This repository offers a suite of AI agent "skills" designed to automate core operational tasks for tech startup founders. It addresses the need for solo or small founding teams to manage diverse responsibilities—from fundraising and sales to product development and legal compliance—without dedicated staff. The benefit is significant time savings on repeatable work, allowing founders to focus on strategic user engagement and product iteration.

How It Works

The project's core concept revolves around "Skills," which are essentially markdown files that imbue AI agents with specialized knowledge and workflows for specific founder tasks. Each skill operates by first reading a shared startup-context—encompassing company stage, product details, market position, team structure, and key metrics—to ensure outputs are tailored to the specific startup. This context-aware approach prevents generic AI responses, enabling skills to produce founder-grade results. Skills are designed to be modular and can cross-reference each other for more comprehensive task completion.

Quick Start & Requirements

• Primary install / run command: npx skills add shawnpang/startup-founder-skills (or use --skill flag for specific skills/categories).
• Non-default prerequisites and dependencies: Requires an AI agent compatible with the "Agent Skills spec" (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf).
• Links: The README serves as the primary documentation; no separate quick-start or demo links are provided.

Highlighted Details

• Comprehensive Coverage: Skills span 9 core startup functions: Fundraising, Sales & BD, Product & Strategy, Recruiting & Team, Engineering, Legal & Compliance, Operations, Customer Success, and Marketing & Growth.
• Contextual Tailoring: The startup-context skill ensures all other skills generate output relevant to the specific company's situation.
• Modular Installation: Users can install all skills, specific categories (e.g., fundraising), or individual skills (e.g., pitch-deck).
• Open-Source Foundation: Each skill is adapted from existing open-source projects, with authors credited.

Maintenance & Community

Contributions are welcomed via pull requests and issues. No specific community channels (like Discord or Slack) or dedicated roadmap links are provided in the README.

Licensing & Compatibility

• License type: MIT.
• Compatibility notes: The MIT license is highly permissive, allowing for commercial use and integration into closed-source projects without significant restrictions.

Limitations & Caveats

Certain legal skills, such as privacy-policy and terms-of-service, explicitly state they are not a substitute for professional legal counsel. The skill set is primarily targeted at solo or small technical founding teams who are acting as the entire operational department.