The Best Articles in Startups
The most useful articles and videos in Startups from around the web—beginners to advanced—curated by thought leaders and our community. We focus on timeless pieces and update the list whenever we discover new, must-read articles or videos—make sure to bookmark and revisit this page.
Top 5 Startups Articles
At a glance: these are the articles that have been most read, shared, and saved in Startups by Refind users in 2023 so far.
Videos
Watch a video to get a quick overview.
Eric Ries on The Lean Startup, the law of sustainable growth, lessons learned, and looking ahead
It’s a special TWiST Live for Ep600! Jason sits down with Eric Ries, author of “The Lean Startup” and the upcoming, Kickstarter-backed, “The Leader’s Guide.”...
Chamath Palihapitiya: Money, Success, Startups, Energy, Poker & Happiness
Chamath Palihapitiya is a venture capitalist, engineer, CEO of Social Capital, and co-host of the All-In Podcast. Please support this podcast by checking out...
Should You Start A Startup?
In this episode of Startup School, YC Group Partner Harj Taggar shares his advice on the types of people best suited to be startup founders and how to prepar...
Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy
Brought to you by OneSchema—import CSV data 10x faster: https://oneschema.co/lenny; Pando—always-on employee progression: https://www.pando.com/lenny; and Le...
How Simple Legal Mistakes Can Bankrupt Your Start-up
I’ve worked with hundreds of founders to help them move fast without breaking things. Over the years I’ve seen a lot. Based on that experience, here are the ...
What is ...?
New to Startups? These articles make an excellent introduction.
Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile: What is the difference?
What is the difference between Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile?
How to ...?
How to build a breakthrough
…the secret of Backcasting
How to Cultivate Resilience: A Four Part Framework
Part I of Rethinking Resilience
How to maintain engineering velocity as you scale
Faire’s engineering team grew from five to over 100 engineers in three years. Throughout this growth, we were able to sustain our pace of engineering execution by adhering to four guiding principles.
How to Spot Business Ideas Worth Pursuing
Your company might be eager to innovate, but you'll want to have a strategy in place to govern the prioritization of ideas - and avoid chasing shiny objects.
How To Invest In Startups
There is a lot of advice about how to be a good startup founder. But there isn’t very much about how to be a good startup investor. Before going any further, I should point out that this is a...
Trending
These links are currently making the rounds in Startups on Refind.
Retool’s Path to Product-Market Fit
In the latest post for our new series, "Paths to Product-Market Fit," Retool founder and CEO David Hsu sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to share how the internal tools company…
How to build your culture like a product — Lessons from Anna Binder, Asana’s Head of People
Anna Binder joined Asana back in 2016 as its first HR executive. She shares her advice from helping weave the cultural fabric, from getting comfortable with feedback to maintaining a healthy exec…
Small Habits Co-Founders Can Hang On to as They Build the Plane While Flying It
Labelbox’s Manu Sharma and Brian Rieger have turned a decade-long friendship into a lasting business partnership, scaling the AI developer tool startup since co-founding it together in 2017. Here,…
How to Get New Ideas
January 2023(Someone fed my essays into GPT to make something that could answer questions based on them, then asked it where good ideas come from. The answer was ok, but not what I would have said. So…
For Startup Growth, TikTok is the GOAT 🐐
But that doesn’t mean you’ve found product market fit.
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles in Startups—all under 10 minutes.
Reid Hoffman: Better Decisions, Fewer Mistakes #147
LinkedIn co-founder and former PayPal executive Reid Hoffman discusses lessons learned from decades spent as a hands-on operator and investor, including what he knows about scaling that others miss,…
How 'Sharing In Public' Led Me To My First Customers [Zero Paid Advertising]
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?Hey folks! My name is Dominik Sobe and I am the solo founder of multiple bootstrapped and profitable software products which are all run under my…
The IKEA Effect - Why people fall in love with their own ideas
Howie Mann on Sep 3, 2022 6 minute readThe IKEA effect describes how people come to overvalue things in which they have successfully put effort into. This cognitive bias can pose risks to…
«Spike rough prototypes and MVPs to test ideas early. Embrace sharing ideas that you are embarrassed with so it will be easier to cull.»
Your growth strategy should align with your company's strategy
In the same way that there's no single industry in which growth couldn't be applied, there's also no single timing or strategy of a company…
The Right Way to do a Competitor Analysis for a New Product Category
A guide for startup founders to do an objective & value based competitor analysis
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles in Startups.
The One Tool Startups Need to Brainstorm, Test and Win
At the heart of the Lean Startup movement, the Business Model Canvas can help early stage startups carve out a successful model.
Investing in Internal Documentation: A Brick-by-Brick Guide for Startups
David Nunez, an early hire at Stripe and Uber, shares his step-by-step playbook for establishing good internal documentation habits at your startup. He unpacks his tested tactics for creating a…
The Elephant in the room: The myth of exponential hypergrowth
Fast-growing startups are frequently described as “exponential,” especially when the product is “viral.” Turns out, this is incorrect, even for “viral” products like Facebook and Slack. If you have an…
«t’s well-known that growth—as a percentage—naturally declines with scale, even when there’s nothing wrong with the company.»
What I Learned at Clubhouse 📓
I’ve learned a lot about building startups over the past few years, and have become much more opinionated on how to do it well. I spent the last 2 years at Clubhouse, where my learning was…
«Importantly, don’t just tell, rather show users how you want them to engage. Collaboration between community and product can be very valuable here.»
10 Lessons from Great Businesses
After publishing over half a million words on some of the world’s most innovative businesses, these are the 10 lessons I come back to again and again. You’ll find tactics from Stripe, FTX, Tiger…
Podcasts
On the go? Listen to these Podcasts and audio in Startups.
Reid Hoffman | Crisis Management
A re-broadcast of our episode featuring Greylock general partner Reid Hoffman in conversation with his Blitzscaling co-author Chris Yeh. In this episode (originally recorded in May 2022), Hoffman and
Thought Leaders
We monitor hundreds of thought leaders, influencers, and newsletters in Startups, including:
Sam Altman
@OpenAI
andrew chen
a16z GAMES FUND ONE
steve blank
Customer Development & Secret History, Teaching at Stanford and Columbia
Ryan Hoover
Founder of @ProductHunt. Investor at @WeekendFund. Writing about fun(d) stuff at http://signatureblock.co with @vedikaja_in. Say hi! 👋🏼
Eric Ries
Trying to change how startups are built.
Publications
We monitor hundreds of publications, blogs, newsletters, and news sources in Startups, including:
a16z
we invest in software eating the world http://a16z.com/portfolio/ http://a16z.com/podcasts/
Every 📧
We publish smart, thoughtful essays on business and personal development. Our mission is to feed the minds and hearts of the people who build the internet.
Packy McCormick
Boyboss @ Not Boring: http://notboring.co || Not Boring Capital || Advisor @a16z crypto
MIT Technology Review
Our in-depth reporting on innovation reveals and explains what’s really happening now to help you know what’s coming next. http://technologyreview.com/newsletters
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We follow dozens of thought leaders in Startups, including Sam Altman, andrew chen, steve blank, Ryan Hoover, Eric Ries.
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