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
All lecture videos will be uploaded to this site - after the in-person lectures every Tuesday and Thursday. Hundreds of universities are organizing groups to watch the videos together, as well as peer evaluate the projects. See if your university already has a group, and if not, apply to be a leader. If it does, you'll be able to sign up for that shortly!
In addition to the mailing list and Facebook group, a discussion forum will be set up specifically for students following along to discuss the contents of the lecture. Join either of the groups to get updated when that is live, as well as when the first lecture video is put online!
| 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 |