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.
Videos
Watch a video to get a quick overview.
Behind the scenes of Calendly’s rapid growth
Annie Pearl is the Chief Product Officer at Calendly. Previously, she was Chief Product Officer at Glassdoor, as well as Director of Product Management at Bo...
Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups
Gustaf Alströmer is a Group Partner at Y Combinator, where he has worked with over 600 startups. He’s also a fellow Airbnb alumnus and even started the origi...
The cult of the founder CEO
Big Tech is fascinated by founder-CEOs. But the very qualities that makes them so dynamic and attractive to venture capitalists can mean they’re not always t...
Storytelling with Nancy Duarte: How to craft compelling presentations and tell a story that sticks
Nancy Duarte is the CEO of Duarte Inc. and has helped create over 250,000 presentations for influential business leaders across the globe, including Apple, T...
How This Billionaire Founder Finds +$20B Business Ideas (#495)
Episode 495: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) talk with Kevin Ryan, Founder and CEO of AlleyCorp, an in...
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 Cultivate Resilience: A Four Part Framework
Part I of Rethinking Resilience
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 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 build a growth team - lessons from Uber, Hubspot, and others (50 slides)
Dear readers, Building a new growth team is hard. You have to figure out the macro organizational issues – how it fits in with marketing, product, and other functions – as well as the micro, like how…
Trending
These links are currently making the rounds in Startups on Refind.
How to Prepare for an Upturn
One day the markets will rebound. Founders who shift their mindsets early and get two steps ahead will stay ahead in the long run.
My Company Died—Learn From My Mistakes
A dispatch from the wild, vicious world of consumer payments
How to choose the right marketing channels for your startup
Part 2 of 3 in Growth Marketing Strategy Series. Follow this guide to choose marketing channels that fit with your audience, market, GTM motion & marketing advantages.
The 100 Best Bits of Advice Ever Shared on First Round Review
We combed The Review archives for a special compilation of the 100 very best advice published on our digital pages over the last 10 years from folks like Stewart Butterfield, Claire Hughes Johnson and…
A Founder’s Framework for Understanding Performance vs. Brand Marketing for Your Startup
Startup marketing experts Sarah Emmott and Holly Chen share a multi-step process for how to craft a brand and performance marketing strategy, including how to set goals, allocate the right budget, and…
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles in Startups—all under 10 minutes.
How to avoid “death by LLM”
When Stack Overflow’s traffic apparently went into rapid decline this year, Elon Musk reacted on X with an epitaph: “Death by LLM.” (LLM stands for “large language model.”) His message initially sent…
«Create an AI roadmap now, not tomorrow»
How to do product positioning
Making products is hard. The advice you get doesn't help much; either it's too vague to be useful or too specific to be applicable to your situation. These notes build a model of how products work…
10 things we've learned about A/B testing for startups
#1 Failure is inevitable. Embrace it.
Mediocre Success Is Worse Than Outright Failure
Avoid the messy middle and aim for unambiguous results
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles in Startups.
How to Do Great Work
July 2023If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it.Partly my goal was to create…
«The trouble with exponential growth is that the curve feels flat in the beginning. It isn't; it's still a wonderful exponential curve»
The Silent Killer of Your Operating Practice: Fear
Amanda Schwartz Ramirez, former PayPal strategy leader and now COO advisor for startups, shares the 5 biggest fears that can derail your company's strategic planning sessions (and tactical advice for…
Performance & Compensation (for Eng Execs).
Uber’s original performance process was called “T3B3” and was remarkably simple: write the individuals top 3 strengths, and top 3 weaknesses, and share the feedback with them directly in person. There…
Executive Compensation
From stock options to compensation benchmarking, these are some of the most important topics for late-stage CEOs to consider when putting together an executive compensation package.
You Probably Shouldn’t Work at a Startup
It’s overrated—both financially and emotionally
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
steve blank
Customer Development & Secret History, Teaching at Stanford and Columbia
andrew chen
a16z GAMES FUND ONE. Investing in games, AI, VR/AR, metaverse, and the future of entertainment!
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.
What is Refind?
Every day Refind picks the most relevant links from around the web for you. Picking only a handful of links means focusing on what’s relevant and useful. We favor timeless pieces—links with long shelf-lives, articles that are still relevant one month, one year, or even ten years from now. These lists of the best resources on any topic are the result of years of careful curation.
How does Refind curate?
It’s a mix of human and algorithmic curation, following a number of steps:
- We monitor 10k+ sources and 1k+ thought leaders on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
- In addition, our users save links from around the web using our Save buttons and our extensions.
- Our algorithm processes 100k+ new links every day and uses external signals to find the most relevant ones, focusing on timeless pieces.
- Our community of active users gets the most relevant links every day, tailored to their interests. They provide feedback via implicit and explicit signals: open, read, listen, share, mark as read, read later, «More/less like this», etc.
- Our algorithm uses these internal signals to refine the selection.
- In addition, we have expert curators who manually curate niche topics.
The result: lists of the best and most useful articles on hundreds of topics.
How does Refind detect «timeless» pieces?
We focus on pieces with long shelf-lives—not news. We determine «timelessness» via a number of metrics, for example, the consumption pattern of links over time.
How many sources does Refind monitor?
We monitor 10k+ content sources on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
Who are the thought leaders in Startups?
We follow dozens of thought leaders in Startups, including Sam Altman, steve blank, andrew chen, Ryan Hoover, Eric Ries.
Missing a thought leader? Submit them here
Can I submit a link?
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