I've spent 15 years leading growth and operations at venture-backed startups in Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, and Atlanta.
These are the best resources I’ve found to drive others’ desperation-induced focus.
| Title▲▼ | Key Takeaway▲▼ | People▲▼ | Topic▲▼ | Type▲▼ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI is not a feature | Bake AI into the core product experience. If it feels like a bolt-on feature, you've already lost. | Ben McRedmond | Artificial Intelligence | 📝 Article |
| Something Like Fire | Don't assume AI will just help you. Have a real plan for when it disrupts your market, not just when it makes things easier. | Michael J. Totten | Artificial Intelligence | 📝 Article |
| Hunter S. Thompson's Letter on Finding Your Purpose and Living a Meaningful Life | Decide how you want to live first. Then build your work around that, not the other way around. | Maria Popova | Career | 📝 Article |
| Three paths in the tech industry: founder, executive, or employee | Founder, executive, or employee. Pick your path deliberately based on what you actually want out of your career. | Michael Seibel | Career | 📝 Article |
| You don’t need to work on hard problems | Stop chasing hard problems for clout. Chase important ones that actually matter. | Ben Kuhn | Career | 📝 Article |
| How to announce a funding round | Your funding announcement should tell your story and showcase your team. Nobody cares about the number alone. | Tiffany Spencer | Communication | 📝 Article |
| It’s okay that your startup doesn’t have a communications strategy | You don't need a comms strategy right now. Just start talking to customers and investors like a real person. | Ashley Mayer | Communication | 📝 Article |
| 4 Behaviors of Great Founders | Great founders execute fast, hold deep conviction, learn constantly, and manage stakeholders well. That's the whole playbook. | Julian Shapiro | Culture | 🧵 Twitter Thread |
| Bad Blood | Never take a founder's word at face value. Verify the product claims yourself. | John Carreyrou | Culture | 📚 Book |
| Deep Work | Block real, uninterrupted hours for deep work. Your best thinking can't happen in 15-minute windows between Slack pings. | Cal Newport | Culture | 📚 Book |
| Everybody Hurts | Talk openly about mental health with your cofounders and investors. Silence doesn't protect anyone. | Andy Dunn | Culture | 📝 Article |
| How High-Performing Teams Avoid Injury | Burnout prevention isn't soft. High-performing teams build recovery into the system before people break. | Laura Simon | Culture | 🎙️ Podcast Episode |
| How Mark Zuckerberg Led Facebook’s War to Crush Google Plus | When the threat is real, rally the whole company around one priority and sprint. That's how Facebook killed Google Plus. | Antonio García Martínez | Culture | 📝 Article |
| Play for the Front of the Jersey | Play for the team, not your personal highlight reel. Career growth follows company wins. | Ravi Gupta | Culture | 📝 Article |
| Quit and join that risky tech startup? | Take the career risk early. The downside is smallest when you're young and the learning ceiling is highest. | Gary Tann | Culture | 🎙️ Podcast Episode |
| Rework | Ship fast, stay focused, skip the meetings. Deep work beats busy work every time. | Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson | Culture | 📚 Book |
| Setting the pace | Set a pace and hold it. Demand more from each hour instead of trading quality for speed. | David Heinemeier Hansson | Culture | 📝 Article |
| The Hard Thing About Hard Things | Make the hard call now with the info you have. Waiting just makes it worse. | Ben Horowitz | Culture | 📚 Book |
| The Lean Startup | Build the smallest thing that works, measure what happens, then iterate. Skip the 50-page business plan. | Eric Ries | Culture | 📚 Book |
| Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness | Happy employees perform better. Investing in well-being isn't soft, it's a performance strategy. | MIT Sloan Review | Culture | 📝 Article |
| Why Amazon Makes No Profit | Reinvest everything into growth. Short-term profit extraction kills long-term compounding. | Jeff Bezos | Culture | 🎙️ Podcast Episode |
| Working From Home Is Less Healthy Than You Think | Remote work has real health costs. Build movement, social connection, and mental health breaks into the culture. | Jordan Metzl | Culture | 📝 Article |
| ‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups | Give away your responsibilities every few months. If you can't hand off your work, you can't scale. | Molly Graham | Culture | 📝 Article |
| Reflections on Our IPO — the First with a Female Founder/CEO, COO and CFO | Build diverse leadership from day one. Don't wait until IPO prep to figure it out. | Jennifer Hyman | Exits | 📝 Article |
| Startup Equity Expectations: New Car, New House, New Life | Be brutally honest with early employees about what their equity is actually worth in different exit scenarios. | David Cummings | Exits | 📝 Article |
| Building VC Relationships | Start building relationships with the right VCs 6 to 12 months before your raise. Not weeks before. | Elad Gil | Fundraising | 📝 Article |
| Building Your Board | Your board should evolve as your company does. Invest in those relationships early and often. | Glenn Kelman | Fundraising | 🎙️ Podcast Episode |
| Dear SaaStr: Why Are VCs So Lousy At Follow-Up? | Build VC relationships through steady communication long before you need anything from them. | Jason Lemkin | Fundraising | 📝 Article |
| How to Approach Investors | Build real relationships with investors before you need their money. Don't cold pitch. | Steve Walsh | Fundraising | 📝 Article |
| How to convince investors | Traction speaks louder than slides. Show up as a credible founder with real evidence of progress. | Paul Graham | Fundraising | 📝 Article |
| How to Raise Money | Be formidable and show progress. That beats a perfect pitch deck every single time. | Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, Parker Conrad | Fundraising | 🎙️ Podcast Episode |
| How VCs Become Assholes | Hold your investors accountable. When they stop adding value, call it out. | Omri Drory | Fundraising | 📝 Article |
| I Hate Investor Updates | Send investor updates every month, no excuses. Automate the metrics and spend your energy on the narrative. | Chris Neumann | Fundraising | 📝 Article |
| Raising money takes 6-9 months | Start fundraising conversations 6 to 9 months before you need cash. It always takes longer than you think. | Dave Payne | Fundraising | 📝 Article |
| Some Advice Before You Hit the Fund Raising Trail | Nail your story and walk in with real confidence. Investors can smell uncertainty instantly. | Mark Suster | Fundraising | 📝 Article |
| Step-by-Step Fundraising Tactics from the NYC Legend Who Raised $750M | Create FOMO in your round. Start with a smaller ask, build momentum, then let the valuation follow. | First Round | Fundraising | 📝 Article |
| 1,000 True Fans | You don't need millions of users. Find 1,000 people who'll buy everything you make. | Kevin Kelly | Getting Started | 📝 Article |
| Desperation-Induced Focus | Constraints create focus. When you're desperate, you stop doing dumb stuff and zero in on what matters. | Ravi Gupta | Getting Started | 📝 Article |
| Don’t Edit Your Imagination | Stop killing your own ideas before you try them. Start with the biggest vision possible and let reality trim it down. | Brian Chesky | Getting Started | 📝 Article |
| How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably | Greatness isn't a lightning bolt. It's being consistently good, over and over, with repeatable systems. | Steph Smith | Getting Started | 📝 Article |
| How to Do Great Work | Find what you're curious about. Get to the edge of what's known. Notice what's missing. Go explore it. | Paul Graham | Getting Started | 📝 Article |
| How to Start a Hard Tech Startup | If you're going deep tech, the team has to be genuinely obsessed with the problem. Passion isn't optional here. | Sam Altman | Getting Started | 🎙️ Podcast Episode |
| How to Start a Startup | Find great cofounders, build what people want, spend almost nothing, and launch yesterday. | Paul Graham | Getting Started | 📝 Article |
| Six Principles for Making New Things | Ship the ugly version 1.0 first. Solve simple problems nobody else noticed. Iterate from real feedback. | Paul Graham | Getting Started | 📝 Article |
| Startups are an act of desperation | Startups need desperation as fuel. Whether it's financial, career, or mission-driven, that urgency is what keeps you alive. | Elad Gil | Getting Started | 📝 Article |
| Stop Chasing Money, Chase Wealth | Stop trading hours for dollars. Build skills, systems, and leverage that compound without you. | Garry Tan | Getting Started | 🎙️ Podcast Episode |
| Talented Entrepreneurs Working on the Wrong Idea | The idea matters less than the market. Validate with real customers before you scale anything. | David Cummings | Getting Started | 📝 Article |
| The idea maze | Study the dead companies in your space before you build. The idea maze has already been partially mapped. | Chris Dixon | Getting Started | 📝 Article |
| The Most Important Question For Founders is "Why?" | Know your 'why' before you start building. It's the only thing that'll keep you going when things get brutal. | Ben Yoskovitz | Getting Started | 📝 Article |
| What is -1 to 0? A Philosophy of Ideation. | Treat ideation like a real job. Validate that you're the right founder for this market before committing years of your life. | Ruchi Sanghvi | Getting Started | 📝 Article |
| What Sets Successful Startup Accelerators Apart | The best accelerators compress mentorship and use peer pressure as a feature, not a bug. | Susan Cohen | Getting Started | 📝 Article |
| Why Startup Consulting is a Bad Idea | Generic consulting is a waste. Find tactical, market-specific help or real mentorship instead. | Karl Hughes | Getting Started | 📝 Article |
| Blitzscaling | When the market window is open, choose speed over efficiency. You can optimize later. You can't unlose the market. | Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh, Bill Gates | Growth: Fundamentals | 📚 Book |
| Do You Have Product Market Fit? | Measure PMF through cohort retention, not sign-ups. If people aren't sticking around, you don't have it yet. | Casey Winters | Growth: Fundamentals | 🎙️ Podcast Episode |
| Growing a startup | Pick one customer persona. Get absurdly good for them. Then expand. | Julian Shapiro | Growth: Fundamentals | 📝 Article |
| Growth | Learn the full funnel: acquire, activate, retain, monetize. Most founders only think about the first one. | Alex Schultz | Growth: Fundamentals | 🎙️ Podcast Episode |
| High Growth Handbook | Scaling from 10 to 10,000 people is all tactics. Hire the right execs and manage your board like a pro. | Elad Gil | Growth: Fundamentals | 📚 Book |
| How to Get Users and Grow | Find the moment users first get real value from your product. Optimize for that before you scale anything. | Alex Schultz | Growth: Fundamentals | 🎙️ Podcast Episode |
| How to Talk to Users | Stop asking leading questions. Shut up and listen to what your users actually struggle with. | Eric Migicovsky | Growth: Fundamentals | 🎙️ Podcast Episode |
| Launching Airbnb and the Challenges of Scale | Do things that don't scale. Manually engage with every early customer. Be obsessive about each hire. | Brian Chesky | Growth: Fundamentals | 🎙️ Podcast Episode |
| Speed x AI | AI makes speed 10x cheaper. If you're not using it to move faster than your competitors, someone else is. | James Currier | Growth: Fundamentals | 📝 Article |
| Why product-led growth is the future | Let the product sell itself. Don't add a sales team until the product can activate and convert users on its own. | Elena Verna and Lenny Rachitsky | Growth: Fundamentals | 🎙️ Podcast Episode |
| Distribution | Your distribution strategy is your product strategy. Don't treat acquisition like something separate. | Ben Horowitz | Growth: Marketing | 📝 Article |
| Every Startup's Go-To-Market Strategy Has To Answer The $100 Million Question | Work backward from $100M in revenue. What does the customer need to be worth? What sales model gets you there? | Valley Voices | Growth: Marketing | 📝 Article |
| Growth Loops are the New Funnels | Build loops, not funnels. The best growth systems feed their own outputs back into acquisition. | Brian Balfour, Casey Winters, Kevin Kwok, and Andrew Chen | Growth: Marketing | 📝 Article |
| Growth Wins | Growth without retention is a leaky bucket. Fix the foundation first. | Brian Balfour, Casey Winters, Kevin Kwok | Growth: Marketing | 📝 Article |
| How Morning Brew Got Its First 10,000 Subsribers | Morning Brew grew through college ambassadors and peer referrals. Build a referral engine with real incentives early. | Austin Rief | Growth: Marketing | 🧵 Twitter Thread |
| How to Craft a Successful Go to Market Strategy | Go to your customers where they already are. Don't expect them to change their behavior for you. | Toptal | Growth: Marketing | 📝 Article |
| How to design a referral program | Ask for referrals in the moment when users are already engaged. Not in some random banner they'll ignore. | Andrew Chen | Growth: Marketing | 📝 Article |
| How to launch on Reddit | Reddit will eat you alive if you pitch. Learn the rules, add genuine value, and engage like a real community member. | Marc Lou | Growth: Marketing | 📝 Article |
| Is "Scoff and Dismiss" a Marketing Strategy? Confessions of a Brand Guy | Stop dismissing marketing ideas reflexively. Test them for real impact instead. | Steven Carse | Growth: Marketing | 📝 Article |
| Peanut Butter Versus a Lightning Strike | Stop spreading your marketing thin across the whole year. Concentrate firepower into a few high-impact moments. | Darryl Dickens | Growth: Marketing | 📝 Article |
| The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs | Every marketing channel degrades over time. Keep testing new creative and new channels constantly. | Andrew Chen | Growth: Marketing | 📝 Article |
| Retention Is The Silent Killer | Retention is the metric that matters most. Companies with the best retention always win long-term. | Brian Balfour | Growth: Retention | 📝 Article |
| Why the worst users come from referral programs, free trials, coupons, and gamification at andrewchen | Referral programs and free trials attract the worst users. Grow organically with people who actually want your product. | Andrew Chen | Growth: Retention | 📝 Article |
| Competition Is for Losers | Don't compete. Build a monopoly in a tiny market first, then expand from a position of strength. | Peter Thiel | Growth: Strategy | 📝 Article |
| Going from Zero to One | Create something genuinely new. Incremental improvements in crowded markets are a losing game. | Peter Thiel | Growth: Strategy | 🎙️ Podcast Episode |
| Hooked | Trigger, action, variable reward, investment. Build that loop into your product and users come back without being asked. | Nir Eyal, Ryan Hoover | Growth: Strategy | 📚 Book |
| Shoe Dog | Phil Knight got rejected constantly for years. Long-term resilience and refusing to quit is the real competitive advantage. | Phil Knight | Growth: Strategy | 📚 Book |
| Super Pumped | Growth at all costs is a trap. Culture shortcuts and vanity metrics will catch up to you. | Mike Issac | Growth: Strategy | 📚 Book |
| Fell in a hole, got out. | When you're bleeding cash, cut hard and fast. Core team, costs, product scope. Reset to survive. | Tony Stubblebine | Hard Lessons | 📝 Article |
| My Billion Dollar Mistake | Once you have PMF, stop brainstorming new ideas. Just build what your customers are already asking for. | Hiten Shah | Hard Lessons | 📝 Article |
| Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company | Chasing a billion-dollar valuation is overrated. Build something profitable and meaningful instead. | Sahil Lavingia | Hard Lessons | 📝 Article |
| The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups | Most startup mistakes don't kill you. The one that does is building something nobody wants. | Paul Graham | Hard Lessons | 📝 Article |
| What is -1 to 0? A Philosophy of Ideation. | Treat ideation like a real job. Validate that you're the right founder for this market before committing years of your life. | Ruchi Sanghvi | Ideation | 📝 Article |
| Creativity, Inc | Get the team right first. A great team will fix bad ideas. A bad team will ruin great ones. | Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace | Innovation | 📚 Book |
| Crossing the Chasm | Win one narrow segment completely before you try to cross the chasm into the next one. | Geoffrey A. Moore | Innovation | 📚 Book |
| Degens Are Pioneers | The people willing to look crazy early are the ones who find the breakthroughs. Calculated risk-taking is underrated. | Qiao Wang | Innovation | 📝 Article |
| Founders at Work | Successful founders weren't sure they'd succeed either. They just kept moving forward anyway. | Jessica Livingston | Innovation | 📚 Book |
| Zero to One | Build something new, not something slightly better. And get one distribution channel working really well. | Peter Thiel | Innovation | 📚 Book |
| Aim off-center to counter a bias | You already have biases. Deliberately aim the other direction to compensate. | Derek Sivers | Leadership | 📝 Article |
| Alignment > Autonomy | Alignment first, autonomy second. Without shared direction, autonomy just creates chaos. | Build Right Side | Leadership | 📝 Article |
| Conflict Avoidance is Dishonesty | Avoiding conflict is lying to your team. Say the hard thing directly so real problems actually get solved. | Sarah Guo | Leadership | 📝 Article |
| Focus | Kill non-essential projects before they start. Ruthless delegation is how you stay focused on what matters. | Andrew Bosworth | Leadership | 📝 Article |
| How to Win Friends & Influence People | Listen more. Talk less. Frame everything in terms of what the other person cares about. | Dale Carnegie | Leadership | 📚 Book |
| Lies that Losers Tell | Stop lying to yourself about where you stand. Face the uncomfortable truths about your product, market, and execution early. | Ben Horowitz | Leadership | 📝 Article |
| Steve Jobs’ Insult Response | When someone takes a shot at you, acknowledge what's valid, stay human, and redirect to what actually matters. | Steve Johbs | Leadership | 🎙️ Podcast Episode |
| Stop Preparing For The Last Disaster | Stop war-gaming the last crisis. Build general resilience so you can handle whatever comes next. | Farnam Street | Leadership | 📝 Article |
| The #1 skill every executive should have | The best executives switch between strategy and tactics fluidly. Practice that context-switching like a skill. | Personal Math with Greg & Taylor | Leadership | 📝 Article |
| The Best-Case Outcomes Are Statistical Outliers | Plan for the likely outcome, not the best case. Best cases are statistical flukes. | Farnam Street | Leadership | 📝 Article |
| The danger of playing it safe | Playing it safe in PR and product is its own risk. Swing for new categories instead of incremental moves. | Lulu Cheng Meservey | Leadership | 📝 Article |
| The Effective Executive | Guard your time ruthlessly. Focus on opportunities, not fires. Go deep on the few things that actually move the needle. | Peter F. Drucker | Leadership | 📚 Book |
| The Electricity Metaphor | If you're building foundational infrastructure, your real job is distribution. The applications will come. | Jeff Bezos | Leadership | 🎙️ Podcast Episode |
| The Five Dysfunctions of a Team | Trust comes first. Without it, your team will never have the real debates that lead to better decisions. | Patrick Lencioni | Leadership | 📚 Book |
| The No-Stats All-Star | The most valuable people on your team might not show up in the stats. Find and reward them anyway. | Michael Lewis | Leadership | 📝 Article |
| Transparent Optimism | Give your team the full picture (good and bad) and explain how you'll win. They can handle the truth. | Casey Winters | Leadership | 📝 Article |
| Trillion Dollar Coach | Your job as a manager is to make your people successful. Everything else is secondary. | Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle | Leadership | 📚 Book |
| Why Every Leader Needs to Take a Think Week | Block a week (or even a few days) away from the noise to think, reflect, and plan. Your best ideas won't come from Slack. | Michael Karnjanaprakorn | Leadership | 📝 Article |
| Work on what matters. | Only work on things tied to your company's survival. Everything else is a distraction. | Will Larsen | Leadership | 📝 Article |
| High Output Management | Set clear OKRs, make them visible to everyone, and tie them directly to company goals. That's the whole system. | Andy Grove | Management | 📚 Book |
| Managing people | Be explicit about how you communicate with your team. A casual suggestion from a founder sounds like a mandate. | Andreas Klinger | Management | 📝 Article |
| The Underrated Power of 'Glue Employees' Who Hold Everything Together | Recognize the glue people on your team. They multiply everyone else's output and rarely get the credit. | Heidi Mitchell | Management | 📝 Article |
| Your Small Imprecise Ask Is a Big Waste of Their Time | When you ask someone for something, be specific about what you need and how long it'll take. Vague asks waste everyone's time. | Stay SaaSy | Management | 📝 Article |
| How to Set KPIs and Goals | Pick one north star metric. Set growth targets that reflect your actual market, not fantasy. | Adora Cheung | Metrics | 🎬 Video |
| A Counterintuitive System for Startup Compensation | Level employees cross-functionally for comp. Revisit it once or twice a year, not constantly. | First Round Review | Operations | 📝 Article |
| Benchmarks of option plans | Allocate 12 to 16% of fully diluted equity to your option pool. Be consistent with how you grant to technical hires. | Index Ventures | Operations | 📝 Article |
| The Role of Timing in Recruiting Talent | Start recruiting great people way before you need them. Build the pipeline now, not when you're desperate. | David Cummings | People | 📝 Article |
| Tools of Titans | Steal the habits, not just the goals. Meditation, reading, exercise, and small daily systems compound over years. | Timothy Ferriss | Problem Solving | 📚 Book |
| Building Consumer Social Apps | Before you scale a consumer app, build a repeatable testing process. A good idea alone won't carry you. | Nikita Bier | Product | 🧵 Twitter Thread |
| Building Product | Ship the basic version fast. The goal is to start conversations with users, not to build something perfect. | Michael Seibel | Product | 🎙️ Podcast Episode |
| Half, Not Half-Assed | Cut your feature list in half. Ship something focused and excellent instead of something bloated and mediocre. | Basecamp | Product | 📝 Article |
| How to prioritize features | Don't spread across features. Double down where you're already winning. | Emmett Shear | Product | 📝 Article |
| How to ship fast | Protect momentum at all costs. Quick decisions, no padded estimates, and keep the people doing the work in the room. | Ben McRedmond | Product | 📝 Article |
| The Design Sprint | Run a five-day sprint to test your idea with real users before you commit serious resources. | GV | Product | 📝 Article |
| High-leverage Housekeeping | Organize your tools and systems so your brain is free for strategic thinking, not logistics. | Taimur Abdaal | Productivity | 📝 Article |
| Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule | Protect big blocks of time for deep work. Batch your meetings at the end of the day so makers can actually make. | Paul Graham | Productivity | 📝 Article |
| The Top Idea in Your Mind | Pay attention to what you think about in the shower. That's your real priority. Make sure it's the right one. | Paul Graham | Productivity | 📝 Article |
| Tools of Titans | Steal the habits, not just the goals. Meditation, reading, exercise, and small daily systems compound over years. | Tim Ferriss | Productivity | 📚 Book |
| 23 Company Building Lessons, Learned From Scaling Stripe & Notion | Do the work yourself before hiring someone to do it. And use a spreadsheet to model equity scenarios honestly. | First Round Review | Scaling | 📝 Article |
| Lessons scaling from 10 to 20 people | Before you go from 10 to 20 people, draw the org chart. Map who you have and who you need. Clarity prevents chaos. | Joseph Walla | Scaling | 📝 Article |
| Productivity | Working on the right problem matters more than working fast. Direction over speed, always. | Sam Altman | Scaling | 📝 Article |
| Tech debt is not a burden, it's a strategic lever for success | Tech debt isn't inherently bad. Take it on strategically when it accelerates the business. Just don't ignore it forever. | Matt Greenberg, Keya Patel | Scaling | 📝 Article |
| The Biggest Problem With Mediocre VPs? They Spend All The Money | Bad VPs hire their way out of problems instead of solving them. Watch where the money goes. | Jason Lemkin | Scaling | 📝 Article |
| VP of Finance: The Non-Obvious | Hire your VP of Finance earlier than feels natural. By the time it feels urgent, you're already behind. | Matt Turck | Scaling | 📝 Article |
| The ultimate guide to SEO | For video SEO, nail your keywords, metadata, and watch time. That's what drives discoverability. | Lenny's Rachitsky, Ethan Smith | SEO | 🎬 Video |
| Tips for SEO | SEO is about credibility now. Build brand mentions and programmatic content, not just keyword stuffing. | Eric Siu | SEO | 🧵 Twitter Thread |
| Climbing the wrong hill | Explore different paths early in your career. Switching gets exponentially harder the longer you wait. | Chris Dixon | Strategy | 📝 Article |
| 2,851 Miles | Watch for regulatory capture. Keep transparency high and open-source alternatives alive. | Bill Gurley | Success | 🎙️ Podcast Episode |
| Should You Just Give Up? | Know when to quit. Perseverance has a cost, and sometimes the smartest move is redirecting your energy. | Joshua Rothman | Success | 📝 Article |
| Success | Buffett and Gates both credit their success to one word: focus. Do fewer things, better. | Warren Buffett, Bill Gates | Success | 🎙️ Podcast Episode |
| High Agency People | Stop blaming circumstances. Ask yourself what you can actually control and go do that. | Shreyas Doshi | Team | 🧵 Twitter Thread |