skill
startup-playbook-skill
A portable, stage-by-stage playbook for building a high-growth startup — read it, use it with any AI assistant, or install it as a Claude Code skill. Distilled from YC's How to Start a Startup (CS183B
Set up
Skills are installed by placing their folder where your agent loads skills.
The download comes from github.com/arturdeinis/startup-playbook-skill itself, not from our server, so what you get is exactly what its author published.
Install instructions come from the README
README
synced Oct 17, 2026Startup Playbook skill
A stage-by-stage operating playbook for building a high-growth startup, distilled from Y Combinator's How to Start a Startup (Stanford CS183B) — the 20 lectures by Sam Altman, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Dustin Moskovitz, Adora Cheung, Alex Schultz, Kevin Hale, Brian Chesky, Patrick & John Collison, Ben Silbermann, Aaron Levie, Reid Hoffman, Keith Rabois, Ben Horowitz, Emmett Shear, Hosain Rahman, Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, Tyler Bosmeny, and others.
It's just plain Markdown — a master SKILL.md roadmap plus per-stage references — so it's not tied to any one tool. Read it yourself, drop it into any AI assistant or agent, or install it as an agent skill. Its job is to figure out what stage a founder is at and tell them what to do next — and to stop them doing a later stage's work too early (optimizing growth before retention, hiring before they must, fundraising before traction, adding process before product/market fit).
What's inside
SKILL.md— the master step-by-step roadmap: 10 stages, each with a concrete exit gate (a signal you're ready to advance), fast diagnostics, and the recurring operating principles.references/— one deep-dive per stage, each self-contained and citing the lecture(s) it's drawn from.
| # | Stage | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Mindset & readiness | references/00-founder-mindset.md |
| 1 | Idea & market | references/01-idea-and-market.md |
| 2 | Cofounders & founding team | references/02-cofounders.md |
| 3 | Talk to users | references/03-talk-to-users.md |
| 4 | Build a product users love | references/04-build-product.md |
| 5 | Launch & first users (don't scale) | references/05-launch-and-first-users.md |
| 6 | Product/market fit & growth | references/06-pmf-and-growth.md |
| 7 | Fundraising & sales | references/07-fundraising-and-sales.md |
| 8 | Hiring, culture & management | references/08-hiring-culture-management.md |
| 9 | Legal, finance & scaling | references/09-legal-and-scaling.md |
The two invariants (true at every stage)
- Before product/market fit, only two things matter: build the product and talk to users.
- Execution and momentum are the lifeblood. There's no credit for trying — only for making something the market wants.
How to use it
The whole thing is portable Markdown, so use whichever mode fits.
1 · Read it (no tools)
Open SKILL.md, find your stage, then read the matching file in references/. It's written to be read by a person as much as by a machine.
2 · With any AI assistant or agent
Model-agnostic — works with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Cursor, Copilot, or any LLM / agent framework. Give the assistant SKILL.md (and the relevant references/*.md) as context — a system prompt, custom instructions, an uploaded file, or a pasted block — then ask your question:
Use this playbook. Figure out what stage my startup is at and tell me what to do next. — then attach or paste
SKILL.md.
3 · As a Claude Code skill
Clone it into your skills directory:
git clone https://github.com/arturdeinis/startup-playbook-skill.git ~/.claude/skills/startup-playbook-skill
(Skills also work per-project in a repo's .claude/skills/.) Then invoke it with /startup-playbook-skill, or just ask a startup question and it surfaces on its own — "Is my idea good?", "How do I get my first users?", "Do I have product/market fit?", "Review my pitch", "When should I hire / raise money?" Claude locates your stage, opens the matching reference, and gives you the next 1–3 concrete actions.
Triggering is semantic, not keyword-exact. Claude reads the skill's name and description and decides whether your request is about building a high-growth startup — it doesn't scan for a fixed word list. So the examples above (and the triggers in SKILL.md) are illustrative, not an allowlist: an intent-matching request fires it even with no shared words ("my users keep churning, what do I do?"), a passing mention of "startup" won't, and lifestyle-business / consultancy / side-project questions may not match at all. To widen or narrow it, edit the description and triggers in SKILL.md.
Scope & caveat
This advice is calibrated for hyper-growth startups. Much of it (aim for monopoly, try not to hire, all-in commitment, raise from strength) is deliberately wrong for a small business, a consultancy, or a side project. Use accordingly.
Attribution
The content is an original synthesis and paraphrase of the publicly available CS183B lectures (startupclass.samaltman.com / YC's How to Start a Startup). It contains no lecture transcripts — only distilled, attributed guidance. All credit for the underlying ideas belongs to the original speakers.
Unofficial project. This is an independent, fan-made summary. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Y Combinator, Stanford, or any of the lecturers. "Y Combinator," "How to Start a Startup," and the speakers' names are used only to attribute the source material.
License
MIT — use it, remix it, ship it.