Ideas, Products, Teams, and Execution with Dustin Moskovitz (How to Start a Startup 2014: Lecture 1)

Welcome! Can I turn this on? Baby, all right. Hit people here. Can you guys hear me? Is the mic on? No? Maybe you can ask them to turn it on. Maybe we can get a big—there we go. All right! Maybe we can get a bigger auditorium; we'll see.

So welcome to CS 183 B! I'm Sam Altman; I'm the president of Y Combinator. Nine years ago, I was a Stanford student, and then I dropped that to start a company, and I've been an investor for the last few. So, YC, we've been teaching people how to start startups for nine years. Most of it's very hands-on and specific to the startups. About thirty percent of it is pretty generally applicable, and so we think that we can teach that thirty percent in this class, and even though that's only thirty percent of the way there, hopefully, it'll still be really helpful.

We've taught a lot of this at YC already, but it's all been off the record. This is the first time that a lot of what we teach in life you can be on the record. So we've invited some of our best speakers to come and give the same talks to give at YC. We've now funded seven hundred and twenty companies, and so we're pretty sure that a lot of this advice is pretty good. We can't fund every startup yet, but we can hopefully make this advice very generally available.

Guest speakers are going to teach seventeen of the twenty classes; I'm only teaching three. Counting YC itself, every guest speaker has been involved in the creation of a billion-plus dollar company, so the advice should be that theoretical. It's all been from people who have done it. All the advice in this class is geared towards people starting a business where the goal is hyper growth and eventually building a very large company. Much of it doesn't apply in other cases, and I want to warn people up front that if you try and do these things in a lot of big companies or non-startups, it won't work. It should still be interesting.

I really do think that startups are the way of the future, and it's worth trying to understand them, but startups are very different from normal companies. So over the course of today and Thursday, I'm going to try to give an overview of the four areas that you need to excel at in order to maximize your chances of success in a startup. Then, throughout the course, the guest speakers are going to drill into all of these in more detail.

So the