How to Start a Startup

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!

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