Know Mohit Rathore
- An investor's short, blunt take on why platform risk makes a company harder to back and how founders can reduce it. It helps... itamarnovick.com Article · Starting Up Startup anti-pattern #3: platform risk Simeon Simeonov
- The full, sourced account of how a single API pricing change killed thriving third party apps like Apollo in a matter of weeks.... Wikipedia Article · Starting Up Reddit API controversy Wikipedia
- This is the strategic backbone: how platform businesses take power from traditional pipeline businesses by orchestrating a... Harvard Business Review Article · Starting Up Pipelines, Platforms, and the New Rules of Strategy Marshall Van Alstyne, Geoffrey Parker, Sangeet Paul Choudary
- A VC framework for choosing where to build, weighing talent, customers, capital and cost against the kind of company you are.... NFX Article · Starting Up Where To Build Your Startup James Currier
- Lenny gathers how strong product people build intuition for what will work, which is really a method for reading signals and... Lenny's Newsletter Article · Starting Up How to develop product sense Lenny Rachitsky
- This is the closest thing to a playbook for building where government sets the rules, drawn from real cases like 23andMe,... Penguin Random House Book · Starting Up Regulatory Hacking: A Playbook for Startups Evan Burfield with J.D. Harrison
- Omojola built inside two of the most regulated spaces there are, payments (Cash App) and healthcare (Carbon Health), and here... First Round Review Article · Starting Up Finding Startup Ideas and Building in Heavily-Regulated Spaces Ayo Omojola (First Round Review)
- This is the serious study behind the buzzwords, documenting how Uber, Airbnb, and Tesla treated changing the law as part of the... Southern California Law Review Essay · Starting Up Regulatory Entrepreneurship Elizabeth Pollman and Jordan M. Barry
- A short, readable interview with Elizabeth Pollman that distils the academic work into founder-sized takeaways. If the full... The Regulatory Review Article · Starting Up On Startups and Regulatory Entrepreneurship The Regulatory Review
The hubs
Starting Up
Find an idea, validate it, build, and land your first customers.
GTM
Go-to-market, from breaking in to how the best teams do it.
D2C
Building a direct-to-consumer brand, India-first.
Wealth
Paying yourself, ESOPs, secondaries, and de-risking founder wealth.
How Founders Use AI
How founders actually put AI to work, mapped topic by topic.
Glossary
Plain-language definitions of the startup and VC terms you'll hit.
eChai Partner Brands
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