yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

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


2m read
·Nov 3, 2024

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

More Articles

View All
Graphing logarithmic functions (example 2) | Algebra 2 | Khan Academy
This is a screenshot from an exercise on Khan Academy. It says the interactive graph below contains the graph of y is equal to log base 2 of x as a dashed curve, and you can see it down there is that dashed curve with the points (1, 0) and (2, 1) highligh…
New Crew, Same Pissah | Wicked Tuna
Chum and they will come with Lance. Brad and I, we are gonna catch a ton of tuna fish this year. Drop you like a bad habit. I’ve known Paul for about two and a half years. He’s a great guy; he’s a great fisherman. The reason why I’m fishing is to provide …
Introducing a New Baby Elephant – Day 85 | Safari Live
Today, X is malaria; thankfully, that is the best in the home B. Of course, I do excuse the shadows on my face, but you will notice that when I turn my face to the Sun, I’m unable to open my eyes. That is because it is so very bright. So let’s not look at…
The Next Great Reset | Why The UK Is Collapsing
What’s up, Graham? It’s Guys here and it’s official: the global economy is tanking. In the last 24 hours, Hong Kong and Chinese stocks crashed to a 13-year low. UK’s Prime Minister resigned under financial pressure, holding the shortest term ever in Briti…
When The Housing Crash Will Happen
What’s up you guys? It’s Graham here, and if you thought the housing market was expensive, it got worse. Despite higher interest rates, record low affordability, and a 60% chance of recession, the housing market is now $2 trillion more expensive. That’s r…
How The World’s Richest Man Actually Has Very Little Cash...
As of October the 13th, 2021, the Forbes realtime list of billionaires has Elon Musk at number one with a personal net worth of $26.6 billion. If you want some context, that’s about the same as the gross domestic product of Greece. This means Musk’s fortu…