How to Start a Startup (CS183B Stanford, Y Combinator)

The market for entertainment will always be larger than the market for information.

This is easily observable on the internet (free-market flow of information) where entertainment-related content gets a disproportionate amount of clicks and views viz a viz information-related content.

There are videos titled “36 GIRLY HACKS YOU WISH YOU KNEW SOONER” that have had 2.7 million views in 5 months (this is a real example by the way, but I won’t link to it. LMM does not link to bullshit.)

Meanwhile, content that is dense in information barely has any eyes on it. CS183B, a Stanford course produced by Y Combinator and taught by actual startup founder billionaires averages about 150,000 average views per lecture (in over six years) across it’s twenty 50-minute long lectures.

I happened to stumble across this course, watched all 20 of the lectures, and found them to be very insightful – every speaker has in-the-trenches experience and is sharing his lessons from his business journey.

I want to increase its visibility, so this article contains all the 20 lectures along with working links (some of them have different sources than the official page as many of the original links have died over the years) to the recommended books and readings for each lecture. The readings are meant to be read before watching the lectures.

Lecture 1 – Sam Altman and Dustin Moskovitz – Ideas and Products; Why to Start a Startup

Readings:

• Advice for ambitious 19-year-olds by Sam Altman
• Good and Bad Reasons to Become an Entrepreneur by Dustin Moskovitz

Books recommended:

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things (India, USA, UK) by Ben Horowitz
• Zero to One (India, USA, UK) by Peter Thiel
• The Facebook Effect (India, USA, UK) by David Kirkpatrick
• The Tao of Leadership (India, USA, UK) by John Heider
• The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership (India, USA, UK) by Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Klemp
• Nonviolent Communication: Create Your Life, Your Relationships, and Your World in Harmony with Your Values (India, USA, UK) by Marshall Rosenberg PhD

Lecture 2 – Sam Altman – Teams and Execution

Readings:

• Stupid Apps and Changing the World by Sam Altman
• Do things that Don’t Scale by Paul Graham

Lecture 3 – Paul Graham – Before the Startup

Readings:

• How to Get Startup Ideas by Paul Graham
• (video) Excerpt from Steve Jobs’s 1995 interview with Computerworld’s Oral History Project – watch from 1:10:53 onwards [LMM’s note: watch the whole thing – Steve Jobs was a genius]

Lecture 4 – Adora Cheung – Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing

Readings:

• From Failure to $37M in Funding with Adora Chueng
• Why Startups Need to Focus on Sales, Not Marketing
• Unofficial: Why Homejoy Failed

Lecture 5 – Peter Thiel – Business Strategy and Monopoly Theory

Readings:

• Chapter 3-5 of Zero to One (India, USA, UK) by Peter Thiel

Lecture 6 – Alex Schultz – Growth

Readings:

• (video) How we put Facebook on the path to 1 billion users – Chamath Palihapitiya; (user-provided transcript)
• Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death? by Joel Spolsky
• A Recipe for Growth – Adding Layers to the Cake by Jeff Jordan
• Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s Early Days by Mike Isaac
• The Secret Behind Pinterest’s Growth Was Marketing, Not Engineering by Liz Gannes
• (video) Growth Accounting & Triangle Heatmap Explanation by Danny Ferante
• Startup = Growth by Paul Graham
• Chasing Facebook’s Next Billion Users by Douglas MacMillan
• (video) Ready to Grow Breakout Session at f8 [Dead link, can’t find a replacement. Leave a comment if you find it somewhere else.]

Recommended Books:

• Ogilvy on Advertising (India, USA, UK) by David Ogilvy
• Viral Loop (India, USA, UK) by Adam L. Penenberg

Lecture 7 – Kevin Hale – How to Build Products Users Love

Readings:

• Your App Makes Me Fat by Kathy Sierra
• What Makes a Design Intuitive by Jared Spool
• (video) Creative mornings with Ben Chestnut; (user-provided transcript)
• What Makes Marriages Work by John Gottman, Nan Silver
• Bonus Material
  • BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model
  • Customer Intimacy and Other Value Disciplines, Harvard Business Review
  • The Sanctity of Marriage, This American Life
  • Creating Passionate Users

Lecture 8 – Walker Williams, Justin Kan, Stanley Tang – Doing Things that Don’t Scale, PR, How to Get Started

Readings:

• The Press is a Tool by Alexia Tsotsis

Recommended books:

• Trust Me, I’m Lying (India, USA, UK) by Ryan Holiday
• A Burned Out Blogger’s Guide To PR (India, USA, UK) by Jason Kincaid

Lecture 9 – Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, Parker Conrad – How to Raise Money

Readings:

• Why Software is Eating the World by Marc Andreessen
• How to Convince Investors by Paul Graham
• How to Raise Money by Paul Graham
• Linkedin’s Series B Pitch to Greylock by Reid Hoffman
• Ron Conway’s Recommended Reading List

Recommended books:

• Born Standing Up (India, USA, UK) by Steve Martin
• Product Design for the Web (India, USA, UK) by Randy J. Hunt
• Talking to Humans (India, USA, UK) by Frank Rimalovski & Giff Constable
• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers (India, USA, UK) by Geoffrey a. Moore 
• Four Steps to the Epiphany (India, USA, UK) by Steve Blank
• Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days (India, USA, UK) by Jessica Livingston
• Thinking, Fast and Slow (India, USA, UK) by Daniel Kahneman
• The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership (India, USA, UK) by Bill Walsh with Steve Jamison & Craig Walsh
• Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae (India, USA, UK) by Steven Pressfield
• High Output Management (India, USA, UK) by Andrew S. Grove
• The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (India, USA, UK) by Jon Gertner
• Onward (India, USA, UK) by Howard Schultz and Joanne Gordon
• The Art Spirit (India, USA, UK) by Robert Henri

Lecture 10 – Alfred Lin and Brian Chesky – Hiring and Culture, Part I

Readings:

• The Happiness Culture: Zappos isn’t a Company — it’s a Mission, Fast Company
• Don’t Fuck Up the Culture by Brian Chesky

Recommended books:

• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (India, USA, UK) by Patrick Lencioni

Lecture 11 – Patrick Collison, John Collison, Ben Silbermann – Hiring and Culture, Part II

Readings:

• What’s It Like to Work for Stripe by Alex Maccaw
• How to Hire by Sam Altman

Lecture 12 – Aaron Levie – Building for the Enterprise

Readings:

• The Continuous Productivity of Aaron Levie, MIT Technology Review
• Robert Cialdini’s six principles of influence [Content no longer on Wikipedia; read the in-depth 5-page book summary at Ki Book Club]
• Marc Andreessen on the Future of Enterprise by Alexia Tsotsis

Recommended Books:

• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers (India, USA, UK) by Geoffrey a. Moore 
• The Innovator’s Dilemma (India, USA, UK) by Clayton Christensen
• Behind the Cloud (India, USA, UK) by Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler

Lecture 13 – Reid Hoffman – How to Be a Great Founder

Readings:

• The Information Age to the Networked Age: Are you Network Literate? by Reid Hoffman
• The Alliance: A Visual Summary by Reid Hoffman
• What I Wish I Knew Before Pitching LinkedIn to VCs by Reid Hoffman
• If, Why, and How Founders Should Hire a “Professional” CEO by Reid Hoffman
• The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups by Paul Graham

Lecture 14 – Keith Rabois – How to Operate

Readings:

• Bill Walsh, The Score Takes Care of Itself (India, USA, UK), pp. 2-31, 137-146, 202-203
• Andy Grove, High Output Management (India, USA, UK), Chapters 3 (optional), 4, 9, 11, 13, 14

Lecture 15 – Ben Horowitz – How to Manage

Readings:

• Making Yourself a CEO by Ben Horowitz
• A Good Place to Work by Ben Horowitz
• How to Minimize Politics in Your Company by Ben Horowitz

Recommended Books:

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things (India, USA, UK) by Ben Horowitz
• Lean In (India, USA, UK) by Sheryl Sandberg
• The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (India, USA, UK) by C.L.R. James

Lecture 16 – Emmett Shear – How to Run a User Interview

Lecture 17 – Hosain Rahman – How to Design Hardware Products

Readings:

• (video) Hosain Rahman at Startup School 2014

Lecture 18 – Carolynn Levy, Kirsty Nathoo – Legal and Accounting Basics for Startups

Readings:

• How to Work with Lawyers at a Startup by Mark Suster
• Startup Company Lawyer by Yokum Taku

Lecture 19 – Tyler Bosmeny, Michael Seibel, Dalton Caldwell, Qasar Younis – Sales and Marketing, How to Pitch, Investor Meeting Roleplaying

Readings:

• SaaStr – From-the-trenches sales advice by Jason Lemkin, founder of EchoSign
• How I Raised Myself From Failure to Success In Selling (India, USA, UK) by Frank Bettger (1949)
• Five ways to build a $100 million business by Cristoph Janz
• Pitching Hacks! How to pitch startups to investors by Venture Hacks

Lecture 20 – Sam Altman – Later-stage Advice

And that’s it – 20 lectures, and a lot of reading material. If you complete the course, make sure to pat yourself on the back.

Lecture 17 has 61,390 views at the time of writing this article. YouTube appears to count a view to be about 1 minute of watching, i.e., I would be surprised if more than 10,000 people have completed the entire course (including the article readings) in all it’s six years. So hey, if you managed to do so – you’re clearly a very focused and motivated individual! Keep it up!

Hope this helps.

Your man,

Harsh Strongman