Status: list of pointers and misc musings; still baking
General great sources of advice
- Paul Graham’s essays
- Stripe Atlas Guides - https://stripe.com/guides/atlas-guides
- Elad Gil’s “High Growth Handbook”
- Ben Kuhn’s essays
- Esp good for technical IC ⇒ founder/manager
- The Great CEO Within
- How to win friends & influence people
- YC’s “How to start a startup” sequence (?) link
- (probably okay but I haven’t watched the full thing)
Meta thoughts on advice:
- Startups are more “riding a bike” tacit knowledge, less “book” knowledge.
- Relatedly: knowledge transfer happens by spending time with great people. Ideally, work directly with them. Otherwise: talk to them, read their writing, or study their trajectory.
- Conversely: These sources above are worth reading in full instead of skimming or summarizing with ChatGPT. Books & writing are more than just their high-level takeaways; they’re ways to self-program, self-hypnotize. Still lots of alpha in books.
- Advice is very situation-dependent. Consider reversing all advice you hear. If we say 10 things, maybe 7 will be somewhat helpful, 2 will be net negative, 1 might kill your startup, you need to figure out which is which.
- You should interpret a lot of things I say as “this was helpful for Austin”, but you might not be very much like Austin
What to make
- Lean into what you’re really good at, what your unfair advantage might be, what feels mysteriously hard for other people
- Easiest to build something for yourself, or people like you
- I get a lot of motivation from working on a thing that makes people like me happy
- “Ideas are easy, execution is everything”
- https://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html