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Stanford's new course on building a startup

startup.stanford.edu

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Re: Stanford's new course on building a startup

#12

Post by alainmeier »

trg2 wrote: post #7

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.

Re: Stanford's new course on building a startup

#13

Post by balajis »

Fomite wrote: post #8

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 "s…

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

Re: Stanford's new course on building a startup

#14

Post by heyheyhey »

trg2 wrote: post #7

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'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.

Re: Stanford's new course on building a startup

#15

Post by balajis »

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).

Re: Stanford's new course on building a startup

#17

Post by AYBABTME »

balajis wrote: post #15

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?

Re: Stanford's new course on building a startup

#19

Post by balajis »

AYBABTME wrote: post #17
balajis wrote: post #15

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.
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