startup-playbook-skilllisted

# Startup Playbook A stage-by-stage guide to building a startup whose goal is **hyper-growth and a large, durable company**. Distilled from YC's *How to Start a Startup* (Stanford CS183B): Altman, Graham, Thiel, Moskovitz, Cheung, Schultz, Hale, Chesky, the Collisons, Silbermann, Levie, Hoffman, Rabois, Horowitz, Shear, Rahman, Andreessen, Conway, Bosmeny, and others. > This advice is for growth startups. Much of it is wrong for a small business, a consultancy, or a big company. Warn the user if their goal isn't a large, fast-growing company. ## How to use this skill 1. **Locate the founder's stage.** Ask 2–4 quick questions if it isn't obvious: Do you have an idea you're compelled by? A cofounder? A shipped product? Users? Are they retaining? Revenue? Are you raising? Map the answer to a stage below. 2. **Work the *current* stage — don't skip ahead.** The single most common failure is doing a later stage's work early: optimizing growth before retention, hiring before you must, fundraising before traction, adding process before product/market fit. If the user asks about a later stage, answer, but flag what they should finish first. 3. **Load the matching reference file** in `references/` for depth before giving detailed advice. Each file is self-contained and cites the lecture(s) it comes from. 4. **Use the gates.** Each stage has an exit gate — a concrete signal that they're ready to advance. If the gate isn't met, the work is to meet it, not to move on. 5. **Give a reco