On leadership, team, culture
- “The most overrated thing in Entrepreneurship” – Bill Aulet, University of Strathclyde Business School, 2015
- “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” – Bill Aulet, TechCrunch, 2014
- “A Note on Team Process” – Linda Hill and Maria Farkas, Harvard Business review, 2001
- Hubspot has open-sourced their Culture Code that explains how they create a “lovable company”.
- Zappos shares their Culture Book which contains unedited submissions from their own employees.
On primary market research
- “Our dangerous obsession with the MVP” – Bill Aulet, – TechCrunch, 2014
- Talking to Humans: Success Starts with Understanding Your Customer” – free PDF download, also on Amazon – Giff Constable, 2014
- A Primer on Primary Market Research – Slideshare – Elaine Chen, 2015
- 3 Go-to techniques for Primary Market Research – Elaine Chen, Huffington Post, 2016
- Scaling Customer Development: Crowdsourcing The Research – Elaine Chen, Huffington Post, 2016
- “How startups can run better Landing Page Tests” – Elaine Chen, Xconomy, 2016
On design thinking
- IDEO’s 3-part video series on the shopping cart – first aired on July 1999
Part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkHOxyafGpE
Part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVZ8pmkg1do
Part 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyugyrCQTuw
On product development
- Ben Einstein, Founding Partner of Bolt (a hardware startup investor and accelerator), has written a terrific four-part post that outline what you need to know to build a hardware business.
- “Bringing a Hardware Product to Market: Navigating the Wild Ride from Concept to Mass Production” – free PDF download, also on Amazon – Elaine Chen, 2015
- “Agile primer for Cowboys and Hardware Folks” – Elaine Chen, ConceptSpring, 2014.
On Marketing
- Jay Acunzo, VP Platform at NextView Ventures, has a great blog that covers content marketing, growth hacking and more.
On business models
- “For Entrepreneurs: 2015 SaaS Survey Infographic” – David Skok, http://forentrepreneurs.com, 2015
- “The 3 Business Models That Matter for Connected Hardware Startups” – Ben Einstein, 2015
On Human Resources
- In the spirit of radical transparency, Bufferapp publishes the formula they use to calculate pay – and list the actual amounts for key employees.
- BufferApp also shares their formula for granting employee stock options.
- For senior executives, Ernst and Young publishes an annual executive compensation study. The 2013 basic results may be found here. The up to date basic version may be downloaded here, or you can purchase the full version.
- Ackwire has a table of self-reported stock percentages for startup employees.
- Other common sources of compensation data include the annual Park Square / Wilmer Hale/Ernst and Young Compensation Study for Technology and Life Sciences, Salary.com and crowdsourced data such as glassdoor.com.
On Pitching
- Guy Kawasaki has a great infographic that provides a 10-slide budget for a good pitch deck.
- LearnLaunch provides a more flexible guideline for a good pitch deck.
On Accelerators
- “Avoid Stagnation: Acceleration Trumps Incubation” – Bill Aulet, TechCrunch, 2013
- “Some of the Best Academic Accelerators in the US” – Trish Cotter, 2016
- “Accelerator Programs in the US” – Trish Cotter, 2016
- “Accelerator Programs: How They Stack Up” – Trish Cotter, 2016
On Corporate Entrepreneurship
- “Innovation Factory: How Parker Hannifin Pumps Out Breakthrough Products” – Forbes interview with Bill on Parker Hannifin / Indego
- “How GE Applies Lean Startup Practices” – Brad Power, Harvard Business Review, 2014
- “How to Transform a Traditional Giant into a Digital One” – Ram Charan, Harvard Business Review, 2016
- “How a Big Company can Run Fast, Like A Startup” – Elaine Chen, Xconomy 2015
- “Starting up innovation: How your company can empower intrapreneurs” – Elaine Chen, TechBeacon, 2014
- “Building Obama’s lean startup in America’s biggest bureaucracy” – Elaine Chen, TechBeacon, 2015
- “How a 47-year-old company embraced Lean Startup” – Elaine Chen, TechBeacon, 2015