Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, And Marissa Mayer Want To Teach You 'How To Start A Startup'

Advertisement

classroom

Joe Corrigan/Getty Images

Some 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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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:

DateSpeakerTopic
9/23/14Sam Altman, President, Y Combinator Welcome, and Ideas, Products, Teams and Execution Part I
9/25/14Sam Altman, President, Y Combinator Ideas, Products, Teams and Execution Part II
9/30/14Paul Graham, Founder, Y Combinator How to Have Ideas and How to Get Started
10/2/14Adora Cheung, Founder, Homejoy Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing
10/7/14Peter Thiel, Founder, Paypal & Palantir, and Partner, Founders Fund Business Strategy and Monopoly Theory
10/9/14Alex Schultz, VP Growth, Facebook Growth
10/14/14Kevin Hale, Founder, Wufoo and Partner, Y Combinator How to Build Products Users Love, Part I
10/16/14TBA
10/21/14Marc Andreessen, Founder, Andreessen Horowitz and Founder, Netscape Ron Conway, Founder, SV Angel Ben Silbermann, Founder & CEO, Pinterest How to Raise Money
10/23/14Alfred Lin, Former COO, Zappos and Partner, Sequoia Capital Company Culture and Buliding a Team, Part I
10/28/14Patrick and John Collison,Founders, Stripe Company Culture and Building a Team, Part II
10/30/14Aaron Levie, Founder, Box Sales and Marketing
11/4/14Reid Hoffman, Partner, Greylock Ventures and Founder, LinkedIn TBA
11/6/14Keith Rabois, Partner, Khosla Ventures How to Operate
11/11/14Ben Horowitz, Founder, Andreessen Horowitz, and Founder, and Opsware How to Manage
11/13/14Marissa Mayer, CEO, Yahoo TBA
11/18/14Hosain Rahman, Founder, Jawbone How to Build Products Users Love, Part II
11/20/14Kirsty Nathoo and Carolynn Levy, Partners, Y Combinator Mechanics--Legal, Finance, HR, etc.
12/2/14TBA
12/4/14Sam Altman, President, Y Combinator Closing Thoughts and Later-Stage Advice

Disclosure: Marc Andreessen is an investor in Business Insider.