The Startup Owner's Manual by Steve Blank - The Startup Owner's Manual lays out the best practices, lessons and tips that have swept the startup world, offering a wealth of proven advice and information for entrepreneurs of all stripes.
Venture Capitalists at Work by Tarang Shah and Sheetal Shah - Venture Capitalists at Work: How VCs Identify and Build Billion-Dollar Successes offers unparalleled insights into the funding and management of companies like YouTube, Zappos, Twitter, Starent, Facebook, and Groupon. The venture capitalists profiled—among the best in the business—also reveal how they identify promising markets, products, and entrepreneurs.
Hello, Startup - The "Hello, World" tutorial for building a startup
The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action - The Balanced Scorecard translates a company's vision and strategy into a coherent set of performance measures. The four perspectives of the scorecard--financial measures, customer knowledge, internal business processes, and learning and growth--offer a balance between short-term and long-term objectives, between outcomes desired and performance drivers of those outcomes, and between hard objective measures and softer, more subjective measures. This is a great tool for all companies, but importantly early stage companies, to help them translate data to data execution into actionable and measurable outcomes, across the business.
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't - Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.
Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us -
Seth Godin stresses the importance and benefits of knowing your audience and staying hyper-focused on them to build a loyal following. “With his signature wit and storytelling flair, Godin presents the three steps to building a tribe: the desire to change things, the ability to connect a tribe, and the willingness to lead.
Rise of the Revenue Marketer -
The role of Marketing has dramatically evolved over the last decade. Historically seen exclusively as a cost-center for the business, this shift tasks Marketing with generating revenue. This book highlights these changes and outlines the organizational structure necessary to drive this accountability and growth.
Think Like a Founder - Discover the good, the bad, and the ugly of succeeding with a tech startup from nine-time company founder Jothy Rosenberg.
Think Like a CTO - A book that shares the experience and advice of veteran CTOs and industry experts for handling IT crises, leading tech teams, and creating an inspiring vision for your company.
The Lean Launchpad by Steve Blank (Udacity) - Learn the key tools and steps to build a successful startup (or at least reduce the risk of failure). An introduction to the basics of Steve Blank's famous Customer Development process, where entrepreneurs "get out of the building" to gather massive amounts of customer and marketplace feedback, and then use that feedback to continuously iterate and evolve their startup business models, improving the chances of success at every step.
Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies (Coursera) - Explore how to identify and develop great ideas into great companies. Learn how to identify opportunities based on real customer needs. Develop solid business models. Create successful companies.
Startup courses at Edx - Learn how to start your new business venture with free online entrepreneurship and business development courses from MIT, IIMB and other top schools.
Three business fables by Patrick Lencioni that are powerful tools to be a better leader:
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni - Throughout the story, Lencioni reveals the five dysfunctions which go to the very heart of why teams even the best ones-often struggle. He outlines a powerful model and actionable steps that can be used to overcome these common hurdles and build a cohesive, effective team.
The Five Temptations of a CEO: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni - Patrick Lencioni delivers a provocative message. CEOs mainly have themselves to blame when things go wrong. If you're a CEO (or a manager for that matter), do you have the courage to face it? Doing so could change your future -- for the better.
Argonaut - Deploy apps and infrastructure on your cloud in minutes. Support for custom and third-party app deployments on Kubernetes and Lambda environments. Free forever startup tier allows unlimited apps and deployments for 5 environments and 2 users.
Datadog - Modern app monitoring and security for applications
Software Engineering and Development is expensive and delicate. Use Spurwing instead of reinventing the wheel when it comes to time management solutions. Spurwing is like Stripe but for appointment scheduling. This API makes it easy to add robust appointment booking and calendaring features to any application. The Spurwing API is a secure and feature-rich, accessible product for building custom solutions, product integrations, scheduling and calendaring widgets. You are only limited by your own imagination.
Reach out to ilya@spurwing.io for an intro call.
Self-Service SaaS: A Beginner’s Guide to Maximizing Growth - There aren’t many resources available that thoroughly outline the basics of managing self-service revenue at a SaaS company, but Chargebee does a nice job of it in this guide. By explaining the basics, providing a framework, including real-world examples from the SaaS space, and linking out to additional resources this asset is a solid place to start!
How to Start a Movement - 3 minute video drawing parallels to leadership and the importance of the people that follow the leader. Critical for a start-up to achieve and maintain alignment
Employee Engagement: The Wonder Drug For Customer Satisfaction - short article showing the high correlation between employee engagement and customer satisfaction. Satisfied customers and happy/engaged employees produce the most amazing start-ups - or any type of company for that matter.
