startup-founder-skills

Startup Founder Skills for AI Agents

Hey friends. Shawn here. I've been bootstrapping and starting companies for the past 10 years (still working hard at 996 level). Somewhere along the way, I realized that more and more of what I do every day — writing cold emails, drafting pitch decks, prepping for calls, reviewing contracts, writing job descriptions — can be automated. So I set out to find the 50 founder tasks that AI handles best and pair each one with the best open-source skill to do it.

The goal is simple: spend less time on repeatable work so I can spend more time on what actually matters — talking to users, trying more products, and making genuine connections.

Inspired by Marketing Skills by Corey Haines — extended from marketing to the full founder stack: fundraising, sales, product, recruiting, engineering, legal, finance, and growth. Works with Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, and any agent that supports the Agent Skills spec.

Contributions welcome! Found a way to improve a skill or have a new one to add? Open a PR.

Who Is This For?

• Solo technical founders building an MVP who also need to fundraise, sell, hire, and market — without a team to delegate to
• First-time founders who know how to code but haven't written a pitch deck, cold email, or job description before
• Small founding teams (2-3 people) wearing multiple hats and needing to move fast across every function
• Technical co-founders who handle product and engineering but now need to step into sales, recruiting, or investor conversations

If you're at a company with a VP of Sales, a Head of Marketing, and in-house counsel — you probably don't need this. These skills are for founders who are the sales team, the marketing team, and the legal team, all at once.

What are Skills?

Skills are markdown files that give AI agents specialized knowledge and workflows for specific tasks. When you add these to your project, your agent can recognize what you're working on and apply the right frameworks, templates, and best practices — so you get founder-grade output, not generic AI slop.

How Skills Work Together

Every skill reads from startup-context first — your company's stage, product, market, team, and metrics. This shared context means skills produce output tailored to your specific startup, not generic advice.

                              ┌──────────────────────────────────────┐
                              │          startup-context             │
                              │    (read by all other skills first)  │
                              └──────────────────┬───────────────────┘
                                                 │
  ┌──────────────┬──────────────┬────────────────┼────────────────┬──────────────┬──────────────┐
  ▼              ▼              ▼                ▼                ▼              ▼              ▼
┌───────────┐ ┌───────────┐ ┌───────────┐ ┌────────────┐ ┌───────────┐ ┌────────────┐ ┌───────────┐
│Fundraising│ │ Sales &BD │ │ Product & │ │ Recruiting │ │Engineering│ │  Legal &   │ │ Marketing │
│           │ │           │ │ Strategy  │ │   & Team   │ │           │ │ Operations │ │ & Growth  │
├───────────┤ ├───────────┤ ├───────────┤ ├────────────┤ ├───────────┤ ├────────────┤ ├───────────┤
│pitch-deck │ │cold-      │ │prd-writng │ │job-desc    │ │arch-desgn │ │privacy-pol │ │landing-pg │
│inv-rsrch  │ │ outreach  │ │user-rsrch │ │interview   │ │code-revew │ │terms-of-sv │ │content    │
│data-room  │ │sales-scrpt│ │roadmap    │ │sourcing    │ │cicd-setup │ │contract-rv │ │seo        │
│fund-email │ │proposal   │ │mvp-scope  │ │employer-   │ │tech-stack │ │soc2-prep   │ │email-mktg │
│           │ │lead-score │ │comp-anlys │ │ brand      │ │security   │ │process-doc │ │social     │
│           │ │partner-   │ │mkt-rsrch  │ │            │ │           │ │board-update│ │launch     │
│           │ │ outreach  │ │           │ │            │ │           │ │            │ │           │
└─────┬─────┘ └─────┬─────┘ └─────┬─────┘ └──────┬─────┘ └─────┬─────┘ └──────┬─────┘ └─────┬─────┘
      │             │             │               │             │              │             │
      └─────────────┴──────┬──────┴───────────────┴─────────────┴──────────────┴─────────────┘
                           │
            Skills cross-reference each other:
              pitch-deck ↔ investor-research ↔ data-room
              cold-outreach ↔ lead-scoring ↔ sales-script
              prd-writing ↔ mvp-scoping ↔ roadmap-planning
              job-description ↔ interview-kit ↔ sourcing-outreach

See each skill's Related Skills section for the full dependency map.

Available Skills