Y Combinator's How to Start a Startup

About this site

This site was created to host Creative Commons content from the Stanford CS183B class being put together by Sam Altman, President at YCombinator and going from September 23rd through December 4th.

In this course, Sam will lead us through 20 killer sessions with the likes of startup experts like Peter Thiel, Aaron Levie, and Reid Hoffman to discuss 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.

A letter from Sam Altman, President at YCombinator about the course:

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!
-Sam

How the course will work

All of the lecture videos for this course will be uploaded to startupclass.samaltman.com after the in-person lectures every Tuesday and Thursday. Universities will also be organizing groups to watch the videos together, as well as peer evaluate the projects.

Given the official mailing list, Facebook Group, Youtube channel and website (startupclass.samaltman.com) launched by YC are likely to get a little unwieldy, startupclass.co was created to:

1. Create a timely and easy access point for all the YCombinator "How to Start a Startup" lecture series videos, associated readings, and assignments.

2. Have a single, ad-free place for meaningful discussion for each of the lectures so we can collaborate and learn from each other.

3. Open-source the discussion. All lectures, discussion and content here will be under a Creative Commons license to foster the most openness and creativity possible.

4. Let you track progress. Within the course, you'll be able to track your progress from lecture to lecture by clicking "complete".

We're hoping to get speakers and experts to engage with the group. Looking forward to seeing you inside.