Explore
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.
- Naval's idea of specific knowledge, the thing you cannot be trained for, is the sharpest lens on why you and not someone... The Almanack of Naval Ravikant Article · 6 min read · Starting Up Find and Build Specific Knowledge Naval Ravikant In 2 answers
- Blakely built a product for a problem she experienced as a customer, with no industry background and no network in hosiery, and... NPR, How I Built This with Guy Raz Podcast · about 45 min · Starting Up How I Built This: Spanx, Sara Blakely Guy Raz In 2 answers
- Alagh started from a problem she hit as a new mother in India, unable to find safe products for her son, and that specific... The Better India Article · Starting Up How Ghazal Alagh Built Mamaearth From a Mother's Concern The Better India In 2 answers
- Kevin Hale distills a pitch into seven questions investors need answered, and 'why this team' is one of them. Use it to place... Y Combinator Startup Library Article · ~15 min read · Starting Up How to Pitch Your Company Kevin Hale, Y Combinator In 2 answers
- Field-tested fundraising lessons drawn from founders who raised billions in follow-on capital. It situates 'why you' inside the... First Round Review Article · ~20 min read · Starting Up The Fundraising Wisdom That Helped Our Founders Raise $18B in Follow-On Capital First Round Review In 2 answers
- A plain explainer of the exact filter this question is about, with the signals investors read as founder/market fit. It is... The VC Corner Article · ~12 min read · Starting Up Founder-Market Fit: The #1 VC Filter You Didn't Know Was Judging You Ruben Dominguez, The VC Corner In 2 answers
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Video · ~30 min · Starting Up
How To Perfectly Pitch Your Seed Stage Startup
Michael Seibel, Y Combinator
In 2 answers
- Two Indian founders turned investors on what they actually weigh when funding early founders, including resilience and... The Neon Show Podcast · ~44 min · Starting Up VC Wisdom: Nansi & Siddhartha on Investing, Fundraising, and Growth The Neon Show (Nansi Mishra & Siddhartha Ahluwalia) In 2 answers
- The clearest explainer of how VCs actually decide, from term sheets to how partnerships evaluate founders. Understanding the... Andreessen Horowitz Book · 336 pages · Starting Up Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It Scott Kupor In 2 answers
- Adapted from a talk at MIT, this is the clearest case that being a student is not a disqualifier. Graham is honest about where... Paul Graham (paulgraham.com) Essay · 20 min read · Starting Up A Student's Guide to Startups Paul Graham In 2 answers
- Perez zooms out to centuries of technological surges and shows a repeating pattern: a new technology installs quietly, gets... Edward Elgar / Carlota Perez Book · 224 pages · Starting Up Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages Carlota Perez In 2 answers
- McCormick writes long, plain language deep dives on emerging companies and sectors while they are still forming, which is... notboring.co Article · twice weekly · Starting Up Not Boring Packy McCormick In 2 answers
- The canonical account of how disruptive technologies start out worse and cheaper, get ignored by incumbents, then improve until... Clayton Christensen (Harvard Business School) Book · Book (~280 pages) · Starting Up The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail Clayton M. Christensen In 2 answers
- Nat Turner (who sold two companies he built this way) shares a systematic, repeatable method for finding ideas without... First Round Review (review.firstround.com) Article · ~15 min read · Starting Up 90% of Feedback is Crap: How to Find the Next Big Startup Idea First Round Review In 2 answers
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Video · ~30 minutes · Starting Up
Nandan Nilekani on India's Digital Public Infrastructure
Nandan Nilekani
In 2 answers
- A deep read on why new consumer products catch on before anyone can explain them, driven by status and attention rather than... eugenewei.com Essay · 45 min read · Starting Up Status as a Service (StaaS) Eugene Wei In 2 answers
- Riley spends dozens of hours per report distilling an emerging market into a five minute read with players, opportunities, and... trends.vc Tool · Starting Up Trends.vc Dru Riley In 2 answers
- Willison is a working engineer who writes plainly about what the technology can and cannot reliably do, which is the single... simonwillison.net Article · ~30 min · Starting Up Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 Simon Willison In 2 answers
- 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 In 2 answers
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Video · 60 min · Starting Up
Intro to Large Language Models (1 hour talk)
Andrej Karpathy
In 2 answers
- A customer acquisition playbook that helps you commit to a growth lane and get world class at it, backed by case studies. It is... First Round Review Article · Starting Up Drive Growth by Picking the Right Lane: A Customer Acquisition Playbook for Consumer Startups Dan Hockenmaier, Lenny Rachitsky In 2 answers
- A ready to use version of the 40 percent very disappointed survey, so you can measure real attachment instead of guessing from... LearningLoop Template · quick setup · Starting Up Sean Ellis Product-Market Fit Survey Sean Ellis (framework) In 2 answers
- If ONDC is your opening, this is the primary source for how the network actually works and how to join it, including... ONDC Tool · Starting Up ONDC (official network) ONDC In 2 answers
- A YC founder explains how his team cut their MVP build time from three months to hours once they committed to shipping the... Y Combinator Blog Article · Starting Up The Art of Shipping Early and Often David Mack In 2 answers
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
The partnership →