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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

#61

Post by jonathanjaeger »

clubhi wrote: post #54
jonathanjaeger wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Re: Stanford's new course on building a startup

#62

Post by skarmklart »

hasenj wrote: post #45
skarmklart wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 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.

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

Re: Stanford's new course on building a startup

#63

Post by likeapub »

"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?

Re: Stanford's new course on building a startup

#64

Post by xmen »

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).

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

Re: Stanford's new course on building a startup

#65

Post by dncrane »

wilfra wrote: post #58
hasenj wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Re: Stanford's new course on building a startup

#66

Post by mjhea0 »

Mithrandir wrote: post #4
thejosh wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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
startup(100)
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