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.
A survey-driven method to measure and improve PMF.
Why it matters It turns the vague idea of product/market fit into a metric you can actually measure and move.
Starting Up Product & Design
Why, when, and how to raise a seed round
Why it matters It is the standard reference founders send each other, covering SAFEs, valuation, and process end to end.
Fundraising & VC Starting Up
Recruit your first users by hand, one at a time.
Why it matters It gives you permission to do the manual, unglamorous work of getting your first customers instead of waiting for growth to happen on its own.
Starting Up
A framework for judging whether an idea is worth pursuing.
Why it matters It gives you concrete criteria to evaluate ideas instead of falling in love with the first one.
Starting Up
Notice problems you have yourself and build for them.
Why it matters It reframes idea generation as noticing real problems rather than brainstorming, which is where most first-time founders go wrong.
Starting Up
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 market India startups actually sell to
Why it matters It is the essential lens on why most Indian startups can only find product-market fit in a thin affluent India1 segment.
Strategy & Moats Starting Up
Why it matters Teresa Torres gives founders a simple visual tool to connect a business outcome to real customer opportunities and the experiments that address them.
Product & Design Starting Up
A condensed guide to starting and building a startup.
Why it matters It is a dense, high-signal overview of the whole early journey from one of YC's clearest thinkers.
Starting Up
Product/market fit is the one thing that matters.
Why it matters It defines product/market fit and explains why nothing else matters until you have it.
Starting Up Product & Design
You only need a small core of dedicated fans to sustain a business.
Why it matters It reframes early traction as depth with a few real fans rather than mass appeal from day one.
Starting Up Growth & Marketing
Test whether the problem you picked is worth solving.
Why it matters It gives you a rigorous test for whether your problem is real, urgent, and worth building a company around.
Starting Up
A startup is a search for a repeatable business model.
Why it matters It gives you the first-principles definition of a startup that reframes everything you do early on.
Starting Up
Counterintuitive things you should know before starting.
Why it matters It corrects the mental models that trip up founders before they even begin.
Starting Up
Why it matters A concrete tour of exactly how Airbnb, Uber, Tinder and others got their first users, tactics you can copy on day one.
Growth & Marketing Starting Up
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
Why it matters Michael Seibel's tight guide to scoping a first version around a real problem and getting it in front of users fast, minus the perfectionism.
Product & Design Starting Up
Good people, something customers want, spend little money.
Why it matters It distills the whole game into three things you can actually hold in your head.
Starting Up
Advice for starting a startup, written for teenagers.
Why it matters It is the simplest, clearest version of the start-a-startup playbook Graham has written.
Starting Up
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
Why it matters The skateboard to car drawing here is the single best correction to teams who ship a broken half-product and call it an MVP.
Product & Design Starting Up
Why it matters The original definition of the MVP as the smallest thing that lets you learn, before the term got diluted into any half-built product.
Product & Design Starting Up
Why it matters Steve Blank explains that the minimum feature set is a tactic for reaching visionary early customers fast, not an excuse to ship something weak.
Product & Design Starting Up
Strategy where the future is unknowable
Why it matters It reframes uncertainty as the startup's advantage and shows how to build strategy when the future cannot be forecast.
Strategy & Moats Starting Up
Why it matters Wingify founder Paras Chopra argues you cannot manufacture demand, so start from an existing market pull and build to it, a first-principles take on product market fit.
Product & Design Starting Up
A collected set of Altman's core startup lessons.
Why it matters It captures the founder advice Altman repeats most, in one place.
Starting Up
What actually distinguishes a startup from a small business.
Why it matters It clarifies what a startup is and forces you to decide honestly whether you are building one.
Starting Up
The common ways early startups die.
Why it matters It is a checklist of failure modes you can steer around before they sink you.
Starting Up
Why it matters The most cited annual read on the Indian startup and consumer landscape, now with a serious view of where AI fits the India market.
AI & the Future Starting Up
An honest look at the reasons not to start one.
Why it matters It makes you confront the real costs before you commit years of your life.
Starting Up Founder Life & Mindset
Why it matters A blunt, founder-level definition of what PMF feels like day to day, so you stop faking it and know when to scale.
Growth & Marketing Starting Up
A stark look at how you are really spending your time.
Why it matters It puts the opportunity cost of your years into perspective before you commit them to a startup.
Starting Up Founder Life & Mindset
Answering the reasons you talk yourself out of it.
Why it matters It walks through the excuses that stop people from starting and tests whether yours are real.
Starting Up Founder Life & Mindset
The pitch outline Sequoia asks founders to answer
Why it matters It is the classic ten part deck skeleton that forces you to say what a company is and why it wins.
Fundraising & VC Starting Up
The eChai reading room curates long-form essays and articles worth a founder's time, on building, fundraising, product, and people.
The reading room is a hand-picked set of long reads that link out to the original source, curated for founders on eChai.
