Foundations
Start here — what startups are and how they work
Understand the startup world from the ground up: what startups are, how they differ from regular businesses, the stages of growth, and the mental models every founder needs before writing a single line of code.
A one-page visual template that maps how a company creates, delivers, and captures value across nine building blocks.
B2B and B2C startups play completely different games. Here's how to choose the model that fits your market, your skills, and your capital plan.
50% of founders experience mental health conditions. Here's why founder burnout is structural — and the specific tools that actually help.
The five stages of startup growth explained — from ideation to scale — with key milestones, exit criteria, and common failure modes for each phase.
Four legal decisions — incorporation, co-founder equity, IP assignment, and the 83(b) election — can make or break your company. Get them right early.
A startup and a small business are fundamentally different organizations with different goals, capital, and exit logic. Here's the real difference.
Startups are designed to search for a repeatable, scalable business model under extreme uncertainty — they are not just small versions of large companies.
Before scaling, only one thing matters: product-market fit. Here's why it's the central challenge of early-stage startups and what it actually takes to find it.
A competitive moat is a durable advantage that protects a startup's market position from competitors. Network effects and switching costs are the strongest.
The flywheel effect describes how consistent momentum across linked business activities creates compounding growth with no single breakthrough moment.
Porter's Five Forces is a framework for analyzing competitive intensity in any industry across five structural forces that shape profitability.
A two-sided marketplace connects two distinct user groups who each provide value to the other, powered by cross-side network effects.