Startup resources

This exists because a founder asking "how do I run a customer interview" does not need another explainer. They need the good ones that already exist, and to know which is which.

The nine pages

Within each page, sub-headings are the topic the resource was filed under in its source collection, so a long page stays navigable.

The grouping is ours. It follows what the collection actually contains rather than the ten sections of the stack, because a reading list and a knowledge base are different shapes and forcing one into the other helps nobody.

Where it came from

Two curated collections, merged and de-duplicated. Thirty-seven resources appear in both, which is a reasonable sign that the overlap is the material people actually rate.

The startup resource list assembled by Third Derivative, New Energy Nexus and RMI — three climate organisations who put it together for founders in their programmes. It is the reason this index has a climate section at all, and the reason some of the material leans towards hard tech and energy rather than software.

A university entrepreneurship knowledge base contributed the larger share: 42 topic pages across seven sections, each holding a curated reading list. Its resources appear here credited to their own publishers.

Credit goes to the publisher, not the collector. A Y Combinator essay is credited to Y Combinator, not to whoever put it on a list. Where a resource sits on a platform rather than a publication — a YouTube video, a Medium post, a LinkedIn article, a Google Doc — no publisher is named, because the author cannot be recovered from the link alone and guessing would credit the wrong person. Where the publisher is a personal site or a smaller outlet, the domain stands in for the name rather than a guess at what the organisation calls itself.

What was left out, and why

An index that quietly drops things is not one you can trust, so here is the accounting.

From the climate collection: 68 links pointed at two domains that no longer exist. playbooks.cyclotronroad.org held 45 and growth.500.co held 23. Neither resolves in DNS — not a redirect, not a paywall, no server. Cyclotron Road's playbooks have a living successor at Stanford Climate Ventures, but the paths do not map across, so recovering them is a title-by-title job rather than a rewrite.

Fifty entries in that same list were one Google Slides deck, one row per slide. It is one entry here.

Seven returned a hard 404 or 410, including, with some irony, the deal roadmapping template that Third Derivative wrote themselves.

From the university collection: three links on one dead domain, and eleven that pointed back at the source site's own files rather than at third-party material. Everything else survived, which says something about the difference between a list that is maintained and one that is not: 68 dead out of 179 in the older collection, 3 dead out of 609 in the newer one.

Every domain in this index resolves. Individual pages can still rot, and some sit behind bot protection that refuses automated checks while working perfectly for a person.

Using it

Take what is useful. These are other people's pages and the only thing this index adds is the sorting.

Two habits worth carrying over from the rest of this repository. A link is not a citation: if something here changes how you run your business, save the page into _inbox/ with the URL and the date so the claim can be traced later, the way getting your material in describes. And a reading list rots like any other document — the older of the two collections here lost more than a third of its links before anyone noticed.