Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, And Marissa Mayer Want To Teach You '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:

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

Disclosure: Marc Andreessen is an investor in Business Insider.