DESIGN YOUR STARTUP WSE 1
List of recommended and optional readings.
Program resources
Reading schedule
One reading or video a week. Most take 20 minutes and were written by people who have already made the mistake you are about to, or funded a hundred who did. Read the optional readings if you wish to go deeper.
Kickoff Week
Recommended
Seven months in the writing, and widely called the best essay on ambition ever published. On curiosity, choosing what to work on, and why the people who do great work rarely planned it.
Optional
Thirteen ideas the world’s top startup incubator wants someone to build, each written by one of its partners. Updated quarterly, and the clearest signal anywhere on where the openings are right now.
Optional
Written for students specifically. Why almost everything that feels intuitive about startups is wrong, and why being young is both your biggest advantage and your biggest trap.
Week 1 · Discovery
Recommended
The Pebble founder’s framework for user interviews: three mistakes every founder makes, and five questions that work in any conversation. Watch this before your first interview.
Optional
Blank is the Stanford professor behind the classic startup method: talk to customers, test your assumptions, don’t build until you know. He still wants you to do that. In 2026, however, he argues that for AI products the key question is whether the AI can deliver the outcome the customer is paying for.
Optional
Four YC partners on why the next wave of software replaces the workflow rather than assisting it, and why there may be $300 billion companies in this category alone. If you have no idea yet: go find a boring, repetitive, expensive job in an industry you already know.
Week 2 · MVT
Recommended
Why Airbnb hand photographed apartments and Stripe installed customers laptop by laptop. The unglamorous manual work that earns your first users.
Optional
The Airbnb growth lead’s version: how to interpret what users tell you, and why the feedback that feels best is often the least useful.
Week 3 · MVT
Recommended
Short and sharp. What actually counts as product market fit, and why founders keep mistaking funding and headcount for progress.
Optional
Twenty years of pre PMF investing distilled into four levels, from nascent to extreme, with real benchmarks at each stage.
Week 4 · MVP
Recommended
Real launch stories from Airbnb, Twitch and Stripe; all of which shipped embarrassingly basic MVPs. How to cut your feature list down to what actually matters.
Optional
Monzo’s founder spent a month building with Claude Code, Cursor and Lovable after a decade of not writing code. A practical playbook for shipping fast with AI.
Optional
Tesla’s former AI director on why English is now the programming interface. He calls the models “people spirits”: brilliant in places, baffling in others, and always to be verified rather than trusted. Essential framing before you ship anything built on an API you do not control.
Week 5 · MVP
Recommended
Thirteen points on outlier results, built around compounding and a willingness to take asymmetric risk. Reads fast, sits with you for years.
Optional
How to get consequential work done when everything feels urgent. Useful in the week your build is behind.
Week 6 · Showcase and First Customers
Recommended
Tactical playbook for finding your first 10, 100 and 1,000 users, B2B or B2C, from the person who did it at Airbnb.
Optional
Brief, brutal and honest on the emotional reality of building when nothing is working yet. Read it the week the Showcase exposes what isn’t ready.
Week 7 · Selling and Demo Day
Recommended
How to frame a pitch to be remembered, not just understood. The clearest thing YC has published on investor communication.
Optional
Ten slides, no polish, $600K raised. Proof that clarity beats design.
Week 8 · GTM
Recommended
Why nearly every founder prices too low, and how to charge more without losing the customer.
Optional
Why AI products run at 50–60% gross margins where software ran at 90%, and why advice-giving copilots struggle to justify their price. The 2026 sequel to Hale.
Optional
The tenth edition, now covering ten markets, tracking a regional digital economy passing $300 billion in GMV. A credible market-sizing source for the Southeast Asian region. Read the summary; download the full report and use only what you need.
Week 9 · GTM
Recommended
One question every founder should be able to answer about their own venture. Short, and the right thing to carry into the next four weeks of self directed work.
Optional
Buyers now build their shortlist inside a language model before they visit a single website. If your brand does not surface in that first list, you never reach the stage where your product gets evaluated. What discovery looks like when the customer never runs a search.
Week 10 · GTM
Recommended
The hardest conversation Seibel has with founders, and the unforgiving question behind it.
Week 11 · GTM
Recommended
Why fast decisions usually beat right decisions, and how to build speed into how you work rather than how hard you push.
Week 12 · Making Progress
Recommended
The numbers every founder was told to recite from memory before walking into an investor meeting.
Optional
The same firm, ten years later, arguing that one of those numbers matters far less than everyone thinks. Read the two against each other.
Week 15 · Making Progress
Recommended
One number that tells you whether your venture is efficient or simply consuming capital, with benchmarks for each stage.
Optional
Indonesia’s aquaculture unicorn, backed by SoftBank and Temasek, reported $752 million in revenue against an actual $157 million. The founder admitted falsifying the accounts from 2018 and was sentenced to nine years. Read it against the metrics list: those are the numbers you will be asked to recite, and this is what happens when you invent them.
Week 16 · Making Progress
Recommended
YC’s end to end guide to seed mechanics: convertible notes, SAFEs, valuations, the lot. Prepares you for Week 17.
Optional
YC’s CFO walks through how different funding structures actually affect your equity and cap table.
Week 17 · Continue or Kill
Recommended
HBS research on the six recurring patterns behind startup failure, and how to spot them in your own venture before it’s too late.
Optional
How much to raise, from whom, and what milestones make the next round possible.
Week 18 · The Close
Recommended
Seventeen short reflections after a decade running YC and OpenAI. A five minute read, and the right note to end on.
Optional
The famous late Harvard Business School professor turns his strategy frameworks on the only question that outlasts the venture: what you are building all of this for.
Reference Library
Where to go when you’re stuck. Free, searchable, organised by stage; most of this term’s readings live here.