Ryan Hoover

How venture capital works, from fund economics to term sheets, for founders.

Customer development: how startups find customers before building the full product.

Build, measure, learn: test what customers want with small experiments.

Venture financing term by term, for founders negotiating their first rounds.

Management as production: a manager's output is the output of the team they lead.

Why well-run firms lose to cheaper, worse products that enter at the market's bottom.

Eight CEOs who beat the market by allocating capital, not by running operations.

The brain science that matters to designers and how it shapes people's daily use.

Why people mistake luck for skill, above all in markets.

From the Harvard Negotiation Project, this examines the negotiations we avoid: performance reviews, relationship ruptures, disagreements about fault. The three-conversation model (what happened, feelings, identity) explains why these go wrong and provides a structure for having them anyway.

Alfred Adler's psychology taught through five nights of dialogue.

A four-step model for habit-forming products: trigger, action, reward, investment.

Game design principles drawn from psychology, with 100+ sets of questions to ask.

An operating manual for founders scaling from a few people to a few hundred.

Distraction comes from escaping discomfort, not technology, and how to manage it.

You are the awareness watching your thoughts and feelings, not those thoughts.