#How to Start a Startup

A YC and Stanford Course =

###Everything we know about how to start a startup, for free, from some of the world experts.

• The Course is FREE, and available at: Startup School
• Lecture Videos also available at youtube.
• iTunes Podcast available here.

###Description Sam Altman and the folks from Y Combinator offer up an amazing course in "How To Start A Startup" at Stanford. Course includes lectures from: Sam Altman, Dustin Moskovitz, Paul Graham, Adora Cheung, Peter Thiel, Alex Schultz, Kevin Hale, Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, Ben Silbermann, Alfred Lin, Patrick and John Collison, Aaron Levie, Reid Hoffman, Keith Rabois, Ben Horowitz, Marissa Mayer, Hosian Rahman, Kirsty Nathoo, Carolynn Levy, and more.

The trasncript was taken from geius.com. (I create this book on Gitbook for those who want read the transcript on various devices.)

###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

##Table of Content

• Lecture 1: How to Start a Startup by Sam Altman
• Lecture 2: Ideas, Products, Teams and Execution Part II by Sam Altman
• Lecture 3: Counterintuitive Parts of Startups, and How to Have Ideas by Paul Graham
• Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing by Adora Cheung
• Lecture 5: Business Strategy and Monopoly Theory by Peter Thiel
• Lecture 6: Growth by Alex Schultz
• Lecture 7: How to Build Products Users Love, Part I by Kevin Hale
• Lecture 8: Doing Things That Don't Scale, PR, and How to Get Started by Walker Williams
• Lecture 9: How to Raise Money by Marc Andreessen
• Lecture 10: Company Culture and Building a Team, Part I by Alfred Lin
• Lecture 11: Company Culture and Building a Team, Part II by Patrick Collison
• Lecture 12: Sales and Marketing by Aaron
• Lecture 13: How To Be A Great Founder by Reid Hoffman
• Lecture 14: How to Operate by Keith Rabois
• Lecture 15: How to Manage by B Horowitz
• Lecture 16: How to Run a User Interview by Emmett Shear
• Lecture 17: How to Build Products Users Love, Part II by Hosain Rahman
• Lecture 18: Mechanics--Legal, Finance, HR, etc. by Kirsty Nathoo
• Lecture 19: Sales and Marketing, How to Pitch, and Investor Meeting Roleplaying by Tyler Bosmeny
• Lecture 20: Closing Thoughts and Later-Stage Advice by Sam Altman