[OSL]

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The world of tech and startups is changing very rapidly.

Here are some resources that I've found particularly useful/helpful as of late.

Airbnb's First Pitch Deck

This is exactly what it sounds like.

Zero to One

Peter Thiel's new book. A quick read at about 200 pages. Great for inspirational content.

How to Design a Billion Dollar Company

This is an article that examines some of the transactional platform-based startups that have emerged in the past few years, how they scaled, and how they reached the valuations they did.

How to Build a Billion Dollar App

This book is written by one of the founders of taxi-hailing app "Hailo" - he analyzes some of the runaway success stories in the mobile app startup space in the past 5 years or so, such as Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, Airbnb, etc - very methodical and provides actionable advice and resources. Very interesting.

The Lean Launchpad Course on Udacity, by Steve Blank

This is a video course taught by silicon valley legend Steve Blank. It provides a framework based on the Lean Startup principles to get you to find your product market fit within your target demographic as soon as possible while spending as few resources as necessary.


How to Start a Startup - Dustin Moskovitz and Sam Altman

Y combinator's Sam Altman and Facebook's Dustin Moskovitz talk about startup creation fundamentals.


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[Cattle Rustler]

Droppin' gold like always, nice to see you posting again bro!

[pitt]

It's interesting how I was thinking of your posts last night and how I saw this book last night ''how to build a billion dollar app'' on my amazon recommendation list. I first thought, this must be someone trying to make a quick buck with bullshit advice, I completely ignored the book. Now that I see you recommending it, I am thinking to take a look at it soon.

Good to see you here again.

[OSL]

Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram, gives the talk "From Stanford to Startup" which discusses his journey from meeting his cofounder in Palo Alto all the way up to the Facebook acquisition.

These "Stanford Ecorner" videos are also available in podcast format in the iTunes store. Highly recommended.




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[OSL]

Drew Houston, founder of Dropbox, talks about the humbler and less glamorous side of growing startups that we don't hear about in the media.

This is definitely one of my favorite talks. Most startup discussions focus on really high level ideas and it was encouraging to see that Y combinator's finest also had no idea how to handle incorporation and other logistical/administrative obstacles in the early days.


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[OSL]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk7TabCi...Rh&index=2

This is the "Small Empires" series, hosted by Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian.

This series interviews prominent startups in NYC to give us a sense of what the growth story was like. You should actually hit the link because it goes to a playlist that contains all of the "Small Empires" episodes.

My favorites were Squarespace and Rap Genius.


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[OSL]

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I can't embed this video in here but you should check out Tech Stars:

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/75400336-...ode-1.html

Tech Stars is New York's answer to Y Combinator. It's arguably the "number two" startup incubator in the US/World.

Full list of episodes and clips here:

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/tech-stars/2/

This is filmed in reality TV show format and is actually quite annoying but an interesting look into what this particular incubator is like.



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[OSL]

Yelp COO Geoff Donaker discusses what it was like to build Yelp, with a particular focus on talent management and what it was like, logistically and psychologically, to go through the IPO process.



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[OSL]

Jack Ma is probably more of a business idol to me now than any other tech titans. The fact that he just had the largest IPO of all time doesn't hurt.

This is an incredible speech.

You DEFINITELY should purchase and watch this documentary about the rise of Alibaba "Crocodile in the Yangtze"

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/crocodileintheyangtze

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[OSL]

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Bloomberg Game Changers - Elon Musk

This is the best one in the series, IMO.


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