How to Start a Startup Summary
Conclusion
If you are serious about starting a startup, you’ll be investing tens of thousands of hours doing it. Spending 15 to 150 hours now to learn some of the core principles could be the difference between success and wasting years of your life and hundreds of thousands (or more) of someone’s money.
Learning
Psychologist Carl Rogers said, “the only kind of learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered or self-appropriated–truth that has been assimilated in experience.”
Remembering
You can just watch the videos if you want, but studies say you’ll forget 50% of the material by tomorrow. And by next month you’ll have forgotten 80%. If you follow a few steps you can put the most important lessons in your long-term memory.
- while watching a video, write down important points you want to remember
- at the end, review each point; think about how it relates to an experience you’ve had; what examples did the speaker give; what were other details
- now, take a blank sheet of paper and write down the important points from MEMORY (no peeking)
- check what you wrote against your notes and if you missed any points get another blank sheet of paper and try again until you can write everything from memory
- try to recall the points again in 1 day, then 3, then 1 week, then 1 month (or as needed)
Aha Moments
The deeper you get into the material (watching, learning, recalling, discussing with others, relating to your past experiences, creating new experiences) and researching the topics, people, and companies, then the more details you uncover and more connections you make, leading to a greater sense of understanding and mastery.
Knowing the material isn’t enough. You have to understand it well enough to know in which situation to apply each concept.
Readings
- required reading before anything else, imho
- all readings
All Videos by Topic
- Building a Great Product BEFORE Anything Else
- Before the Startup by Paul Graham (9/30)
- Why Start a Startup (2nd speaker from 25:34 to 43:40) by Dustin Moskovitz (9/23)
- How to Get Started by Stanley Tang (10/16)
- Legal and Accounting Basics by Kirsty Nathoo, Carolynn Levy (11/20)
- Competition is for Losers by Peter Thiel (10/7)
- Ideas and Products by Sam Altman (9/23)
- Building Product, Talking to Users by Adora Cheung (10/2)
- How to Build Products Users Love by Kevin Hale (10/14)
- Doing Things That Don’t Scale by Walker Williams (10/16)
- How to Run a User Interview by Emmett Shear (11/13)
- Building for the Enterprise by Aaron Levie (10/30)
- Seeking Funding After Building a Great Product
- How to Raise Money by Mark Andreesen, Ron Conway, Parker Conrad (10/21)
- How to Talk to Investors (2nd speaker from 19:30 to 33:48) by Michael Seibel (12/2)
- Investor Meeting Roleplaying (3rd section from 33:48 to 48:50) by Dalton Caldwell, Qasar Younis (12/2)
- Building a Great Company After Building a Great Product
- Teams and Execution by Sam Altman (9/25)
- Growth by Alex Schultz (10/9)
- PR by Justin Kan (10/16)
- Culture by Alfred Lin and Brian Chesky (10/23)
- Hiring and Culture part 2 by Patrick Collison, John Collison, Ben Silbermann (10/28)
- Sales and Marketing by Tyler Bosmeny (12/2)
- How to be a Great Founder by Reid Hoffman (11/4)
- How to Operate by Keith Rabois (11/6)
- How to Manage by Ben Horowitz (11/11)
- How to Design Hardware Products by Hosain Rahman (11/18)
- Closing Thoughts and Later-Stage Advice by Sam Altman (12/4)
Class Resources
- Official Class Homepage
- All Readings
- Youtube video channel
- Reddit Project Submissions
- Discussion Forum
- Cleveland Code Meetup
Researching Startups and Founders
Bonus: Airbnb Case Study
Series
- Prev: Later-Stage Advice
- First: About Series
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