Startups, and thinking clearly
Essays that shaped how a generation of founders think about building something people want.
Photograph: Crédit photo: Sarah Harlin · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Graham co-founded Y Combinator and wrote a long series of essays about startups, work and thinking that are among the most-read pieces of writing in the field. They are free, they are short, and they age unusually well.
The most quoted instruction is the plainest: make something people want. The essays are largely elaborations of how much harder that is than it sounds and how many ways founders avoid finding out.
The value is less in the conclusions than in watching someone reason carefully about a messy question. Even the essays about topics you do not care about are worth reading for that.
At the start, recruit users by hand, deliver the service personally, do the unscalable thing. It teaches you what the product should be, and the businesses that skip it build the wrong thing efficiently.
The whole of startup advice compressed. The test is not whether people say it is a good idea; it is whether they use it, and whether they would be annoyed if you took it away.
A brutally clarifying question: on your current growth and spending, do you reach profitability before the money runs out? Founders avoid asking because the answer is often no, and knowing early is the whole point.
These links go to their own work. We summarise and point — we do not republish it.
Anyone building something new, and anyone who enjoys watching a careful argument being made.
Written about high-growth technology startups. If you are opening a café, the reasoning transfers and most of the specifics do not.