#95 overall
How to Start a Startup
Stanford University
4 recommenders · 4 threads · recommended in 3 years, 2015–2017 · score 4.8
A Stanford lecture series, taught by Sam Altman with a rotating roster of startup founders and investors, covering the practical basics of founding and running a startup, including growth, management, and operations. The lectures were recorded as a live class and are also distributed as a podcast and online videos.
Commenters call it an excellent, thorough introduction to startups and praise individual lectures on growth, management, and operations.
Business, Finance & Economicsbeginnerfreevideo lectures#startups#entrepreneurship#growth#management#sam altman
Recommendations by year
20062026
I highly recommend Sam Altman's course "How to Start a Startup": http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/how-to-start-a-start-up-a...
I watched it on my lunch breaks, it's a great, thorough introduction.
There's a really excellent course on starting a startup, from Sam Altman (President of YCombinator).
http://startupclass.samaltman.com/
It was delivered as a live lecture at Stanford, with presentations by Sam Altman himself, as well as Dustin Moskovitz, Paul Graham, Adora Cheung, Peter Thiel, Alex Schultz, Kevin Hale, Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, Parker Conrad, Brian Chesky, Alfred Lin, Patrick and John Collison, Ben Silbermann, Aaron Levie, Reid Hoffman, Keith Rabois, Ben Horowitz, Emmett Shear, Hosain Rahman, Kirsty Nathoo, Carolynn Levy, and Tyler Bosmeny.
My favorite presenter is Reid Hoffman, but all the lectures are awesome. If you're a startup founder, you owe it to yourself to watch them all...
Here's a great lecture by Alex Schultz on growth:
http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec06/
On a side note, elocution is also something to notice in that lecture. He doesn't mumble, he speaks full, clear, sharp, sentences. The ratio content/time is high.
Reminds me of the anecdote of Niels Bohr complaining to Paul Dirac about not knowing how to finish a sentence in an article, to which Dirac replied: "I was taught at school never to start a sentence without knowing the end of it."
When I sold my business I suddenly found myself in charge of four divisions of a much larger company. I found the YCombinator "How to Start a Startup" Lecture Podcast (https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/how-to-start-a-startup/i...) invaluable. Specifically the later lectures on "How to Manage" and "How To Operate" were fantastic.
If you don't understand why GOOD startups do this, take a look at the "Doing things that don't scale[1]" lecture from "How to Start a Startup" series by Sam Altman at Stanford.
[1] https://clip.mn/video/yt-oQOC-qy-GDY
But they aren't a lottery. Startups (and business in general) is about unfair advantages - knowing information that other people don't, and acting on that knowledge.
As a founder, your job is to find your unfair advantage and execute on it. Startups that successfully find a valuable secret and exploit it become worth billions. Startups that have no such advantage usually die.
I thought the article was getting at this, but it seems like a lot of the folks here missed it. Twitch succeeded because, as justin.tv, they were in a position to notice rising demand for gaming livestreams. And then when they did, they executed against it very effectively - look at Emmett's user interview lecture for how they systematically gathered feedback from prospective users to convert them to current users. [1]
That's what Justin's talking about when he says "Trust your metrics and your growth." They had an information advantage over VCs - there was very good reason for believing VCs were ignorant there, because in this case, they were.
[1] https://clip.mn/video/yt-qAws7eXItMk
Cofounder Adora Cheung is worth following. The story is a great example for founders. Check out her lecture at Sam Altman's startup class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP176MBG9Tk