📶 Summer Reading: The best startup + venture content I read over the summer

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Good morning 👋

It’s the Tuesday after Labor Day which means your inboxes are about to become borderline-unusable with people looking to “catch up and pick your brain”.

I figured you have enough people asking you for something today, so I wanted to give you something to change it up.

I read a lot this summer. Here are 31 pieces of content that changed my thinking.

If there are any in particular that you liked, let me know in the comments.

Summer Reading

The best things I consumed since Memorial Day

🏰 The New New Moats: Jerry Chen from Greylock details why systems intelligence are the next defensible business model

🧠 Mental Models Megathread: 40 concepts to expand your mind

🤖 Automation Workflow Spreadsheet: A Google Sheet to help with your automation process

📈 Compounding Optimism: Morgan Housel gives reasons for hope in the future

🤝 Email Capture Swipe File: How some of the best newsletters capture emails and grow their audience

💀 VC Contagion: Is VC killing itself?

🌎 Why AI Will Save the World: Marc Andreessen gives hope for the future

🤷‍♂️ 99 Brutally Honest Takeaways About Venture Capital: Our observations from working every role in VC

🍽 Eat What You Kill: Great breakdown on VC and how we got to where we are

🔦 How to Find LPs: How to use tech to build your LP list

✅ Free Markets Provide the Best Feedback: Naval gives his two cents

🌐 The Platform Engineering Approach to VC: Why new funds don’t hire old-school investors

🤖 Can AI Replace VCs? Experiments to test that thesis

📈 ConvertKit’s MRR Journey: How the email hosting platform scaled their MRR from $1,500 to $100,000 in 12 months

🏢 Building a Venture Capital Fund of Funds Portfolio: Things to consider when building out your portfolio strategy

🛡 When to Dig a Moat: Packy McCormick details when it’s the right time for companies to think about their moat

📧 How the Best Newsletters Grew to 50k+ Subscribers: Peter Yang shares what has worked for the biggest newsletters

🧠 10 Years of Money Wisdom: Thread by Shaan Puri on what he’s learned

🔎 Smart Things Smart People Have Said: Morgan Housel’s collection of wisdom

⭐️ How to Do Great Work: Paul Graham’s latest essay

📶 SaaS Growth Articles: Top articles from a SaaS founders that have scaled

🎡 Creator Flywheels: How to create systems to win attention

📜 Pmarca Archives: Marc Andreessen’s best pieces of writing from years ago

📝 Silicon Valley Career Guide: Andy Rachleff’s timeless lessons on making a career in tech

💯 First 100 Users: How some of the best startups hacked their first 100 customers

🧠 12 Pricing Psychology Tips: Things to help you sell more stuff

🏃‍♀️ Nike’s Best Ads: Nine of the best ads Nike has ever produced

💬 How to Use Words to Get People to Do What You Want Them to Do: Sam Parr from The Hustle shares

🔥 The highest signal-per-word page on the internet: Useful things to think more clearly

🧲 $100M Leads: This is the best course I’ve ever taken, and I’ve consumed all the information twice

🧠 Charlie Munger wisdom: Notes from Poor Charlie’s Almanack

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Tweet of the Week

12 ideas from Don Valentine

For those that don’t know, Don Valentine is the Godfather of Silicon Valley. He died a few years back, but many VCs still consider him the best to ever do it.

P.S. Here’s another great piece on wisdom passed down from Don.

Thanks for reading this far and giving us a little bit of your attention this week.

Feel free to unsubscribe whenever this stops becoming valuable to you.

- Clay and Tyler