We’re excited to announce the launch of our first book: How to Start a Startup, which has been named one of the Top 5 Books of the Year by Product Hunt.
“Starting a successful startup is similar to having kids; it’s like a button you press and it changes your life irrevocably.” ~Paul Graham
As Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham noted in a lecture at Stanford University, starting a successful startup — like having kids — is life-changing.
It’s similar to raising children in another way, as well: it’s one of the most challenging yet rewarding things you can do.
No one can provide an exact roadmap, as the path traveled by each startup will have its own unique twists and turns. But, there are many common challenges that founders will face along the way.
With the How to Start a Startup book, our goal is to provide the ultimate Silicon Valley playbook — a reference guide on everything you’ll need to know in the earliest stages of your company.
You’ll learn from 25+ tech founders and investors like:
- Paul Graham, Y Combinator co-founder
- Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder
- Dustin Moskovitz, Facebook co-founder
- Aaron Levie, Box co-founder and CEO
- Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, co-founders of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm
- Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Founders Fund, early Facebook investor
- Ben Silbermann, Pinterest co-founder and CEO
These insiders will reveal the secrets to raising money, building products users love, hiring a great team, getting press coverage, attracting customers, scaling up, and more.
ThinkApps‘ mission is to build great products. From our headquarters in San Francisco, we’ve designed and developed apps used by millions of users and, in the process, have become deeply immersed in the world of startups.
When Y Combinator began its “How to Start a Startup” course at Stanford University, we quickly recognized that its lectures captured a lot of the key learnings from which early-stage founders would benefit.
Using the course material as a starting point, we decided to write an in-depth reference guide to creating a successful tech startup.
We shared an early version of the book with the Product Hunt community in November, and just a few weeks later, it was nominated as “Book of the Year” as part of the site’s inaugural Golden Kitty Awards.
After gathering feedback and making a few updates, we’re excited to officially launch How to Start a Startup to the public.
We hope that this book will help take the wisdom and energy of Silicon Valley and spread it worldwide, motivating and educating aspiring entrepreneurs and early-stage startup founders around the globe.
