Every resource founders actually use, in one library.

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

1. The developer forum where a lot of new tools and shifts get discussed before they reach the mainstream tech press. Reading it... Y Combinator Tool · Starting Up Hacker News Y Combinator
2. 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
3. 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
4. Indian early stage investors talk through which trends they think are actually turning in India versus which are still hype,... Prime Venture Partners Podcast Podcast · Approx 45 min · Starting Up 2025 Predictions for Indian Startups, Funding, AI and IPOs Prime Venture Partners
5. 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
6. A calm, long-form conversation that models how to hold two ideas at once: AI is genuinely important, and most of the loud... Lenny's Podcast Podcast · ~90 min · Starting Up A rational conversation on where AI is actually going (Benedict Evans) Lenny Rachitsky and Benedict Evans
7. 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
8. Course · ~6.5 hours · Starting Up Making Friends with Machine Learning (full course) Cassie Kozyrkov
9. 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
10. 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
11. 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
12. Two India-based early-stage investors talk through exactly this question: what separates AI hype from defensible value. They... Prime Venture Partners Podcast Podcast · ~45 min · Starting Up AI x SaaS: How PrimeVP Thinks About the Next Wave Shripati Acharya and Gaurav Ranjan
13. An India-rooted show that asks an experienced investor how to tell a substantive AI company from a wrapper riding the wave. It... The Neon Show (Neon Fund) Podcast · ~60 min · Starting Up What Top 1% Investors Look For in AI Startups Siddhartha Ahluwalia
14. 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
15. 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.
16. 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
17. 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
18. 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
19. 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
20. 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
21. 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
22. 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
23. 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
24. 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

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