Class Central is learner-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Online Course

How to Start a Startup

Stanford University and Y Combinator via Independent

Found in Entrepreneurship Courses

Go to class

Provider Independent
Cost Free Online Course
Session Self Paced
Language English
Start Date
Learn more about MOOCs

Taken this course? Share your experience with other students. Write review

Overview

CS183B is a class we’re teaching at Stanford. It’s designed to be a sort of one-class business course for people who want to start startups.

Videos of the lectures, associated reading materials, and assignments will all be available here. There will be 20 videos, some with a speaker or two and some with a small panel. It’ll be 1,000 minutes of content if you watch it all.

We’ll cover how to come up with ideas and evaluate them, how to get users and grow, how to do sales and marketing, how to hire, how to raise money, company culture, operations and management, business strategy, and more.

You can’t teach everything necessary to succeed in starting a company, but I suspect we can teach a surprising amount. We’ve tried to take some of the best speakers from the past 9 years of Y Combinator dinners and arrange them in a way that will hopefully make sense.

We’re doing this because we believe helping a lot of people be better at starting companies will be good for everyone. It will hopefully be valuable even for people who don’t want to start startups.

Talks like these have really helped Y Combinator founders create their companies. We hope you find it helpful too!

Syllabus

Date Speaker Topic 9/23/14 Sam Altman, President, Y Combinator Welcome, and Ideas, Products, Teams and Execution Part I 9/25/14 Sam Altman, President, Y Combinator Ideas, Products, Teams and Execution Part II 9/30/14 Paul Graham, Founder, Y Combinator How to Have Ideas and How to Get Started 10/2/14 Adora Cheung, Founder, Homejoy Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing 10/7/14 Peter Thiel, Founder, Paypal & Palantir, and Partner, Founders Fund Business Strategy and Monopoly Theory 10/9/14 Alex Schultz, VP Growth, Facebook Growth 10/14/14 Kevin Hale, Founder, Wufoo and Partner, Y Combinator How to Build Products Users Love, Part I 10/16/14 TBA 10/21/14 Marc Andreessen, Founder, Andreessen Horowitz and Founder, Netscape
Ron Conway, Founder, SV Angel
Ben Silbermann, Founder & CEO, Pinterest How to Raise Money 10/23/14 Alfred Lin, Former COO, Zappos and Partner, Sequoia Capital Company Culture and Buliding a Team, Part I 10/28/14 Patrick and John Collison,Founders, Stripe Company Culture and Building a Team, Part II 10/30/14 Aaron Levie, Founder, Box Sales and Marketing 11/4/14 Reid Hoffman, Partner, Greylock Ventures and Founder, LinkedIn TBA 11/6/14 Keith Rabois, Partner, Khosla Ventures How to Operate 11/11/14 Ben Horowitz, Founder, Andreessen Horowitz, and Founder, and Opsware How to Manage 11/13/14 Marissa Mayer, CEO, Yahoo TBA 11/18/14 Hosain Rahman, Founder, Jawbone How to Build Products Users Love, Part II 11/20/14 Kirsty Nathoo and Carolynn Levy, Partners, Y Combinator Mechanics--Legal, Finance, HR, etc. 12/2/14 TBA 12/4/14 Sam Altman, President, Y Combinator Closing Thoughts and Later-Stage Advice

Taught by

Sam Altman

Reviews for How to Start a Startup Based on 13 reviews

5 stars 69%
4 stars 31%
3 star 0%
2 star 0%
1 star 0%

Did you take this course? Share your experience with other students.

Write a review

Raj D

by Raj is taking this course right now, spending 8 hours a week on it and found the course difficulty to be medium.

Absolutely am loving this course, primarily because it is based on the real world, all the speakers are businessmen who own and run startups, and no professors so far. I am currently on Video#7 of 20, and am finding it to be fascinating. Every speaker has his own unique take on what a start up is, and yet I can see them agreeing with each other. Starting a StartUp is really tough business, primarily because the payoff for a successful startup is so bloody huge.

10 people found
this review helpful