Playbook
Advanced~220m total

CEO & Founder Leadership

The leadership playbook for tech founders, CTOs and CEOs — operating cadence, decision-making, hiring executives, fundraising narrative, board management, and founder mode.

For: Founders, CEOs, CTOs, engineering leaders stepping up

Advanced38 min

Engineering Leadership Beyond the Code: A Field Manual for Tech Founders, CTOs and CEOs

What changes when great engineers start leading teams, companies and capital. A synthesis of the canonical leadership, management and business literature — Drucker, Grove, Christensen, Horowitz, Doerr, Camille Fournier, Will Larson, Lara Hogan, Patty McCord and more — turned into frameworks, checklists and decisions you can actually run on Monday.

Advanced16 min

The CEO Operating System: Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly

What founder-CEOs actually do with their week. A field-tested cadence drawn from Andy Grove, Fred Wilson, Keith Rabois, Claire Hughes Johnson and the EOS / Scaling Up playbooks — turned into a calendar you can copy.

Advanced18 min

Hiring Executives: The Founder's Playbook

A wrong VP hire costs founders 12–24 months. A right one compounds for a decade. The full process — when to hire, how to write the role, source, interview, reference, close, and onboard — drawn from Horowitz, Rabois, Botha and Reid Hoffman.

Advanced17 min

The Fundraising Narrative: Seed to Series B

Founders raise on story before metrics. A complete guide to the narrative arc, the deck, the metrics investors actually look at by stage, process design, and term sheets — synthesized from Sequoia, YC, a16z, First Round and Bessemer.

Advanced14 min

Board Management for Founders

Boards amplify what you bring. How to compose your board, run a quarterly meeting that creates leverage instead of theatre, manage your investors between meetings, and use independents to get truth — built on Brad Feld, Reid Hoffman and Sequoia's playbooks.

Advanced12 min

Founder Mode vs. Manager Mode: When to Stay Deep, When to Delegate

Brian Chesky's 2024 'Founder Mode' essay landed because the standard 'hire good people and get out of their way' advice fails for founders. A practical synthesis: what to stay deep on, what to fully delegate, and the failure modes of both extremes.