The build-measure-learn loop that named a generation of startups.

Notes on startups, or how to build the future.

Best practices, lessons and tips that have swept the startup world, offering a wealth of proven advice for…

The book that introduced customer development.

A practical guide to iterating from plan A to a plan that works.

Origin of the business model canvas.

The hook model behind products people return to without prompting.

A collection of interviews about the early days of popular technology companies.

Drawing on a decade of research, Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them.

Term sheets and deal mechanics explained by people who write them.

How VCs identify promising markets, products and entrepreneurs.

The bullseye framework for working through nineteen customer acquisition channels.

The management text most operators keep returning to.

Building a business when there are no easy answers.

Raising expectations, increasing urgency and narrowing focus, from the CEO who took Snowflake public.

How network effects begin, scale and defend themselves.

Using tough benchmarks, Collins identified elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained them for…

A master blueprint for building organizations that prosper across decades.

Useful to growth stage companies moving beyond their initial product, with a framework for investing beyond the core.

Translates vision and strategy into a coherent set of performance measures across financials, customers, internal…

The importance of knowing your audience and staying hyper-focused on them to build a loyal following.

How leaders shape organizational culture to capitalize on their greatest asset, their people.

Marketing's shift from cost center to revenue owner, and the org structure that shift requires.

The five dysfunctions at the heart of why even good teams struggle, and actionable steps to overcome them.

A provocative message: CEOs mainly have themselves to blame when things go wrong.

A leader's crucial role in building a healthy organization, the linchpin of sustained success.

The good, the bad and the ugly of succeeding with a tech startup, from a nine-time founder. Published as Tech Startup…

Veteran CTOs on handling IT crises, leading tech teams and creating an inspiring technical vision.

The "Hello, World" tutorial for building a startup.

Condensed notes from founder talks.

A reading shortlist for first-time founders.

Free online program with a curriculum, peer groups and founder talks.

YC's searchable archive of essays, talks and playbooks, and the best single starting point on this list.

The full Sam Altman lecture series, hosted on YouTube now that the original course site is offline.

An introduction to the customer development process, where founders "get out of the building" to gather customer…

Identify opportunities based on real customer needs, develop solid business models and create successful companies.

Free online entrepreneurship and business development courses from MIT, IIMB and other top schools.

Short talk on building things you believe in.

Ries presenting the ideas himself.

Wide-ranging conversation on where value accrues.

Distribution and growth tactics from practitioners.

The early archive of YC talks.

Lecture series with an India-focused lens.

Collected founder talks.

A browsable map of YC companies and resources.

The complete archive. Start with the four below.

Notice problems you have yourself rather than trying to think up ideas.

Recruit users manually and give them an experience that cannot last.

What makes a startup a startup, defined precisely.

A checklist of failure modes worth rereading yearly.

Founders describing what surprised them.

Short, dense posts on companies and ambition.

Ninety points, no filler.

The longer form version.

Derek Sivers on why execution is the term that matters.

Marc Andreessen on product-market fit, from his own archive.

First Round Review's greatest hits.

Long-form operational advice, consistently among the best startup writing anywhere.

Fred Wilson on why incumbents lose to focused newcomers.

Communication as a founder's highest-leverage skill.

Profile with useful detail on YC's early thinking.

An opinionated reading path.

Jason Cohen's long-form essays on bootstrapping, pricing and positioning.

A walkthrough of the solo, AI-assisted operating model.

General-purpose assistant for research, writing, support drafts and operations.

Long-context assistant suited to product specs, coding help and founder workflows.

AI search with citations, useful for market research and competitive intel.

Ground a model in your own documents to interrogate contracts, research and transcripts.

API docs, pricing and model comparisons for the GPT family.

Claude API docs, including prompt caching, batch pricing and agent tooling.

Free tier to prototype against Gemini models before committing to Vertex AI.

Open-weight and commercial European models, often the cheapest capable option.

Meta's open-weight family and model cards, the default when you need to self-host.

One API and one bill across hundreds of models, which makes switching providers a config change rather than a migration.

Models, datasets and Spaces, plus the leaderboards worth checking before you pick a base model.

Independent benchmarks of quality, latency and price per token across providers.

Blind human preference rankings, a useful sanity check against vendor benchmarks.

AI code editor with agents that plan and execute multi-file changes.

Anthropic's terminal-based coding agent.

Completions, chat and coding agents inside GitHub and your editor.

The open standard for connecting models to tools and data. Worth understanding early, because shipping an MCP server…

TypeScript toolkit for streaming, tool calls and generative UI.

Orchestration for chains and stateful, multi-step agents.

Data framework for retrieval over your own documents.

Type-safe Python agents with structured, validated outputs.

Programming rather than prompting, with optimizers that tune prompts against your metric.

Run open models locally, which is the cheapest way to iterate and the simplest answer to "does our data leave the…

Evals, prompt playground and logging for LLM products.

Tracing, evaluation and monitoring, usable without LangChain.

Open-source LLM observability, self-hostable.

Open-source tracing and evaluation built on OpenTelemetry.

Weights & Biases' toolkit for tracking and comparing LLM app versions.

Metrics for retrieval-augmented pipelines.

Framework and registry for benchmarking model behavior.

Serverless GPUs with per-second billing, well suited to spiky inference and batch jobs.

Run and fine-tune open models behind a hosted API.

Production model serving with autoscaling.

Fast inference for image, video and audio models.

High-throughput open-source serving engine, the standard for self-hosting.

Vector search inside Postgres. Try this before adding a dedicated vector database.

Open-source vector database with hybrid search.

Managed vector database.

Vector and full-text search on object storage, priced for large, cold datasets.

In-process analytics that removes the need for a warehouse until you actually need one.

The security checklist to read before you ship prompt-driven features.

The framework enterprise buyers increasingly ask about.

Browsable text of the Act, with obligations phasing in on staggered dates. Relevant to you if any user is in the EU.

Open-source PII detection and redaction for data leaving your systems.

What YC currently wants funded, which is a live signal on where the openings are.

Market maps and infrastructure analysis.

Sequoia on the shift from fast pattern-matching to models that reason, and what it means for products.

The reference diagram for how these systems fit together.

Argues for simple, composable patterns over frameworks, and is right more often than not.

Frontend and full-stack hosting with preview deployments per pull request.

Deploy backends and databases without managing infrastructure.

Run containers close to users in multiple regions.

Managed services, cron jobs and Postgres with a generous starting tier.

Workers, D1, R2 and queues, with egress pricing that matters at scale.

Postgres with auth, storage and realtime included.

Serverless Postgres with database branching, which pairs well with per-PR environments.

Authentication and user management you do not have to build.

Error and performance monitoring.

Modern application monitoring and security.

Dashboards, logs and traces with an open-source core.

Secrets management across environments.

Faster container and CI builds, a cheap fix for slow feedback loops.

On complexity as a recurring cost rather than a one-time one.

Still the clearest baseline for building services that deploy cleanly.

Research-backed metrics for delivery performance, and what actually improves them.

Product analytics, session replay, feature flags and experiments in one open-source platform.

Behavioral analytics for retention and funnel work.

Event analytics with a usable free tier.

Feature flags and experimentation with statistics you can defend.

Open-source BI, quick to point at your production replica.

Rapid, unmoderated user testing on prototypes.

Store and synthesize customer research so insights outlive the researcher.

Collect and prioritize feature requests to build your roadmap.

a16z's definitions of the numbers investors will ask about, and the ones founders commonly conflate.

Benchmark retention curves by business model, so you know whether yours is a problem.

Collaborative interface design, and the file format the industry speaks.

Design and publish marketing sites without a front-end build step.

Generate React and Tailwind interfaces from prompts or screenshots.

Copy-paste accessible components you own outright, rather than a dependency you fight.

Utility-first styling that keeps small teams visually consistent.

Unstyled, accessible component behavior.

Open-source icon set.

Fast palette generation.

Practical visual design rules for developers without a designer.

Incorporate a Delaware C-corp, get an EIN and issue founder stock.

Legal paperwork built specifically for startups raising money in the US.

Cap table, equity issuance and 409A valuations.

Cap table management with modeling aimed at earlier-stage teams.

Company formation and compliance for founders outside the US.

The standard post-money SAFE templates, free to use.

Free document generators and plain-language explanations of startup legal mechanics.

Electronic signatures.

Banking built for startups, with sensible treasury options.

Corporate cards and spend management for newly founded tech startups.

Cards, bills, payments and approvals with automated expense controls.

Control payments, company cards and expenses from one app, useful for multi-currency operations.

Payments, billing and tax.

Low-cost cross-border payments and multi-currency accounts.

Outsourced bookkeeping, tax and CFO support.

Accounting that stays close to real time, so your burn number is current.

The definitive treatment of CAC, LTV and the cash flow trough.

Bessemer's benchmarks for growth, efficiency and retention.

Estimate startup costs for 100+ business types, including legal, equipment, staffing and more

Automated SOC 2, ISO 27001 and HIPAA compliance monitoring.

Continuous compliance automation and audit readiness.

Compliance automation across common frameworks.

Credential management for teams.

Find and fix vulnerabilities in dependencies and containers.

The baseline web application risks to design against.

Libraries that are safe by default, so security is the path of least resistance.

Free companion course to the book, run by Techstars.

The mechanics and psychology of a fundraise.

Be formidable, or at least be clear.

Why the best investments look like bad ideas.

Common own-goals, enumerated.

What happens after the term sheet.

Structure that survives a ten-minute meeting.

a16z on valuation and dilution tradeoffs.

Process, instruments and how much to raise.

The deck outline a great many decks are copied from.

Fundraising, syndicates, roll-ups and startup equity tooling. Distinct from Wellfound, which took over the jobs and…

Searchable, filterable database of investors and their theses.

Investor search with warm-intro paths.

Seed funding, a strong network and the standard deal.

One of the world's leading accelerators, with programs by city and vertical.

Global accelerator and seed fund, formerly 500 Startups.

Focused on enterprise sales.

Funds individuals before they have a company or a cofounder.

Non-dilutive-style funding and compute credits for AI-native startups.

Day-zero investing with cofounder matching across many cities.

A community for people in the pre-idea stage.

The AARRR framework: acquisition, activation, retention, referral, revenue.

Brian Balfour on channel timing and saturation.

Why product-market fit alone does not produce growth.

Old but the fundamentals of a landing page have not moved.

A framework and real examples for managing self-service revenue.

Successor home for the Kissmetrics marketing guides.

A free book on building the first sales motion when the founder is the salesperson.

Stripe's guide to the pricing decisions founders defer for too long.

Social media scheduling and analytics.

Social media management.

Find the most shared content and the key influencers in a niche.

SEO, backlink and keyword research.

Transactional email built for developers.

Behavior-triggered messaging across email, push and in-app.

Simple email marketing for SaaS teams.

Trigger-based automated workflows between apps.

Custom triggers to automate social and device workflows.

Open-source, self-hostable workflow automation with native AI steps.

Automate social media data collection via scraping.

Social media statistics and channel tracking.

All-in-one X and Twitter marketing tool.

Understand how people interact with your site and improve conversion.

Find trends in topics.

Issue tracking and project management that engineering teams adopt without being told to.

All-in-one workspace for notes, docs, wikis and lightweight databases.

Track your team's work and manage projects.

Issue tracking and agile planning at larger scale.

Create and manage kanban boards.

Flexible spreadsheets that behave like a database.

One platform for cross-functional teamwork.

A to-do list to organize work and life.

Collaborative task lists and outlines.

Team chat and the integration surface most tools target.

Workspace chat, videoconferencing, file storage and third-party integrations.

End-to-end encrypted collaboration.

Async video updates, which replace a surprising number of meetings.

Open-source scheduling infrastructure you can embed or self-host.

Collaborative observability with no per-user limits.

Hire employees and contractors internationally without opening entities.

Employer of record, payroll and benefits across many countries.

HR, IT and finance in one system, including device provisioning.

Payroll and benefits for US teams.

Applicant tracking with analytics that show where your funnel leaks.

Startup jobs and candidate sourcing, formerly AngelList Talent.

Curated job marketplace skewed toward startup roles, which absorbed Otta.

Compensation data for calibrating offers.

Explain equity to candidates correctly, in detail.

A structured interview process that reduces expensive mis-hires.

Three-minute video on leadership and the followers who make a leader, critical for a startup achieving and maintaining…

Short article on the high correlation between employee engagement and customer satisfaction.

What each rung of engineering leadership actually requires.

Systems thinking applied to engineering organizations.

A curated path through management writing.

Care personally and challenge directly, with the failure modes named.

Coworking and private offices in most major cities.

Offices, coworking and virtual addresses worldwide.

Coworking aimed at small teams wanting quieter space.

Low-cost coworking in North America.

Virtual addresses and mail handling in Canada.

On-demand access to many spaces on one membership, which suits distributed teams.

Product, growth and career advice with unusually concrete detail.

Deep company histories that teach strategy through cases.

Inflections in finance and technology.

Ben Thompson on business strategy in tech.

Business ideas and opportunity spotting.

Founder and partner conversations, plus current program thinking.

AI engineering, for founders building on models.

Operational benchmarks for B2B SaaS at every stage.

Company, funding and investor data.

Daily launches, and a launch channel in its own right.

Where a technical audience finds and criticizes new products.

Research on private company revenue and growth.

Discover and launch early-stage products, successor to BetaPage.

Guides, tools and playbooks for building a profitable solo business with AI.

Spot demand trends before they are obvious.

Free validation of search demand and seasonality.

Market size data for decks, with sources you should check.