Chapters

How to Get Startup Ideas

Good ideas often disguise themselves as bad ones. Learn to notice organic problems, spot schleps, and stress-test an idea before you fall in love with it.

Do Things That Don't Scale

Nearly every successful startup starts with manual, unscalable, even embarrassing effort. Recruit users by hand, overdeliver, and treat the inefficiency as strategy — not a phase to rush past.

Understand Your Users

The single highest-leverage skill in a startup is understanding your users — what they actually do, not what they say, and not what you assume.

Startup = Growth

A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Growth rate, not size or profitability, is the variable that defines whether you're actually running a startup.

Default Alive, Ramen Profitable

Two numbers decide whether you live or die: your burn rate and your growth rate. Know which one you are — default alive or default dead — before you need to know it.

Mistakes That Kill Startups

PG's list of the eighteen mistakes that kill startups reads less like trivia and more like a pattern-matched autopsy report. Most failures are one of these, in combination.

How to Raise Money

Fundraising is a distinct skill from building a company, with its own rules, biases, and traps. Learn the game before you're forced to play it under pressure.

Founder Psychology

Founders fail for psychological reasons as often as strategic ones — quitting too early, being needlessly harsh, or never starting at all out of manufactured excuses. This chapter is about the mind you need before the startup begins.