Martin in Reading Lists

Startups, a Reading List

Hey there, Martin here!
As you can imagine we love reading and recommending great stories. Lately I discovered that I’m not only into reading a single story but that I like to dive deeper into a specific topic and read as much as I can about it. This results in a collection of great articles regarding my chosen topic. So why not share these articles as a dedicated reading list so that anybody interested in the topic could benefit from my curation?

The last few days I read a lot about startups, mainly because we are one and I wanted to see if there is something we are missing, what we should be aware of or just what others think of young companies like us. So here we go:

A Student's Guide to Startups

»If you start a startup soon after college, you'll be a young founder by present standards, so you should know what the relative advantages of young founders are. They're not what you might think. As a young founder your strengths are: stamina, poverty, rootlessness, colleagues, and ignorance.«

Martin Wolf recommended this article from paulgraham.com

A Startup Education

»At most startups, you will have unlimited opportunities to push your skills as far as you can. With ambitious plans and small teams, you can often set the direction of the design, development, support, or marketing of the product. You will have the opportunity to decide which problems to solve and how to solve them.«

Martin Wolf recommended this article from brianbailey.me

What the big boys could learn from the startups

»But if there’s one thing that separates startups from established companies, at least in my experience, it’s customer service, personal attention and real time response.«

Martin Wolf recommended this article from edwardboches.com

Why Can’t Startups Find Designers?

»As a sign of this trend, there’s even a fund that exclusively backs startups founded by designers. The result is that design skills are in demand now more than ever, and that it’s becoming harder and harder for tech companies to hire good designers, especially in the Bay Area.«

Martin Wolf recommended this article from thenextweb.com

Compassion

»In a startup, things crop up all the time that scream for your attention. And you have to respond – whether it’s a bug on production, or a sudden re-prioritization of features. You keep juggling no matter how many balls are hurled at you.«

Martin Wolf recommended this article from blog.derrickko.com

First-Time Startup Entrepreneurs: Stop Fucking Around

»We are in an amazing time right now — perhaps the perfect time to build companies. And it pains me to see first-time entrepreneurs flush away this huge opportunity getting caught in the hype of how cool it is to do a startup, going to endless meetups and spending entirely too much time on Maserati problems when they’re not busy cargo cult coding.«

Martin Wolf recommended this article from techcrunch.com

What's love got to do with it? For startups, everything

»Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it’s rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you’ll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you’re in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you’re practically there.«

Martin Wolf recommended this article from gigaom.com