Every resource founders actually use, in one library.

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

1. A practical, hands-on checklist of frameworks, sources, and search techniques for finding trends before others, including how... Startup GTM (Substack) Article · Starting Up Find trends before others: Frameworks, Techniques, Sources and Prompts Ayush Poddar
2. A deliberate rebuttal to the safe advice, arguing that in deep tech the only way to own a category is to commit before it is... Michael Dempsey (Medium) Essay · 12 min read · Starting Up If You're Not Too Early, You're Too Late Michael Dempsey
3. Evans is the clearest writer on separating what a technology can actually do from the story being told about it. He repeatedly... ben-evans.com Essay · 10 to 20 min each · Starting Up Essays by Benedict Evans Benedict Evans
4. 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
5. 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
6. 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
7. 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
8. 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
9. 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.
10. 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
11. 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
12. 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
13. 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
14. 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
15. 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
16. 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
17. 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
18. 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
19. 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
20. 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
21. A working seed investor answers plainly whether you can build a huge company away from Silicon Valley, and where the real... elizabethyin.com Article · Starting Up Can you build a unicorn business outside the Silicon Valley? Elizabeth Yin
22. 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
23. 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
24. 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

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