Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, And Marissa Mayer Want To Teach You 'How To Start A Startup'
Sep 16, 2014, 23:26 IST
Joe Corrigan/Getty ImagesSome of the top investors and entrepreneurs are offering free classes on how to start a startup."Some of the most prominent investors and entrepreneurs are joining startup incubator Y Combinator's Sam Altman to teach a class called "How to Start a Startup," starting next week.
The 20-session course will be taught at Stanford within its computer science department. But all videos, reading materials, and assignments will be posted online on Altman's website, so anyone can follow the class content for free.
Altman, Y Combinator's president, will teach the first two sessions. But from Sept. 30, he will be inviting a star-studded lineup of guest lecturers, including Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, and Marissa Mayer. They will cover topics from business strategy and monopoly to how to raise money.
Altman said on the class website:
"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."
Here's the full course schedule:
Disclosure: Marc Andreessen is an investor in Business Insider.
| 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 |