Every resource founders actually use, in one library.

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

1. Benedict Evans is one of the sharpest people at separating a real structural shift from noise, and this essay lays out his... ben-evans.com Essay · ~20 min read · Starting Up AI and the automation of work Benedict Evans
2. If your market is big on paper but nobody is paying, the first thing to check is whether a real budget line for this problem... Lean B2B Article · ~10 min read · Starting Up The Economic Buyer in B2B Customer Development Étienne Garbugli
3. Most market-size decks quote inflated business counts and then wonder why sales stall. This is a founder writing from... Iron sharpen Iron (Substack) Article · Starting Up SMB market in India Aarihant Aaryan
4. This is the cleanest takedown of the most common beginner mistake: pitching a market as "we only need to capture 1 percent." It... N47 Article · ~8 min read · Starting Up Why "All we need is 1% of this very large market" is a red flag Lak Ananth
5. If your whole thesis leans on a regulation or subsidy that has not fully landed, this is the honest warning you need. It walks... Startups Magazine Article · ~7 min read · Starting Up Why and How Startups Should Manage Political and Regulatory Risk Martin Summers
6. Most market-sizing advice pushes you to inflate your TAM to look venture-scale. This piece argues the honest opposite: a market... PeakSpan Capital Article · ~10 min read · Starting Up I Was Born in a Small TAM PeakSpan Capital
7. This is the practical companion to the two ideas above: Aulet's beachhead framework gives you a concrete way to judge whether a... Derby Entrepreneurship Center, Tufts University Article · ~15 min read · Starting Up Beachhead Market: Choosing Where to Start and How to Expand Bill Aulet
8. This piece makes the founder-market fit case in concrete terms: women often build in sectors they have lived inside (femtech,... The VC Corner Article · ~10 min read · Starting Up Why Women-Owned Startups Deliver 2x Better Returns (and Still Get Ignored) Ruben Dominguez
9. Peter Thiel's core argument is that every startup should begin with a very small market: a specific group of people,... grahammann.net (Zero to One book notes) Essay · ~15 min read · Starting Up Zero to One: Start Small and Monopolize Peter Thiel (notes by Graham Mann)
10. A concrete look at founders building outside the big startup hubs, from Srinagar to Gorakhpur to Bhubaneswar, several of whom... YourStory Article · ~10 min read · Starting Up Meet five tech players from small-town India solving for both local and global markets YourStory (Startup Bharat)
11. Newport's core argument, that rare and valuable skills are built through deliberate practice rather than discovered as a... Hachette Book Group Book · ~304 pages · Starting Up So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love Cal Newport
12. This is the clearest short piece on why "I love fintech" falls short: it argues that fit is about a specific problem you cannot... FourWeekMBA Essay · ~8 min read · Starting Up Founder-Problem Fit Gennaro Cuofano
13. Once you accept that "I love fintech" is too broad, this article hands you a concrete way to sharpen it into something... Euro SaaS Edge Article · ~10 min read · Starting Up The Focus Decision Every Founder Avoids Arttu Huhtiniemi
14. This piece walks through concrete Indian startups that copied a hot US model and then did not survive the jump: PepperTap... YourStory Essay · Starting Up Are Indian startups a mere copy of their US counterparts? YourStory
15. This is written for the person deciding whether an AI idea is real, not for the engineer building it, so it stays in plain... Unite.AI Article · ~8 min read · Starting Up Hype vs. Value: Assessing Early-Stage AI Startups for Real Potential Igor Ryabenkiy, Nikolay Kirpichnikov, Sergei Bogdanov and Alexander Korchevsky
16. This is the essay to read when you want to know whether a trend can carry a real company or is just a feature riding on someone... Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Essay · ~20 min read · Starting Up The New Business of AI (and How It's Different From Traditional Software) Martin Casado and Matt Bornstein
17. This piece names the exact trap you are worried about: it uses Zynga, which rode Facebook's platform to a huge business and... Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Essay · ~15 min read · Starting Up On Startups, Platforms, and Innovation Scott Kupor
18. This is a concrete case study of what platform dependency actually looks like from inside the company: Zynga's own filings... Knowledge at Wharton (The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania) Article · ~12 min read · Starting Up Is Zynga's Dependence on Facebook the Key to Its Success, Or Its Downfall? Knowledge at Wharton
19. Most advice assumes the network you are missing is the whole game. Lazarow flips that: founders far from the big hubs are... Harvard Business Review Article · ~12 min read · Starting Up Beyond Silicon Valley: How Startups Succeed in Unlikely Places Alex Lazarow
20. Most trend advice tells you to "stay curious," which is useless on a Monday morning. Amy Webb, a working futurist, gives you an... PublicAffairs (Hachette) Book · ~336 pages · Starting Up The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream Amy Webb
21. This one is useful because it is not one person's theory: it collects how seven working trend forecasters actually run their... In Bed With Tech (Substack) Article · ~15 min read · Starting Up Spotting trends: the tricks used by trend catchers Marie Dollé
22. This essay explains the actual mechanism: when regulation forces incumbents to open up (for example, rules requiring banks to... Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Essay · ~12 min read · Starting Up Every Company Will Be a Fintech Company Angela Strange
23. This is a concrete look at products that grew straight out of what young people were already doing on campus, from Snapchat... Fortune Article · ~15 min read · Starting Up What the Founders of Facebook, Snapchat and Home Depot Have in Common Grace Donnelly, Laura Entis, Stacy Jones, Polina Marinova, Jasper Scherer
24. This is the cleanest framing of the exact call you are making: which parts of your product are your actual reason to exist, and... Courier Article · About a 10 minute read · Starting Up The Three Things to Never Build In Your App: Authentication, Notifications, and Payments Tejas Kumthekar

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