The Hard Thing About Hard Things
by Ben Horowitz
Brutally honest Silicon Valley veteran's guide to navigating startup challenges including layoffs, demotions, firing friends, and managing crises.
More resources on Entrepreneurship
Indie Hackers
Community site for founders of small, self-funded software businesses, featuring interviews, public revenue numbers, and discussion forums. Readers can compare pricing decisions, customer acquisition tactics, and growth paths across bootstrapped products rather than venture-funded startups.
Paul Graham Essays
Complete archive of Paul Graham's writing, including the essays on founder mode, doing things that don't scale, and startup ideas that shaped Y Combinator's advice. Argumentative rather than instructional, useful for forming judgment about early-stage decisions.
How to Start a Startup
Paul Graham's 2005 essay, adapted from a Harvard talk, arguing that startups succeed by combining good people, a product customers want, and frugal spending. Covers finding ideas, choosing cofounders, understanding users, raising angel money and deciding whether to start one.
Entrepreneurship I: Laying the Foundation
A four-module Coursera course from the Gies College of Business on early-stage ventures: generating ideas and pitching, customer discovery interviews and market sizing, forming founding teams and splitting equity, and designing business models. Learners can assess an opportunity and structure a new venture.
Startup School
Learn entrepreneurial leadership from YC partners! Startup School is your guide to building a successful company.
How I Built This
Interview podcast in which Guy Raz talks with founders of well-known companies about how they started and grew them. Conversations cover finding an idea, early funding, near-failures, hiring and scaling, giving listeners concrete accounts of how businesses are built in practice.