Entrepreneurial Resources
Are you launching a venture or scaling an existing business? Here is a list or resources to help wherever you are in your journey.
Essentials/Toolkits
An online educational resource to help learn the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and accelerate your success.
View ToolkitBefore 2004, entrepreneurs suffered from prolonged and cumbersome business plans. Alexander Osterwalder facilitated the creation of a business model by introducing the Business Model Canvas (BMC).
By definition, it’s a visual template that illustrates various objects of a business model. Osterwalder’s original canvas includes nine elements, which represent vital aspects of business survival.
The Pitch Elements Canvas from Actionworks helps you surface talking points for how you articulate an idea. These talking points equip you to advocate (and more importantly, get feedback on) your idea with others.
A comprehensive founder toolkit that comprises a wealth of resources, templates, and investor databases that are curated from leaders in the ecosystem.
Pitch Decks
What goes into a pitch deck? This step-by-step sample pitch deck breaks down each slide critical to a successful pitch.
ViewThis is Mint.com’s pre-launch pitch deck.
Videos
The introductory course by Steve Blank covers the basics of the Customer Development Process and the key steps to building a successful startup.
ViewSeries of videos providing answers on a wide array of startup topics. Produced by one of the country’s top accelerators.
Fundraising
This brief guide is a summary of what startup founders need to know about raising the seed funds critical to getting their company off the ground.
ViewBooks
Available for Checkout at ETX Launchpad
In this inspiring book, Ash Maurya takes you through an exacting strategy for achieving product/market fit for your fledgling venture. You'll learn ideas and concepts from several innovative methodologies, including the Lean Startup, business model design, design thinking, and Jobs-to-be-Done. This new edition introduces the continuous innovation framework and follows one entrepreneur's journey from initial vision to a business model that works.
View on AmazonAvailable for Checkout at ETX Launchpad
Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don't yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, this is your handbook.
Available for Checkout at ETX Launchpad
The shocking discovery of years of research and trial is that most startups fail by doing the "right things", but doing them out of order. In other words, human nature combined with our entrepreneurial drive puts us on autopilot to become part of the 70 percent to 90 percent of ventures that fail.
Available for Checkout at ETX Launchpad
A guide to the early decisions that can make or break startup ventures.
The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything.
Fully updated to reflect the intricacies of startups and entrepreneurship in today's dynamic economic environment, this new edition includes revisions and updates to coverage on negotiating, gender issues, ICO’s, and economic terms. New chapters examine legal and procedural considerations relevant to fundraising, bank debt, equity and convertible debt, how to hire an investment banker to sell a company, and more.
The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things.
The Startup Owner's Manual guides you, step-by-step, as you put the Customer Development process to work. This method was created by renowned Silicon Valley startup expert Steve Blank, acknowledged catalyst of the "Lean Startup" movement, and tested and refined by him for more than a decade.