These are the highest quality resources and notes that I have found over some years. Previously stored in private notes, I’m slowly publishing everything I’ve found useful — maybe it will help you, too.
For Aspirational Founders
For Future Founders
Finding a Technical Co-Founder or CTO
Discovery
How to Structure (and get the most out of) Customer Development Interviews
Sales
https://stripe.com/en-de/atlas/guides/starting-sales
Culture
Vision, Mission, and Values are widely misunderstood, and usually poorly used. Values, in particular, are often vague statements that no one would disagree with, and so they communicate nothing. A real Company Value will communicate something when you can invert the value and imagine that being a value somewhere else. The classic example is Facebook’s “Move Fast and Break Things” — “Move Slow and Keep Things Stable” could be e.g. NASA. By contrast, the values of Enron were “Respect, Integrity, Communication, and Excellence.”
I found the best description of the parts of culture over at The Musings of the Big Red Car: Pearls of company culture.
