All of our Starting Up articles

Starting Up

You’re Not Ready for a Head of Growth: Run This Founder-Led Growth Playbook Instead

Founders are responsible for figuring out how their business is going to grow. Use these tactics — specifically designed for founders — to uncover your most impactful growth levers.

Starting Up

Building a Deep Tech Company? Most Startup Advice Doesn’t Apply — Read This Instead

Learn from Loyal founder Celine Halioua’s rigorous approach to milestone-based planning, fundraising and multi-product strategy for deep tech companies.

Starting Up

How I Spent 17,784 Hours in 5 Years as a Startup Founder

Sam Corcos, co-founder & CEO of Levels, shares a detailed look into exactly how he spent 5 years building the company, with reflections on what changed in the transition from very early-stage to scale up.

Starting Up

The GTM Inflection Points That Powered Clay to a $1B+ Valuation

How do you create a go-to-market machine that’s able to turbocharge (and then sustain) revenue growth? Clay co-founder Varun Anand shares the biggest lessons from the company's success, with growth advice for both product-led and sales-led startups.

Starting Up

25 Hard Questions Every Founder Should Ask Themselves

Startup founders share their go-to questions for taking a pulse check on everything from product strategy to co-founder relationships to their own decision making.

Starting Up

The Uncomfortable Truth: A 3X Founder's Guide to Intellectual Honesty

Crossbeam CEO and co-founder Bob Moore shares his tools for quashing biases in pursuit of the truth at every stage of company building.

Starting Up

The Saboteurs That Threaten Innovation — And How to Handle Them

Steve Blank (of Lean Startup and Four Steps to the Epiphany fame) unpacks why innovators and founders should expect fierce battles from incumbents on the path to disruption.

Finding a startup idea

How to Test A Business Idea: Essential Tools for Validating Before You Launch

If you're an entrepreneur who needs to learn how to validate business ideas effectively, these expert strategies help your startup concept hit the mark.

Starting Up

Non-Obvious Signs of Early Startup Traction — And How to Spot Them

We gathered the most surprising anecdotes from seasoned founders about when things clicked into place.

Starting Up

Here’s What You Can Really Expect When Pitching Your Seed-Stage Startup at a VC Partner Meeting

There isn't much advice to guide founders on navigating their first VC partner meeting. So First Round Partner and former founder Liz Wessel shares her playbook for seed-stage startups tackling one of fundraising's most opaque processes

Starting Up

Starting an Analytics Org From Scratch — Lessons From a Decade at DoorDash

DoorDash VP Jessica Lachs has grown the company’s analytics team from a band of scrappy generalists to a highly specialized 300-person org. Here, she spells out how founders can lay the groundwork for an analytics function at their startup and pick the right first hires for the team.

Starting Up

The Not So Cookie-Cutter Approach to Company Building — 8 Lessons from Zapier

Wade Foster, founder and CEO of Zapier, shares his contrarian takes on building a billion-dollar company — from fundraising advice, go-to-market strategy, and hiring mistakes.