What it does
awesome-ceo is a curated list of resources for startup founders and leaders of high-growth companies. One README.md, roughly 90 links, organized into 10 sections: fundraising, entrepreneurship, product, sales, marketing, management, hiring, finance, books, and supplementary links.
Why I starred it
I keep a handful of awesome-lists bookmarked — the ones where curation is the value, not volume. This one covers the non-engineering side of building a company. The author, Dima Kuchin, also maintains awesome-cto which has 34k+ stars. Where awesome-cto focuses on technical leadership, this companion list tackles the CEO lens: fundraising mechanics, product-market fit, hiring executives, and financial planning.
What caught my eye is how opinionated it is. The description says "opinionated" and it delivers — there are only about 90 links total across every category. Compare that to awesome-lists that dump 500 links nobody reads. Each entry here has a brief annotation explaining why it's worth your time.
How it works
There's no code here. The entire repo is README.md and LICENSE (CC0). Two files, 183 lines, 13 commits. The structure is straightforward markdown — section headers, bullet lists, brief annotations on most entries.
The commit history tells the story: created December 26, 2022, bulk content added in a two-day sprint on February 13-16, 2023, then silence. 13 commits total, all from a single contributor, all with commit messages like "More content". The last push was February 2023 — over two years ago.
## Fundraising
* [A Guide to Seed Fundraising](https://www.ycombinator.com/library/4A-a-guide-to-seed-fundraising) - YCombinator
Very good starting point.
* [A Playbook for Fundraising](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/a-playbook-for-fundraising) - Lenny Rachitsky
Great summary.That's the format throughout — link, source attribution, sometimes a one-line annotation. Some entries include Twitter badge links via socialize-md.vercel.app and YouTube badges to distinguish content types. A few paid resources are marked with a money bag emoji.
The fundraising section is the deepest, covering seed guides from YC and Stripe, pitch deck collections, equity calculators, angel directories, and even a section on exit strategies via a16z. The books section is unusually useful — each entry gets a multi-line description of what the book actually teaches, not just its title.
Using it
There's nothing to install or run. You open the README, find the section relevant to your current problem, and read. A few ways I've used lists like this:
# Clone locally to have it offline / searchable
git clone https://github.com/kuchin/awesome-ceo.git
# Quick search for fundraising-related links
grep -i "fundrais" awesome-ceo/README.mdThe list references tools like Capboard's equity dilution calculator and SmartAsset's startup economics calculator — these are the kind of links you don't find by googling "startup tools." They're specific enough to be useful.
For the books section, every entry links to Amazon and includes a paragraph-length review. For example, the note on "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" is honest: "The title is misleading — because of it I was avoiding this book for years." That kind of annotation is what separates a curated list from a dump.
Rough edges
The obvious one: no commits since February 2023. Links rot. I didn't check all 90, but the fundraising landscape from 2022-2023 is already dated — some of those valuation frameworks assume a different market. There's no CI checking for dead links, no CONTRIBUTING.md, and no indication the author plans to maintain it.
The sections are uneven. Fundraising gets 20+ links with sub-categories for tools, angel directories, and pitch decks. Sales gets exactly one link. Hiring gets three. Marketing gets five. The depth drops off sharply after the first few categories.
Some links use badge images from socialize-md.vercel.app for Twitter and YouTube indicators. These are external image dependencies that could break — and they add visual noise in the raw markdown.
The commit messages ("More content", "More content", "More content") suggest this was built in one sitting and published. No issue tracker, no PRs from the community, no discussion threads. The 244 forks haven't fed anything back.
Bottom line
If you're an engineer moving into a founder or CEO role and want a single page of curated reading on the non-technical side — fundraising, product-market fit, management — this is a solid starting point. Just know the links are from early 2023, and nobody's checking if they still work.