20. Learn From Builders, but Filter Hard

You can get an extraordinary startup education for free. The problem is filtering it. This is the stack to start with.

Start here

• Y Combinator Startup School. Free. About seven weeks at one to two hours a week. Covers MVPs, getting users, funding and leading a team, and includes co-founder matching.
• The YC Library and Paul Graham's essays. Read "Do Things That Don't Scale" first.

How founders and investors think

• Jason Calacanis and LAUNCH: the This Week in Startups podcast, the LAUNCH Accelerator, and Founder University, a 12-week pre-accelerator for going from idea to first product. Listen to learn how the game works, not to join a religion.
• First Round Review, a16z and NFX for depth on product, hiring, sales, marketplaces and network effects.

What is launching and what is getting funded

• Product Hunt. Study names, positioning, screenshots, pricing, comments, and what gets ignored.
• TechCrunch. Useful for seeing which markets and companies are emerging. Funding is not proof that a business is good. A company raising $30 million means investors gave it $30 million. Its Startup Battlefield competition takes no fees or equity and pays a $100,000 equity-free prize.
• Hacker News, especially Show HN and Ask HN. The comments can be brutal. Good.

If you would rather be profitable than funded

• Indie Hackers for independent software and internet businesses.
• Stripe Atlas guides on running an internet business.
• Lenny's Newsletter for product and growth, and SaaStr for selling software to businesses.

Books worth the hours

• The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. How to run the customer conversations in section 2.
• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries and Zero to One by Peter Thiel. Read both. They disagree.
• The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, if you are opening a local business.

Florida

• Lake Wales Startups and Catapult Lakeland first.
• Then Tampa Bay Wave (accelerators with no fees and no equity), Embarc Collective in Tampa, StarterStudio in Orlando, UF Innovate Accelerate in Gainesville, and eMerge Americas in Miami.

Official sources, for anything with a fee or a deadline

• The City of Lake Wales, the Polk County Tax Collector, Sunbiz, the IRS, the Florida Department of Revenue, and the state agency that licenses your trade. Not a blog. Not this guide either, a year from now.

You do not need to read all of this every day. The objective is not consuming startup content. The objective is judgment.