Startup Resources: The best of the best
Hi there! My name is Katelyn. I write Declarative Statements, a weekly newsletter on economics, investing, technology, and culture.
This page has curated links on the best resources I’ve seen in the startup ecosystem.
Have a resource to recommend? List it in the comments or send it to me via email.
Side hustle, Solo-entrepreneurs
How to run a blog that changes your life by Nat Eliason. Do you consider this a newsletter or a blog? Sometimes, I'm not sure. Either way, I saunter on. This piece is full of tips and tricks for aspiring writers.
1,000 True Fans - Long essay and analysis on how the economics of the micro-creator economy work. This part particularly resonated:
100 True Fans - Follow up from last week's post on the economics of 1,000 true fans is Li Jin, formerly of A16Z, with a blog post on how the market has evolved and how now, maybe, you can survive with as few as 100 truly dedicated mega fans.
Operations
VC software stack - 225 lines of sortable SaaS products to run a venture firm. Saturated, you say? Fragmented, I hear?
Cadence: How to build your SaaS operating system for Series A/Series B companies from David Sacks:
So what is the Cadence? It’s based on a few simple insights:
First, the four major functions in a SaaS startup — Sales, Finance, Product, and Marketing — are all best run on a quarterly cycle.
However, it’s not the same cycle. Sales and Finance are on one calendar; Product and Marketing are on another calendar. I call these the Sales-Finance System and the Product-Marketing System.
If you snap these two calendars together, it will create a single operating cadence for the company.
The key milestones and events in these systems create opportunities for company-wide communication and collaboration — a kind of superstructure for the organization.
This is a simple approach that every startup can use, yet few actually do. Let’s describe each function and then how they fit together.
Compensation calculator from GitHub helps you assess compensation across a variety of roles and markets. Silicon Valley and tech-focused but helpful.
The complex technology stack powering the MorningBrew. I'm impressed at the sophistication of the process automation of what they built. What a machine. It's a gift to the world to lay this bare.
How to set up an engineering management organization. Helpful and concise. This point rings true: "The performance review is not a review of the employee’s performance in a vacuum. It is a measure of how well the manager and the employee work together in a team." Allow the transfer. Collect more performance data points.
Risk assessment and prioritization for startups by Leo Polovets. Great set of frameworks and questions. Intuitive and easy to follow.
High Output Founders Library - if you need it you need it.
Templates. So many templates. From Visible VC. Everything really is becoming cut and paste.
Financing and Venture Capital
Shared Earnings Agreements: Sort of like an Income Share Agreement but for companies that want alternative financing arrangements to traditional venture capital or bank debt. Brought to you by Earnest Capital.
The importance of speed in venture capital: Nice article by William McQuillan. Short story: time is valuable.
Check out Venture Patterns by Miles Lasater - He catalogs the best of what other startups and venture capitalists have figured out. A look under the hood of how venture capitalists think and what drives them.
How do you value an online business? Here are a bunch of helpful tools from FE International on valuation.
How investors approach fundraising from LPs by Carta. Helpful set of materials, particularly if you are looking to raise a first-time venture fund. Might also be helpful for entrepreneurs to understand the business model of VCs and how a lot of the behavior of the investors you interact with is determined by their ultimate capital source.
Tim Jackson, DS community member and Walking VC (It's true! The only way to hang with Tim is to take a walk with him in Hyde Park. Highly recommend.), is one of the best VC writers for CEOs. Why? Well, he spent 10 years as a journalist for The Economist and the FT and then built a few companies. Empathetic advice + beautiful writing = my favorite. He writes this week on What to do if you hate your job as a startup CEO for Series A and B CEOs.
Highly recommend the Indie VC newsletter on introduction to alternative sources of finance.
Conserve your cash: 41% of global startups have less than 3 months of cash, according to startup genome.
The Burn Multiple: How startups should think about capital efficiency by David Sacks.
Resources to improve your CFO function from A16Z. Crucial and tactical advice, also from their portfolio companies. Use the frameworks. Shop around.
How Yipit slashed its AWS bill down by $2.5M or 50%.
Are VCs giving you complex legal terms? Fred Destin explains what they mean here.
Growth
6 Rules for Building Growth into Your Startup’s Operating System - Super practical set of advice by Prasid Pathak, an experienced marketing executive with a track record in EdTech.
How to Maximize your Enterprise Software Purchases and How To Optimize Your Website If You've Never Relied on Online Sales - both practical, clear articles written by DS member Stafford Palmieri.
Super Scaling published an in-depth guide on how to scale a business by doing all methodological steps that keep entrepreneurs prepared in all business phases.
Growth Can't Wait - a blog from a founder re-emphasizing the defining characteristic of a startup as fast growth.
How did the biggest consumer apps get their first 1,000 users? This newsletter lays out the answer:
Just seven strategies account for every consumer apps’ early growth.
Most startups found their early users from just a single strategy.
The most popular strategies involve going to your user directly. Doing things that don’t scale.
To execute on any of these strategies, it’s important to first narrowly define your target user.
The tactics that you use to get your first 1,000 users are very different from your next 10,000.
Traffic data from a viral post: Blog illuminates and encourage you to push for sustained, incremental progress over short term spikes.
Product
Principles and Frameworks of Becoming a Product Leader - a bunch of resources listed in Notion by a product leader at Stripe.
Product work beyond product-market fit - a helpful article from Reforge, the training organization for mid-to-senior level technology professionals.
General life advice
150 "Most Influential Essays I've Ever Read" - Isn't the internet great? Someone compiled a complete list with links to the essays everyone on Twitter suggested in response to a tweet.
Marc Andreessen long read from The Observer Effect.
Marc Andreessen's guide to personal productivity: It's vintage material but a gold mine!
Market sizing and scoping
Blume Ventures deck analyzing the EdTech Market in India. I started investing in Indian EdTech in 2012 and was out of the market by 2016. I can not tell you how many times investors and potential LPs told me things like 'you can't make money' and 'it's too hard' and 'there will be no impact'.
Remote work market map from Signalfire VC.
Communities and attention
How to host a virtual networking event by DS members Alisa Cohn and Doria Clark.
Vertical social networks: What are they?
Users post things that they can’t (or won’t) share anywhere else.
Solves a core, utility-oriented need with a new tool / feature.
Enhances a user’s status within an existing community.
Develops and supports its own group of platform-native “stars.”
Platform is a “system of record” for identity within the vertical.
12 Community Management tools from Indie Hacker.
One of those tools is Discord. Highly recommend reading on DarkHorse Discord: How a gaming chat platform is secretly connecting the Internet and defining the future of work.
Discord functions organize its groups into a community (server) and then further into channels about topics, which can be grouped into similar channels based on interest.
Do you love newsletters? Here's a site that aims to aggregate them all.
Rocks, Sand, Water: A framework from Sarah Tavel, Benchmark partner, on how to think about consumer attention. Declarative Statements is a Rock, for example. TikTok is Sand. You're not going to learn much from TikTok. You will be entertained.
Company shutdown stories
Founder failure story from Gagan Biyani on Spig, a food delivery company. Three causes for failure:
In 2013, we mistook the present for the future. Delivery apps got better with scale. We got worse.
The profit equation was off. The market size in SF was too small for our big kitchen. We blitzfailed.
Cap Table + Burnout. Hard to restart after losing $50M.
Cherry: the shutdown story. Founder tell-alls and lessons at the end of a tough journey are true gifts to the ecosystem. Here are 5 posts from a YC incubated HR-benefits startup.
Hiring
You can track all the layoffs in startup-land. By the day.
Want to hire some Airbnb talent? There is a directory for that.
Company profiles and ideas
Lux Capital launched a series called Futura on 'Technologies that are almost-too-amazing-to-be-real -- and the rebels of invention who are bringing them to life'. I love their deep-tech portfolio, and it's great to get this glimpse of the inside.
Is your startup idea terrible? It's good to know early. This can help you evaluate.