Startup Tools: Aggregated List of Recommended Tools (6/18)

Build something users love, and spend less than you make.

Above all, understand your users.

The market is a lot more discerning than any employer.

To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage.

Startup founders seem to be working in a way that's more natural for humans.

All the reasons you aren't doing it, and why most (but not all) should be ignored.

It's the people that matter.

Starting a startup could well become as popular as grad school.

The initial idea is not a blueprint, but a question.

A hacker who has learned what to make, and not just how to make, is extraordinarily powerful.

You have to keep trying new things.

If you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed.

Some things about startups are kind of counterintuitive.

Venture funding works like gears.

Hackers don't know how little they know about this strange world.

Explain what you're doing and why users will want it.

You should always feel richer after trading equity.

Founders have to treat raising money as a dangerous process.

Why not let the founders have that first million, or at least half million?

You may not believe it, but I promise you, Microsoft is scared of you.

Startups run on morale.

There may be more pain in your own company, but it won't hurt as much.

Even a small increase in the rate at which good ideas win would be a momentous change.

The economy of the future will be a fluid network of smaller, independent units.

The group that would eventually make Santa Clara, CA, "Silicon Valley."

Today companies are starting small and lean and staying that way.

Many of the current crop of Internet start-ups have gone from zero to 60 on a shoestring.

Within a few weeks of Allen's arrival, I found people telling me that I had no power at all.

Cases where trade secrets and/or patents are both protectable and essential are rare.

Great products almost always come from someone scratching their own itch.

I think it is much better to think of a venture capital deal as a loan plus an option.

How does a guy in Bentonville, Arkansas with no money blow right by Sears, Roebuck?

What a top VC firm looks for, and the format they want to see it in.

Your presentation is one of the first steps to articulating your idea.

Y Combinator's open-source simple agreement for future equity.

Y Combinator's open-source Series AA Equity Financing Documents.