The ultimate reading list for founders (200 articles, speeches and more)

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Back to blog<br>The ultimate reading list for founders<br>July 27, 2026Correctify Team

Every great company begins with a way of seeing the world differently. Behind the biggest breakthroughs are years of accumulated ideas, from philosophy and science to business and technology. This collection gathers some of the most valuable thinking from founders, investors, and thinkers who have helped shape how we build, create, and solve problems.

Articles

Founder Mindset, Mental Models & Big Ideas

The days are long but the decades are short

Willingness to look stupid

Staring into the abyss as a core life skill

Impact, agency, and taste

The Most Precious Resource is Agency

On agency

The top idea in your mind

How to think for yourself

The four quadrants of conformism

The anatomy of determination

Crony Beliefs

The tyranny of ideas

Some things I believe by Nat Friedman

Some examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together

It's a torturous chaos until it isn't

Excuse me, is there a problem?

Searching for outliers

The Illusion of Knowledge

In Praise of Idleness

Startups are an act of desperation

Put Something Back

The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work

The Map Is Not the Territory

What is First Principles Thinking?

Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform

Theory of Constraints 101

Where Do Prices Come From?

I, Pencil

Fundraising, Metrics & Finance

16 Startup Metrics

Startup Metrics for Pirates

Fundraising Advice to Avoid

How Funding Rounds Differ

The Burn Multiple

All Revenue is Not Created Equal: The Keys to the 10X Revenue Club

Everything we measure at Equals

Preparing a board deck

Sequoia Capital Pitch Deck Template

Good VCs, bad VCs

Strategy, Competition & Growth

The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan

Tesla Master Plan, Part Deux

Tesla Master Plan Part 3

The Pmarca Guide to Startups

The idea maze

Defensibility & Competition

Competition Is for Losers

How startups beat incumbents

Two Powerful Mental Models: Network Effects and Critical Mass

The Case for the Fat Startup

Startup = Growth

How to start a startup

The Dumb Idea Paradox: Why great ideas often start out by sounding dumb

Five ways to build a $100 million business

1000 true fans

No Science, No Startups: The Innovation Engine We're Switching Off

Product & Product-Market Fit

Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager

Know your customers' "Job to Be Done"

We Don't Sell Saddles Here

Your target market isn't demographic

Willingness-to-pay: Creating permanent competitive advantage for the right reasons

If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good

Rarely say yes to feature requests

The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs

Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit - Lessons for Building Horizontal Products

How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product Market Fit

How we launch at Supabase

Leadership & Management

Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO

The second job of a startup CEO

Founder mode

How To Be Successful

Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey?

Stubborn Visionaries & Pigheaded Fools

Do things that don't scale

There are no small changes

Be Impatient

Principal–agent problem

Two-factor theory

Team, Culture & Communication

The 37signals Guide to Internal Communication

The 37signals Guide to Making Decisions

Group Chat: The Best Way to Totally Stress Out Your Team

How we make decisions at Coinbase

Netflix Culture

The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to "The Office"

On Nonviolent Communication

I can tolerate anything except the outgroup

Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think

Collaboration sucks

Hiring, Equity & People Ops

How to hire

What's going on here, with this human?

Omens of exceptional talent

Employee Equity

A No B.S. Guide to Startup Stock Option Grants

Carta Job offer letter

Benefits at Startups

Onboarding at Startups

Letter of Resignation

Engineering & Technical Leadership

The Startup CTO's Handbook

#define CTO

#define CTO OpenAI

What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?

Company Case Studies, Playbooks & Reflections

Spotify Scaling

Reflections on OpenAI

Reflections on Palantir

What I Miss About Working at Stripe

The Story of Shazam: The Startup Days

How Apple is organized for innovation

Every Jeff Bezos' Letter to Shareholders Since 1997

An "Owner's Manual" for Google's Shareholders

A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100

Uncanny Valley

Lifehacks

50 things we&rsquo;ve learned about building successful products

32 things we&rsquo;ve learned about building a startup that scales

Blogs

Paul Graham Essays

Sebastian Bensusan Blog

Steve Blank Blog

Tomasz Tunguz Blog

Patrick Collison Blog

Elad Gil Blog

Sam Altman Blog

Des Traynor Blog

Marc Randolph Blog

Steve Jobs...

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