If you’re thinking of cold-emailing me or asking to “pick my brain,” start here.
I’ve been writing online since 1998. I’ve built companies, invested in others, taught, experimented, and tried to write down what I was learning along the way. Many of the questions I get are already answered somewhere below.
This page is a comprehensive source guide. If you read a few of these first, your email will be sharper, more contextual, and much easier for me to respond to well.
Start Here
- About – background, companies, teaching, and context.
- Cold Email to Me — Start Here
- Main Weblog
- Everything I’ve written (author archive)
Books & PDFs
If you’re reaching out about startups, hiring, product, or careers, start with these.
- Ship While You Sleep (2014; v2 2018) – on hiring, velocity, and building product like code-as-cards.
- Amol’s Guide for Beginners – a curated best-of selection about getting into startups and learning to build.
- Amol’s Team IQ Memo – a short book about leading, measuring, and improving teams.
- Doctoral Dissertation – for the historically curious.
Columbia Courses
I teach Columbia College undergraduate courses at Columbia University:
- Venturing to Change the World – see the syllabus: PDF
- Making History Through Venturing – see the syllabus: PDF
If you’re asking about startups, venture, or careers, those syllabi are a strong signal of how I think about building and history.
Selected Posts
- Patterns in Student Startups
- What To Do Between Startups
- Lessons from Growth Hacking My Blog
- Tech Is Taking Over NYC
Follow / Subscribe
If You Email Me
I genuinely like helping people. I also have a finite inbox.
The fastest path to a useful response:
- Read something above and reference it.
- Ask one specific question.
- Show your thinking and what you’ve already tried.
“Pick my brain” usually means “please do my thinking for me.”
A better move is: show me your thinking and ask for one correction.
This page exists so that high-leverage conversations start from shared context.