Does startup advice follow the market?
35 widely read essays, books and investor memos, each placed on the month-end record from Jan 31, 2012 to Sep 30, 2026. Advice on hiring, raising and spending is tagged Expand or Conserve, and method advice is tagged Craft. The test is whether the capital texts track the conditions while the craft texts do not. A reading list, not evidence for the guidance.
What the record shows
Sunny months make up 59% of the record, and Freezing or Stormy months 37%. Of the 4 texts tagged Expand, 3 came out in a Sunny month (75%). Of the 7 tagged Conserve, 5 came out in a Freezing or Stormy month (71%). Craft texts came out 55% in Sunny months and 40% in Freezing or Stormy ones, close to the months themselves. On this sample, capital advice leans with the conditions and craft advice does not. With 11 capital texts, adding or removing one text moves a share by 14 to 25 points.
- Expand. Invest, grow, hire or move faster.
- Conserve. Focus, cut, extend runway, run leaner or reach profitability.
- Craft. Method advice that sets no direction for money or headcount.
| Text | Month | Advice | Conditions | Funding pressure | Risk appetite |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| How To Manufacture Desire | Mar 2012 | Craft | Sunny | 0 | 100 |
| Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager | Jun 2012 | Craft | Sunny | 0 | 94 |
| Startup = Growth | Sep 2012 | Expand | Sunny | 0 | 97 |
| Product strategy means saying no | Jul 2013 | Craft | Sunny | 0 | 100 |
| The Mom Test | Sep 2013 | Craft | Sunny | 0 | 100 |
| The Build Trap | Aug 2014 | Craft | Sunny | 0 | 100 |
| The SaaS Adventure | Feb 2015 | Expand | Sunny | 0 | 95 |
| The Alternative to Roadmaps | Sep 2015 | Craft | Sunny | 0 | 55 |
| Default Alive or Default Dead? | Oct 2015 | Conserve | Sunny | 0 | 96 |
| MVPM: Minimum Viable Product Manager | Apr 2016 | Craft | Sunny | 0 | 82 |
| On the Road to Recap | Apr 2016 | Conserve | Sunny | 0 | 82 |
| Know Your Customers' “Jobs to Be Done” | Sep 2016 | Craft | Sunny | 0 | 73 |
| Why Product Market Fit Isn't Enough | Jun 2017 | Craft | Sunny | 0 | 77 |
| Blitzscaling | Oct 2018 | Expand | Sunny | 0 | 49 |
| How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit | Nov 2018 | Craft | Sunny | 0 | 48 |
| The Making of a Manager | Mar 2019 | Craft | Stormy | 0 | 46 |
| Product-Led Growth | May 2019 | Craft | Stormy | 0 | 48 |
| Steps to success: the importance of a clear career path for product managers | Jun 2019 | Craft | Stormy | 0 | 50 |
| Shape Up | Jul 2019 | Craft | Stormy | 0 | 45 |
| How to kickstart and scale a marketplace business | Nov 2019 | Craft | Stormy | 0 | 47 |
| Product Strategy – Overview | Feb 2020 | Craft | Stormy | 0 | 31 |
| Coronavirus: The Black Swan of 2020 | Mar 2020 | Conserve | Stormy | 2 | 39 |
| It's Time to Build | Apr 2020 | Expand | Stormy | 2 | 38 |
| The Burn Multiple | Apr 2020 | Conserve | Stormy | 2 | 38 |
| Empowered | Dec 2020 | Craft | Stormy | 0 | 55 |
| Continuous Discovery Habits | May 2021 | Craft | Sunny | 0 | 98 |
| Adapting to Endure | May 2022 | Conserve | Stormy | 26 | 44 |
| The Upside of a Downturn | May 2022 | Conserve | Stormy | 26 | 44 |
| Update on Meta's Year of Efficiency | Mar 2023 | Conserve | Freezing | 100 | 17 |
| The Product Momentum Gap | Oct 2023 | Craft | Freezing | 100 | 32 |
| The AI Product Playbook | Sep 2025 | Craft | Cloudy | 90 | 62 |
| Conditions | Months | Expand | Conserve | Craft |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Freezing | 32 (18%) | 0 (0%) | 1 (14%) | 1 (5%) |
| Cloudy | 8 (5%) | 0 (0%) | 0 (0%) | 1 (5%) |
| Stormy | 33 (19%) | 1 (25%) | 4 (57%) | 7 (35%) |
| Sunny | 104 (59%) | 3 (75%) | 2 (29%) | 11 (55%) |
| On the record | 177 | 4 | 7 | 20 |
4 texts predate the record and are left out of the shares.
How soon after the record moved
- Since the latest change in conditions: a median of 10.5 months, ranging from 2 to 16 months, across 6 of the 11 capital texts; the other 5 came out before the record's first change.
- Since risk appetite last crossed 50: a median of 3 months, ranging from 2 to 13 months, across 7 of the 11 capital texts; the other 4 came out before its first crossing.
- Since funding pressure last crossed 70: 8 months, for the one capital text published after a crossing; the other 10 came out before its first crossing.
Funding pressure or risk appetite
- Risk appetite alone matches 7 of the 11: above 50 for 2 of 4 Expand texts, and at 50 or below for 5 of 7 Conserve texts.
- Funding pressure alone matches 5: at 70 or below for 4 of 4 Expand texts, and above 70 for 1 of 7 Conserve texts.
- For scale, funding pressure was at 70 or below in 76% of all months, and risk appetite above 50 in 67%.
- Risk appetite lines up better, on 11 texts. That is too few to rank the two scores.
Every post, not the famous ones
407 posts about money addressed to founders, from 10 investors' archives, each labelled by a rule written down before any was read.
Share of posts prescribing expansion and conservation each quarter, 2012 Q1 to 2026 Q3, with funding pressure on the same dates. The table below has every value.
| Quarter | Expand | Conserve | Posts | Funding pressure |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 Q1 | – | – | 2 | 0 |
| 2012 Q2 | – | – | 1 | 0 |
| 2012 Q3 | – | – | 2 | 0 |
| 2012 Q4 | 0% | 67% | 4 | 0 |
| 2013 Q1 | 67% | 17% | 5 | 0 |
| 2013 Q2 | 0% | 50% | 5 | 0 |
| 2013 Q3 | 50% | 0% | 4 | 0 |
| 2013 Q4 | 50% | 8% | 7 | 0 |
| 2014 Q1 | 57% | 37% | 12 | 0 |
| 2014 Q2 | 50% | 42% | 8 | 0 |
| 2014 Q3 | 33% | 42% | 5 | 0 |
| 2014 Q4 | 25% | 55% | 11 | 0 |
| 2015 Q1 | 24% | 56% | 16 | 0 |
| 2015 Q2 | 20% | 80% | 8 | 0 |
| 2015 Q3 | 22% | 33% | 8 | 0 |
| 2015 Q4 | 33% | 50% | 8 | 0 |
| 2016 Q1 | 40% | 36% | 15 | 0 |
| 2016 Q2 | 8% | 58% | 13 | 0 |
| 2016 Q3 | 8% | 33% | 10 | 0 |
| 2016 Q4 | 38% | 25% | 5 | 0 |
| 2017 Q1 | 8% | 57% | 11 | 0 |
| 2017 Q2 | 0% | 67% | 7 | 0 |
| 2017 Q3 | 20% | 39% | 10 | 0 |
| 2017 Q4 | 17% | 33% | 5 | 0 |
| 2018 Q1 | 25% | 25% | 4 | 2 |
| 2018 Q2 | 50% | 25% | 4 | 0 |
| 2018 Q3 | 33% | 50% | 4 | 0 |
| 2018 Q4 | 33% | 50% | 5 | 0 |
| 2019 Q1 | 13% | 31% | 7 | 0 |
| 2019 Q2 | 58% | 25% | 9 | 0 |
| 2019 Q3 | 20% | 40% | 9 | 0 |
| 2019 Q4 | 30% | 50% | 8 | 0 |
| 2020 Q1 | 17% | 71% | 9 | 1 |
| 2020 Q2 | 23% | 43% | 13 | 1 |
| 2020 Q3 | 40% | 30% | 7 | 0 |
| 2020 Q4 | 75% | 25% | 4 | 0 |
| 2021 Q1 | 58% | 0% | 6 | 0 |
| 2021 Q2 | 63% | 0% | 7 | 0 |
| 2021 Q3 | 25% | 50% | 4 | 0 |
| 2021 Q4 | 25% | 50% | 6 | 0 |
| 2022 Q1 | 38% | 38% | 6 | 0 |
| 2022 Q2 | 25% | 68% | 11 | 29 |
| 2022 Q3 | 14% | 29% | 7 | 75 |
| 2022 Q4 | 38% | 44% | 12 | 100 |
| 2023 Q1 | 14% | 53% | 10 | 100 |
| 2023 Q2 | 42% | 47% | 10 | 100 |
| 2023 Q3 | 46% | 8% | 7 | 100 |
| 2023 Q4 | 38% | 25% | 5 | 100 |
| 2024 Q1 | 88% | 13% | 5 | 100 |
| 2024 Q2 | 0% | 75% | 3 | 100 |
| 2024 Q3 | – | – | 2 | 93 |
| 2024 Q4 | 25% | 75% | 3 | 90 |
| 2025 Q1 | 75% | 25% | 5 | 90 |
| 2025 Q2 | 67% | 0% | 5 | 90 |
| 2025 Q3 | 69% | 6% | 10 | 90 |
| 2025 Q4 | 17% | 58% | 7 | 74 |
| 2026 Q1 | 89% | 0% | 6 | 42 |
| 2026 Q2 | – | – | 1 | 39 |
| 2026 Q3 | 67% | 17% | 4 | 68 |
Before July 2022, 30% of these posts told founders to expand and 47% to conserve. In the 41 months funding pressure then stayed above its line, the shares were 39% and 40%.
That is not the shift the study predicted in advance. In its registered tests, expansion advice did not become rarer above the line, and no lag from 0 to 12 months shows conservation advice rising after the crossing.
A local model labelled the posts, and its labels agree with a careful reader's at kappa 0.52, below the 0.6 the study set itself. One crossing of the line also cannot separate funding pressure from everything else that changed in 2022.
The study, registered in advance →Every number, with its interval →
Same decision, opposite advice
Each pair is two widely read texts on one decision, pointing opposite ways. In 2 of these 4 pairs, both texts came out under the same conditions.
How fast to grow
Expand
Startup = Growth — Paul Graham, Y Combinator, Sep 2012
SunnyFunding pressure 0 · Risk appetite 97
Conserve
Default Alive or Default Dead? — Paul Graham, Y Combinator, Oct 2015
SunnyFunding pressure 0 · Risk appetite 96
Hiring
Expand
The SaaS Adventure — Neeraj Agrawal, Battery Ventures, Feb 2015
SunnyFunding pressure 0 · Risk appetite 95
Conserve
The Upside of a Downturn — Lightspeed Venture Partners, May 2022
StormyFunding pressure 26 · Risk appetite 44
Speed or efficiency
Expand
Blitzscaling — Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh, Oct 2018
SunnyFunding pressure 0 · Risk appetite 49
Conserve
Update on Meta's Year of Efficiency — Mark Zuckerberg, Mar 2023
FreezingFunding pressure 100 · Risk appetite 17
Spending
Expand
It's Time to Build — Marc Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz, Apr 2020
StormyFunding pressure 2 · Risk appetite 38
Conserve
The Burn Multiple — David Sacks, Craft Ventures, Apr 2020
StormyFunding pressure 2 · Risk appetite 38
Written in conditions like this week's: Freezing
This week's guidance, published Oct 6, 2026, is for Freezing conditions. These were published in Freezing months.
- Update on Meta's Year of Efficiency — Mark Zuckerberg, Mar 2023
- The Product Momentum Gap — Dave Martin and Andrea Saez, Oct 2023
The list, oldest first
The date is first publication. Where an essay became a book, the note says which one the date is.
35 texts by year of first publication, 2005 to 2025, each marked with the conditions the month it came out.
Conditions that month: Before the record starts on Jan 31, 2012
How to Hire a Product Manager
Ken Norton
Hire product managers for raw intelligence, technical grounding, product instinct, leadership through influence and a record of shipping, over domain pedigree.
Craft. About whom to hire, not how many or how fast.
Conditions that month: Before the record starts on Jan 31, 2012
The only thing that matters
Marc Andreessen
Market matters more than team or product, and until a startup has product/market fit, reaching it comes ahead of everything else.
Craft. Puts product/market fit first and sets no budget for reaching it.
Conditions that month: Before the record starts on Jan 31, 2012
The Startup Pyramid
Sean Ellis
A product has fit when at least 40% of its users would be very disappointed to lose it, and a startup should reach that before it spends on scaling.
Conserve. Holds back spending on scaling until the 40% test is met.
Conditions that month: Before the record starts on Jan 31, 2012
What, exactly, is a Product Manager?
Martin Eriksson
Product management sits where business, technology and user experience overlap, and a product manager should be experienced in one, passionate about all three and fluent with people in each.
Craft. Defines the role.
How To Manufacture Desire
Nir Eyal
Products become habits through repeated cycles of trigger, action, variable reward and investment.
Craft. About product design.
The essay. It became the book Hooked, self-published in December 2013.
Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager
Ben Horowitz and David Weiden
Contrasts good and bad habits line by line, and casts the product manager as the one who owns the product's outcome and makes no excuses for it.
Craft. About a product manager's habits.
The date is its publication on the open web. It was written as a Netscape training memo in the late 1990s.
Startup = Growth
Paul Graham, Y Combinator · investor memo
A startup is defined by fast growth, so founders should pick a weekly growth rate they can reach and hit it every week.
Expand. “A startup is a company designed to grow fast.”
Product strategy means saying no
Des Traynor
A good product is a focused, coherent whole, so a product manager has to turn down the usual reasons for adding a feature, good ideas included.
Craft. Says no to features, not to spending.
The Mom Test
Rob Fitzpatrick
Ask customers about what they have actually done, not about your idea, because people lie politely to protect your feelings.
Craft. About interviewing customers.
The Build Trap
Melissa Perri
Teams that measure output ship features built on guesses; they need to organise around learning and the outcomes customers get.
Craft. About what a team measures.
The blog post. It became the book Escaping the Build Trap in November 2018.
The SaaS Adventure
Neeraj Agrawal, Battery Ventures · investor memo
Once a software-as-a-service company reaches about $2M in annual recurring revenue, it should triple revenue twice and then double it three times, hiring a sales leader and a team of reps to get there.
Expand. “triple, triple, double, double, double”
The Alternative to Roadmaps
Marty Cagan
Replace feature roadmaps with a product vision, business objectives and team autonomy, so teams answer for outcomes rather than output.
Craft. About how to plan, not how much to spend.
Default Alive or Default Dead?
Paul Graham, Y Combinator · investor memo
Founders should know whether their startup reaches profitability on the money it already has, and the commonest way to fall short is hiring too fast.
Conserve. “don't hire too fast”
MVPM: Minimum Viable Product Manager
Brandon Chu
A syllabus of the minimum a generalist product manager needs across technology, design and business. It is meant to be learned rather than mastered.
Craft. About what a product manager should know.
On the Road to Recap
Bill Gurley, Benchmark · investor memo
Late-stage startups should stop depending on new rounds by reaching profitability on the money they have, and should take a lower valuation over structured terms.
Conserve. “Achieving profitability is the most liberating action a startup can accomplish.”
Know Your Customers' “Jobs to Be Done”
Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David S. Duncan
Innovation works better when you understand the progress a customer is trying to make in a situation than when you rely on who the customer is.
Craft. About understanding customers.
Why Product Market Fit Isn't Enough
Brian Balfour
Growing past $100M takes four fits that depend on each other, not product/market fit alone: market and product, product and channel, channel and model, and model and market.
Craft. About how a growth model fits together, not how fast to fund it.
Blitzscaling
Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh
When a market will go to whoever reaches scale first, a company should put speed ahead of efficiency and grow before the uncertainty is resolved.
Expand. Its publisher's summary: “speed is the only competitive advantage that matters.”
The book. Harvard Business Review ran a piece on Hoffman and the idea, by Tim Sullivan, in April 2016.
How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit
Rahul Vohra
Treat product/market fit as a number: the share of users who would be very disappointed without you. Raise it by building for the users who already love the product.
Craft. About measuring fit.
The Making of a Manager
Julie Zhuo
A working guide for new managers, built on purpose, people and process. Feedback, hiring and meetings serve those three.
Craft. About managing people.
Product-Led Growth
Wes Bush
Through free trials or a free tier, a product can carry its own acquisition, conversion and expansion instead of leaving them to a sales team.
Craft. About how a product sells, not how much to spend selling it.
Steps to success: the importance of a clear career path for product managers
Jane Honey and Brian Donohue
Intercom published its product manager career ladder so expectations and promotion are explicit. It sets five skill areas across levels from associate to principal.
Craft. About career paths.
Shape Up
Ryan Singer
Work in fixed six-week cycles with variable scope: shape the work first, bet on it instead of keeping a backlog, and let the team own the build.
Craft. About how to schedule work.
The free online edition. A print edition followed.
How to kickstart and scale a marketplace business
Lenny Rachitsky
Nearly every marketplace that worked started by narrowing its geography or category until it reached critical mass, and expanded from there.
Craft. An order for reaching critical mass, with no budget attached.
Product Strategy – Overview
Marty Cagan
Product strategy is deciding which problems to solve. It means focusing, drawing insight from data and customers, turning that insight into team objectives and managing the result.
Craft. About choosing problems.
It's Time to Build
Marc Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz · investor memo
Calls for building housing, manufacturing, health care, education and transportation, and asks the same of political leaders, CEOs, entrepreneurs and investors.
Expand. Backs “aggressive investment in new products, in new industries, in new factories” over buybacks.
The Burn Multiple
David Sacks, Craft Ventures · investor memo
Judge capital efficiency by net burn divided by net new annual recurring revenue; a high multiple is a warning, and it should fall as a company matures.
Conserve. “keep salaries and expenses low in the early days”
Empowered
Marty Cagan and Chris Jones
Strong products come from teams given problems to solve rather than features to build, and from leaders who coach them.
Craft. About team structure and coaching.
Continuous Discovery Habits
Teresa Torres
Talk to customers every week. Map the outcome you want to the opportunities and solutions beneath it, and test assumptions as you go.
Craft. About discovery habits.
The book. The opportunity solution tree it is built around was first published in 2016.
Adapting to Endure
Sequoia Capital · investor memo
Founders should face the downturn early and prepare cuts to projects, R&D and marketing that they could make within 30 days.
Conserve. “Do the cut exercise (projects, R&D, marketing, other expenses).”
Presented to Sequoia's founders on May 16, 2022. Sequoia posted it publicly on June 14, 2022.
The Upside of a Downturn
Lightspeed Venture Partners · investor memo
Founders should not plan on new funding in 2022 or 2023, should slow hiring and drop initiatives outside the core, and should become self-sustaining within six months.
Conserve. Recommends reaching “default alive” within six months.
Update on Meta's Year of Efficiency
Mark Zuckerberg
Meta would cut about 10,000 jobs, close about 5,000 open roles, remove layers of management and cancel lower-priority projects.
Conserve. “we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people”
Meta named 2023 its year of efficiency in its February 2023 earnings release. This is the plan that followed.
The Product Momentum Gap
Dave Martin and Andrea Saez
Momentum stalls when product strategy and customer value drift apart, and teams need practices that keep the two joined.
Craft. About joining strategy to customer value.
The AI Product Playbook
Marily Nika and Diego Granados
The skills and frameworks a product manager needs to build and run products that depend on AI.
Craft. About a product manager's skills.
The e-book. Print followed in October 2025.
What this does not show
The limits are why the result above is stated as shares and not as a finding.
- A small, chosen sample. These texts were picked for being widely read, by the people who built this page. Every post in the archives counted above is the check on that choice.
- Publication, not adoption. Each date is when a text came out. Advice can spread years later, or be drafted months before.
- Texts that share a month. Several memos came out within weeks of each other in 2020 and 2022. They count separately here, though they are closer to one observation.
- Co-occurrence, not cause. The record shows the conditions a text came out in. It cannot show why its author wrote it.
- Nothing before the record. Texts published before it stay on the list and out of every share.
- Tags are judgment calls. Each entry prints the line its tag rests on. The rule: Tag by what the text tells a company to do with money and headcount: more or faster is expand, less or leaner is conserve, and a method with no direction for either is craft.
What the four conditions mean
The same four words this week's guidance uses.
- Freezing. Money is expensive and hard to raise.
- Cloudy. Money is available but pricey.
- Stormy. Money is cheap but investors are wary.
- Sunny. Money is cheap and available.
Sources
- Conditions and scores each month: the month-end record on the history page, computed by the same method behind this week’s guidance. Each text’s date links to that year’s page in the archive.
- Texts: each title links to its author, firm or original publisher, wherever it is still online.