About & attribution

A study companion, not the original.

What this is

This is an unofficial, reader-friendly reconstruction of the Startup Secrets Sandbox, the framework library Michael Skok built and teaches at the Harvard Innovation Labs and through Underscore VC. The original lives in a Coda doc that reads top-to-bottom. This guide keeps every word of that material but reorganizes it three ways, so you can reach any idea as a framework, along the journey, or through a company’s story, and search all of it at once.

Whose work this is

The frameworks (4U, BLAC & White, the 3Ds, Gain/Pain, MVS, DEBT, RSVPD, SLIP, and the rest), the workshop text, and the lectures are all Michael Skok’s. They are reproduced here under the sandbox’s own Creative Commons Attribution license, with credit to him and a link back to the source on every page. This site is not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by Michael Skok, Underscore VC, or Harvard. If you are the rights holder and want a change, it will be made promptly.

How it was built

• Text was recovered verbatim from the live sandbox (the earlier text-only copy had lost images, structure, and many pages).
• Structure was rebuilt from the site’s original navigation hierarchy.
• Lectures from the Harvard i-lab video series were transcribed, cleaned, and woven in beside the framework each one explains, shown in the “Hear how Michael taught it” panels.
• Images (slides and diagrams) were pulled back from the source and stored alongside the text.
• A few embeds were broken on the source site itself; those are noted honestly rather than hidden.

Use it inside your AI agent

This guide is also a remote MCP server, so any MCP-compatible agent (Claude and others) can search and read it directly. Add this URL as a custom connector:

It exposes three tools: search_startup_secrets, get_page, and list_frameworks. No login, no key. Your agent can now cite the frameworks, lectures, and cases on demand.

Go deeper

Prefer the original? Visit the Startup Secrets Sandbox ↗. Michael Skok also publishes the frameworks and essays via Underscore VC and the Harvard i-lab video series on YouTube.