How to start a startup

Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator, and Dustin Moskovitz, Cofounder of Facebook, Asana, and Good Ventures, kick off the How to Start a Startup Course. Sam covers the first 2 of the 4 Key Areas: Ideas, Products, Teams and Execution; and Dustin discusses Why to Start a Startup.

• How to Start a Startup: youtube channel. Stanford lectures.
• lecture trascripts
• Slides
  • Lecture 1 Sam
  • Lecture 1 Dustin

    People have this vision of being the CEO of a company they started and being on top of the pyramid...
    What it's really like: everyone else is your boss -- all of your employees, customers, partners, users, media are you boss.
    ...
    

Dave Parker

• dkparker.com
• Top books for startups
• KIC WTIA presentation slides
• TAM, SAM, SOM, and LAM: What’s your Launch Addressable Market?

Coursera courses

• Coursera Startup Entrepreneurship: Technion Israel Institute of Technology
• Coursera Creating and Developing A Tech Startup: offered by École Polytechnique, HEC Paris

Presentations

The single biggest reason why start-ups succeed | Bill Gross:

• Founder of IdeaLab
  • Idea: ideas are not everything
  • Team: execution - adaptability - the customer is the true reality
  • Business model
  • Funding
  • Timing
• Top 5 factors in success
  1. Timing (42%): AirBnB and Uber came right after the great recession when people needed extra money to overcome their initial rejection of the ideas. CitySearch belongs to the same category when people were looking for cost-effective ways to build web sites. On the other hand, Z.com was an online entertainment company and we had high hopes. But broadband penetration was too low in 1990-2000. A couple of years later when broadband was available, youtube came out perfectly timed and had a great success.
  2. Team/Execution (32%)
  3. Idea “Truth” Outlier (28%)
  4. Business Model (24%)
  5. Funding (14%)

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.
  -- Mike Tyson