Stanford's new course on building a startup | Hacker News Reader

Stanford's new course on building a startup

startup.stanford.edu

210 pointsSami_Lehtinen63 comments

Sounds more like a "how to build a web app" course. [0]

Building a startup involves a lot of "soft skills" that not all developers are familiar with: marketing, talking to customers, overcoming all sorts of psychological blockers/fears about putting yourself, your ideas, and your product "out there" for all people to judge.

When I saw the title, I hoped that it would focus on those aspects of building a startup, sort of like the 30x500 course by Amy Hoy. http://unicornfree.com/30x500

[0] There's nothing wrong with doing a course for how to build web applications. I just don't think it's the same thing as building a startup.

EDIT:

It seems the official name of the course is "Startup Engineering", which makes a lot more sense than the submission title: "How to build a startup".

Please fix the title of the submission so that this comment might be deprecated.

I've mentioned this in a couple comments below, but I think that this class teaches you a lot more than that. I took the class when it was offered at Stanford and one of the most valuable things I took out of the class was how to build APIs for different business functions. Being able to automate huge parts of your business, regardless of what industry you're in, is a huge advantage. Think about an energy company building APIs to monitor consumption and efficiency at client sites and adjusting their work accordingly -- that's huge. This class does a lot more than teach you how to build webapps; it teaches you to think in an automation mindset and happens to teach you a lot of useful skills along the way.

Sure, but my main point was about the types of things taught in the class: mostly technical things.

Most developers are already good at these things (or can learn them fairly quickly). The hard part of building a startup, at least for developers, is actually learning how to run a business and grow it. How to acquire users/customers, how to market, how to take care of all the "nasty but necessary" paperwork.

The class is the sequel to the class by Peter Thiel that covered those things. Unfortunately that class isn't available online, to my knowledge - but the Stanford students who first took that and then this would be learning both.

As somebody who is already reasonably good at the soft skills, I have really been looking forward to this class as a primer and entry point (though clearly not a silver bullet) to learn the technical skills.

There are some good notes for Peter Thiel's class here: http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup

Also took this class at Stanford - extremely valuable, and it does devote a significant portion to marketing and discovering what is valuable to build.

Things such as ways to create extremely minimum viable products, how to generate, and quickly validate ideas are all covered - so it definitely covers more than just the things you note.

Hm, interesting. Though the skeptic in me wonders how much of the course is focused on these aspects? A lecture or two? vs a week or two?

It looks like weeks 8 (Founding: Conception, Composition, Capitalization) and 9 (Business Scaling: Promotion, CAC/LTV/Funnel, Regulation, Accounting) cover the crux of the business stuff.

Give me the specs for a $19.9 ebook on that, please :) I've been of the mind to write something like that for a while.

Haha, a book would be nice, but I think really the only way to learn this is by experiencing it. The book should be more of a guide about how to put yourself in the environment that forces you to learn this stuff.

Yes, I agree you can only actually learn by doing. No amount of book-reading will equal your first startup in terms of practical knowledge and how to apply it. That said, one's own startup is necessarily narrow in scope and there is a ton that the active practitioner can learn from anecdotes from other startups, especially across different markets and industries, and with different talent and network constraints.

My signup page, FWIW: http://dontkillyourcofounder.com/

"Running Lean" (O'Reilly) is excellent and Ash has a bunch of useful videos as well. I think it's currently the best "business side of a startup" book out there.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCimRGeoiwUPmIddym-HdaCg

"The Lean Startup" by Ries is also good but RL is more condensed (lean?!) imo

"Startup Owner's Manual" is also good and they have a course on edx iirc

Edit: It's a udacity class, close enough. Link:

https://www.udacity.com/course/ep245

Hey guys - this is the instructor here. You can sign up for the class at coursera.org/course/startup. The startup.stanford.edu webpage will be updated sometime tomorrow to start tracking the Coursera MOOC content.

Happy to take any feature requests, bug reports, etc. here or via email (balajis at stanford dot edu).

I'm wondering if the focus will be much on emacs only or editor agnostic?

We'll go pretty deep on emacs, especially for REPL integration and debugging. My reasoning is that most people never get a course on an editor. But people who already use vim, Textmate, or something else can just ignore those parts and use what they are comfortable with. With 100,000+ students everyone will have some part of the course that they already know cold.

Hi Balaji. I plan to build a website as a part of your class. Since I am not very tech savvy (basic knowledge of html, css, and python), will you still recommend taking your course?

Hi Smirnoff: try out the first few lectures and see if it fits your background. The key is how quickly you can pick up the web programming stuff.

Great. I will give it a try!

Will it be a video class on Coursera? Live? Time?

The title and description are somewhat at odds. "Startup Engineering", the title, makes sense - the kind of things a certain breed of startup are looking for in software engineers.

On the other hand, "Stanford's new course on building a startup from the ground up" offers only one week for "Promotion, CAC/LTV/Funnel, Regulation and Accounting" - things that are a little bit important for building a business.

And by "startup" this clearly only applies to a certain breed. If you wanted to start a Biotech startup (as a random example), the class is nigh useless.

It's a way narrower course than some of the descriptions suggest.

Hey Formite - this is the instructor here. I actually did start a reasonably successful biotech/genomics company named Counsyl[1] (~200 employees, testing 3% of US births, $65M in funding) and I do think the ambit of the course is broad enough to assist with that.

It's a good strategy these days to build one's business on top of a software core, with APIs for all major business functions and physical interface layers only when absolutely necessary. That's really the overall principle that I'm trying to communicate, along with examples in practice. Let's see if I end up being successful in this pedagogical goal!

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/23/counsyl

balajis - Thank you very much for your reply, and I'd like to say that I'm happy to be corrected. I've signed up for the class despite my concerns that it's...tangental at best to my interests...but if you succeed, I be quite content in being wrong.

I've been following the edTech space very closely for almost two years now. So I have a good idea on what free online courses are out there. I also went over all the comments below.

Here is a google doc with a collection of the best eight online courses available on platforms like Coursera, Udacity, Venture Lab, and iTunes. Together these courses form a kick-ass Internet Startup Major.

http://bit.ly/125Yidy

happy to edit if you have suggestions

Building a startup is different than building a web app. It's sad to see that the instructors are not aware of the massive difference between the two.

Building a startup course should have no technical details. I'd recommend Udacity "How to build a startup" course any time and even for small businesses.

The main lecturer co-founded one of the biggest personal genomics companies in the US, so I'm quite certain that he realizes the difference between the two.

The course emphasizes using CS-related skills in any startup for product development and getting insight into your market. Example exercises are things like scraping competitor data, wading through genomic data from the cmd line and building internal APIs for managing company data.

It's also the case that this course is designed as a follow-up to CS183. So it's expected that students have a full course that wasn't programming related on start-ups already. It's designed as 1-semester of non-tech skills and 1-semester of build.

I was excited about this. But then I realized it was mostly about software development.

Something I've realized was that it's not even worth it for me to work on my own ideas. I might as well focus on taking all the money my clients are willing to throw at me and look into hiring people to work on my ideas for much less money than I can make.

I'd love to see a course along the lines of transitioning from software developer to small business owner. At some point it stops making financial sense to read about balancing photons in radioactive black trees when you already make more point and clicking on a DBMS UI. I need to hire a few people to start helping me out. So much comes along with that that I'm not prepared for.

While there's some merit to what you're saying -- you're advocating an arbitrage, since you make more money developing for clients and can hire people for much less you still have money left over. But keep in mind the passion and dedication it takes to make a great product and know that you might not get that when simply hiring someone for less money than you make.

You make a valid point. One that I often make. However, I'm more of talking about moving my passion and dedication over to running a business and not just blindly sending projects to other firms/freelancers.

Yup. I'm actually working with some freelancers right now and paying for it with my day job (though I'm not a developer myself and chose to work with people specialized in certain areas).

The course launches tomorrow/today on Coursera:

https://www.coursera.org/course/startup

Just enrolled. It looks like this is the second time the class has been offered. Has anyone on HN already taken the course? What did you think?

I took it in the winter at Stanford. It was an amazing class - the material was very strong and there's an emphasis on working on ideas that matter. Read: not social startup #5024. Every Thursday we had hackathons that went til 6am where the main lecturer would advise us on our ideas, give feedback on the product and generally teach us about the important things™. That was considered to be v1 of the course, and I know he (the lecturer) plans to iterate on it and make it better every time it's offered.

tl;dr Highly recommended.

I'm curious how it is online. I've never taken an online Stanford course and this looks like the perfect way for me to start.

I also took the class in the winter at Stanford and had an awesome experience. We focused on the things that mattered and a bunch of really cool startups came out of the class. I can also imagine that it'll be excellent online -- Balaji put together great writeups of the content we covered that I'm still referencing now and I believe the (amazing) guest lecturers were filmed.

Have you got any links to some of the startups that came out of v1 of this class?

Old discussion (4 months ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5089487

It would be helpful for a class on Startup Engineering to elaborate on company building rather than jumping to product building immediately.

Quoting Fred Wilson:

[...] most of our portfolio companies build the product first, then the business, then the company. And building a company is often difficult for founders because they are so focused on the product. [1]

That said, the course does seem to touch on important topics to build a web product with tools out there today. I found the Unix section [2] a bit ambitious. If someone came in with little knowledge of Unix prior to this, as the PDF seems to assume, it provides just enough rope to hang yourself with.

The Introduction [3] also ends with "Time to start coding", which seems like a great way to build a SaaS product, but maybe not a company.

[1] http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/10/building-a-company-vs-buildi...

[2] https://spark-public.s3.amazonaws.com/cme184/unix.pdf

[3] http://spark-public.s3.amazonaws.com/cme184/introduction.pdf

"startup" == "SaaS web startup", apparently.

They will teach you how to make many amazing startups such as Foursquare for dogs!

There's a website that will help with that: http://itsthisforthat.com

import json, requests, csv

def startup(n):

    url = 'http://itsthisforthat.com/api.php?json'
    c = 0

    while c < n:
        data = requests.get(url=url)
        binary = data.content
        output = json.loads(binary)
        row = "It's a " + output['this'] + " for " + output['that'] +"!"
        print row
        c += 1

startup(100)

Can you expand this critique? I'm a recent grad with the prerequisite knowledge they ask for (barely) and aspirations to build cool stuff. Is my time better spent elsewhere? If so, where?

If the cool stuff you want to build includes things like alternative energy sources (solar, wind, wave, and so on) then 90% of the course will be of little benefit to you. However, if your definition of cool stuff can be boiled down to "software on the internet" then this course will likely be helpful.

I actually disagree a bit here -- Balaji and Vijay (the instructors) have both built incredibly successful companies based on many of the principles that they teach in the course. Sure, the online course won't teach you to do genomics or protein folding or build solar panels, but what it will do is allow you to create many of the components that support businesses like those. Thinking in a broader sense about what APIs for various business functions can do and how they can help you can be a tremendous help and this class can teach you how to build those APIs.

I took this course with Balaji at Stanford - definitely the best course I've taken. It was open-ended enough to let me pursue my own entrepreneurial/tech interests but provided enough support to help me avoid mistakes and learn relevant material. Can't wait to see how this course goes on a global level.

Misread the title as "Stanford's new course on building an airship". Disappointed now.

I have very little programming experience/skill but really want to take this course and am up for a challenge. Is it doable?

Anything that I could do to supplement the course to make up for my disadvantage?

Fuck it, lets do it.

> Is it doable?

I guess there's no harm trying.

> Anything that I could do to supplement the course to make up for my disadvantage?

If you want to learn programming, I can recommend "How to design programmes" (Full text available online at htdp.org)

I have an idea, and requires lot of coding hours , I feel if i start coding , By the time i finish the product will have many more competitors :) , Should i do a Proof of concept and look out for investors ?

No. No. No. No.

I just spent the last year of my life doing a 'proof of concept' and 'looking out for investors'. You'll spend your life always with a sense of insecurity drawn on by the fact that you don't have a real product.

Now, if your favorite Uncle is an investor and absolutely loves you, that's a whole different story. But realistically, make a product, find users who love it, then campaign for them by finding people to invest.

Otherwise you'll lose sight of why you're doing this.

"In the second part, you will apply these concepts to develop a simple command line application, expose it as a webservice, and then integrate other students' command line apps and webservices together with yours to create an open-source mobile HTML5 app as a final project."

I am a little confused. Does that mean we cannot simply develop our own startup idea? Why do we have to integrate other students' apps?

Anyone know if there's a list of the project ideas (some of which it sounds like became startups) from previous classes? I've looked around on Google but didn't find any such list. It would be interesting just to see what some of the ideas have been and which ones got traction...

Seems to me like they added course material for the first 2 weeks and then stopped...I wonder why. Anyone at Stanford with any insight?

The full Stanford course materials for the Jan-Mar timeframe are at stanford.coursera.org/cme184-001. The startup.stanford.edu URL tracked the first few weeks, but this was redundant for Stanford students and another page to keep up to date. So the material there is more of a teaser for people interested in the Coursera MOOC class.

That said, it will be more useful for the Coursera students to have a site that is accessible when logged out, so look for startup.stanford.edu to track the MOOC course material beginning tomorrow evening or so.

Question: Does this cost money?

It's free online: https://www.coursera.org/course/startup

Is there a reason I can't access the material from the winter semester?

The material has changed significantly since v1. Page will be updated soon to track Coursera materials.

Seems very interesting. I signed up, when is it starting?

Page keeps loading for me, then bogs down, and then freezes completely and kills my chrome browser. Anyone know what's up?

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Google Chrome 23.0.1271.64 (Official Build 165188) m

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WebKit 537.11 (@132838)

JavaScript V8 3.13.7.5

Flash 11.5.31.2

User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.64 Safari/537.11

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