Some of the best external resources for students

If you go through all of this you’ll encounter some conflicting points of view. That’s good. The goal shouldn’t be to divine truth from advice, but instead, consume it and think about why it might be true and the conditions under which it’s most likely to be true. Ultimately you’re responsible for the actions you take, but the advice of others who have done it is a reasonable place to start. There’s lots of other great stuff that’s not linked here, but we’ll continue to add to this over time, especially content that’s great for students.
The links are tagged as articles 📝, videos 📹, or lists ✔️.
There are also many books worth recommending as well, but there are two I’m going with as “getting started” books for founders:
What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 by Tina Seelig
The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
The first one is optional, but the second one I think is too valuable for a startup founder to pass up.
If you want more book recommendations, there are plenty more.

A Student’s Guide to Startups📝
Paul Graham

An essay on the upsides and downsides of starting a startup as a founder right out of college. It’s originally from 2005 but almost entirely relevant today.

 

How to Start a Startup📹
Sam Altman and Dustin Moskovitz

A good primer on starting a startup and the target audience was students at Stanford so while some things are different, the content should be relevant.

Ideas for Startups📝
Paul Graham

How to find Ideas (kind of), it’s worth a start to think about how to narrow down the space from everything and why what seems like a toy could still be interesting.

 

The Startup Library✔️
Y Combinator

A great library of content from YC. Many of the other videos and articles linked will be from here. I would especially make sure to read through YC’s Essential Startup Advice and the articles linked there.

YC’s Essential Startup Advice📝✔️
Y Combinator

Yes, this is in the notes to the link to The Startup Library but it also deserves its own link.

 

How to Talk To Users📹
Eric Migicovsky

This is a good video that goes over some of the key takeaways from The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. But you should definitely read that book in its entirety.

The Biggest Mistakes First-Time Founders Make
Michael Seibel

These mistakes definitely highlight that a lot of long-term optimization is not monetary, but keeping motivation long enough to build something meaningful.

 

Aleem Mawani on Building Streak
Indie Hackers Podcast

A nuanced discussion on finding problems to solve, bootstrapping vs venture, and other tradeoffs and insights.

Entrepreneurship Resources for Caltech

This is a good collection of resources and content, some of which are Caltech / Pasadena specific.

 

The Idea Maze
Chris Dixon

A primer on how “ideas” as they are popularly understood more practically get developed over time. Explores some of the space between “good ideas” and “ideas don’t matter”.

Do Things That Don’t Scale
Paul Graham

This extremely famous article covers some of the techniques that work great for startups to get initial customers and product feedback.

 

How to Evaluate Startup Ideas
Kevin Hale

A good framework for trying to evaluate your own startup ideas and what you would need to know to evaluate them.