Essay
How to Hire the Best People You've Ever Worked With
The pmarca guide to hiring
Why it matters Andreessen's timeless breakdown of what to screen for, drive, curiosity, ethics, over polish and pedigree.
Hiring, Team & Culture Starting Up
The Reading Room
A curated shelf of long-form writing worth a founder's time: essays, playbooks, and founder stories from across the internet. Read on the original, and save what you want to come back to.
All topics
Starting Up 34
Product & Design 52
Growth & Marketing 46
Sales & GTM 36
Fundraising & VC 22
Strategy & Moats 61
Leadership & Management 57
Hiring, Team & Culture 30
Operations & Scaling 51
Founder Life & Mindset 54
Engineering & Craft 67
AI & the Future 36
Money & Finance 48
Career & Learning 49
Playbook
Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility
The deck that reset how startups write culture
Why it matters The single most influential document on high performing culture, talent density, and treating people like adults.
Hiring, Team & Culture Leadership & Management
Playbook
Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued
How comp actually gets set
Why it matters Reading how candidates negotiate makes any founder a fairer and sharper maker of offers.
Hiring, Team & Culture Money & Finance
Deep Dive
What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team
Psychological safety, proven
Why it matters Project Aristotle's finding that psychological safety, not raw talent, makes teams great is now foundational.
Hiring, Team & Culture Leadership & Management
Founder Story
Why a Nice Place to Work Doesn't Just Happen
Culture as Zerodha's business model
Why it matters Zerodha's founder on why staying small, low attrition, and a genuinely good workplace became the company's real moat.
Hiring, Team & Culture Founder Life & Mindset
Playbook
40 Favorite Interview Questions from Some of the Sharpest Folks We Know
Questions that reveal people
Why it matters A crowdsourced bank of interview questions that actually surface how a candidate thinks and works.
Hiring, Team & Culture
Essay
An Incomplete List of Skills Senior Engineers Need, Beyond Coding
Seniority is more than code
Why it matters A clear map of the non coding skills that define senior engineers, useful for leveling, hiring, and growth.
Hiring, Team & Culture Engineering & Craft
Essay
Being Glue
The invisible work that holds teams together
Why it matters Names the essential coordination work teams depend on and warns how it quietly stalls careers if unrecognized.
Hiring, Team & Culture Engineering & Craft
Essay
Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice
How companies really hire
Why it matters A candid look at how hiring decisions are truly made, essential for anyone writing job posts or offers.
Hiring, Team & Culture Career & Learning
Playbook
Employee Equity: How Much?
A framework for equity grants
Why it matters Fred Wilson's simple, fair method for sizing employee equity is still the reference founders reach for.
Hiring, Team & Culture Money & Finance
Essay
Finding Great Developers
The best ones are never on the market
Why it matters Explains why the strongest engineers never apply and how to actually reach and attract them.
Hiring, Team & Culture Engineering & Craft
Playbook
GitLab's Guide to All-Remote
The open remote handbook
Why it matters The most detailed public playbook for hiring, onboarding, and running an all remote company at scale.
Hiring, Team & Culture Operations & Scaling
Essay
Great Hackers
What the best builders want
Why it matters Graham on what attracts and retains exceptional programmers, still the sharpest read on engineering talent.
Hiring, Team & Culture Engineering & Craft
Playbook
How Netflix Reinvented HR
The thinking behind the culture deck
Why it matters Netflix's former HR chief explains hiring only adults, paying top of market, and the keeper test in plain terms.
Hiring, Team & Culture Operations & Scaling
Playbook
How to Hire
Hiring is the whole job
Why it matters A tight founder's checklist for spending your time on recruiting and only hiring people you would work for.
Hiring, Team & Culture Starting Up
Essay
How We Recruit: On Formal Credentials vs Experience-based Education
Zoho's no-degree hiring philosophy
Why it matters Zoho's founder makes the case for hiring on capability over degrees, the philosophy behind Zoho Schools of Learning.
Hiring, Team & Culture Starting Up
Playbook
Keith Rabois on the Role of a COO, How to Hire and Why Transparency Matters
Barrels and ammunition
Why it matters Home of the barrels versus ammunition framework for spotting the few people who can own an idea end to end.
Hiring, Team & Culture Leadership & Management
Deep Dive
Lessons from a Year's Worth of Hiring Data
What resumes actually predict
Why it matters A data driven gut check on which resume signals matter, most of the ones you screen for do not.
Hiring, Team & Culture Engineering & Craft
Essay
On Being a Senior Engineer
Maturity, not just seniority
Why it matters Defines the behaviors that make someone truly senior, the traits worth hiring and growing on any team.
Hiring, Team & Culture Engineering & Craft
Deep Dive
Open Salaries at Buffer: Our Transparent Formula and All Our Salaries
Compensation in the open
Why it matters The most cited experiment in radical pay transparency, with the real formula and tradeoffs laid bare.
Hiring, Team & Culture Money & Finance
Founder Story
Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company
On overhiring, layoffs, and rebuilding small
Why it matters Gumroad's founder tells the hard truth about scaling a team too fast, laying off friends, and what team size really buys.
Hiring, Team & Culture Founder Life & Mindset
Playbook
Sizing Engineering Teams
Org design from first principles
Why it matters A practical model for how big teams should be and when to split them, the core move in org design.
Hiring, Team & Culture Operations & Scaling
Playbook
The Basecamp Employee Handbook
Culture written down, in public
Why it matters A real, opinionated handbook showing how a calm, remote first company codifies benefits, norms, and expectations.
Hiring, Team & Culture Operations & Scaling
Essay
The Five Levels of Autonomy in Distributed Work
Remote is a maturity ladder
Why it matters Automattic's founder maps the stages of remote work so teams stop mistaking a home office for real distributed culture.
Hiring, Team & Culture Operations & Scaling
Playbook
The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0)
Smart and gets things done
Why it matters The classic hire only people who are smart and get things done interviewing playbook still cited today.
Hiring, Team & Culture Engineering & Craft
Playbook
The HubSpot Culture Code: Creating a Company We Love
Culture is a product
Why it matters Dharmesh Shah's living deck argues culture is to recruiting what product is to marketing, and shows how to build it.
Hiring, Team & Culture Leadership & Management
Essay
Titles and Promotions
The Law of Crappy People
Why it matters Explains why title inflation quietly rots a company and how to run leveling and promotions with discipline.
Hiring, Team & Culture Operations & Scaling
Essay
Tours of Duty: The New Employer-Employee Compact
The Alliance, in one essay
Why it matters Reframes employment as honest mutual investment, a healthier compact than pretending everyone stays forever.
Hiring, Team & Culture Leadership & Management
Essay
We Only Hire the Trendiest
Programmer moneyball
Why it matters Argues the best talent is undervalued and overlooked, a moneyball case against chasing the same crowded signals.
Hiring, Team & Culture Engineering & Craft
Essay
Why Startups Should Train Their People
Onboarding is not optional
Why it matters Horowitz argues that skipping training is the most common and costly management failure at fast growing companies.
Hiring, Team & Culture Leadership & Management
Questions, answered
What should founders read?
The eChai reading room curates long-form essays and articles worth a founder's time, on building, fundraising, product, and people.
Where can I find essays for startup founders?
The reading room is a hand-picked set of long reads that link out to the original source, curated for founders on eChai.
eChai Partner Brands
