Every resource founders actually use, in one library.

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

1. Winning the hire is wasted if your best engineers leave in a year, and this piece digs into why people actually quit. Lack of... First Round Review Article · Long read · Starting Up This is Why People Leave Your Company Carly Guthrie
2. The recruiting chapter of Elad Gil's handbook is a dense, practical reference on building hiring processes that hold their bar... Elad Gil Book · Full chapter, free online · Starting Up High Growth Handbook: Recruiting, hiring, and managing talent Elad Gil
3. A step-by-step guide from a startup hiring platform that covers sourcing, referrals, and being open to remote to widen a thin... Wellfound Article · Long read · Starting Up The Complete Guide to Hiring Your First Engineer Ves Todorov
4. The full recruiting chapter of a widely used operator's handbook, free to read online. It covers work-product exercises, fast... High Growth Handbook Article · Medium read · Starting Up High Growth Handbook: Recruiting best practices Elad Gil
5. 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
6. 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.
7. 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
8. 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
9. 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
10. A useful counterweight that pokes holes in every method, including take-home projects, which can quietly exclude people who... REWORK (37signals) Podcast · ~30 min episode · Starting Up Hiring Is Not Hazing REWORK (37signals)
11. 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
12. 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
13. 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
14. 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
15. Video · 9 min · Starting Up How Much Equity to Give Your Cofounder Michael Seibel
16. The audio version goes deeper on the practical mistakes: unequal splits that breed resentment, forgetting vesting, and treating... Y Combinator Startup School Podcast · 35 min · Starting Up Co-Founder Equity Mistakes to Avoid Michael Seibel
17. 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
18. 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
19. 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
20. 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
21. 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
22. 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
23. 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
24. 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

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