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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

#31

Post by narsil »

It would be helpful for a class on Startup Engineering to elaborate on company building rather than jumping to product building immediately.

Quoting Fred Wilson:

[...] most of our portfolio companies build the product first, then the business, then the company. And building a company is often difficult for founders because they are so focused on the product. [1]

That said, the course does seem to touch on important topics to build a web product with tools out there today. I found the Unix section [2] a bit ambitious. If someone came in with little knowledge of Unix prior to this, as the PDF seems to assume, it provides just enough rope to hang yourself with.

The Introduction [3] also ends with "Time to start coding", which seems like a great way to build a SaaS product, but maybe not a company.

[1] http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/10/building-a-company-vs-buildi...

[2] https://spark-public.s3.amazonaws.com/cme184/unix.pdf

[3] http://spark-public.s3.amazonaws.com/cme184/introduction.pdf

Re: Stanford's new course on building a startup

#32

Post by alainmeier »

csomar wrote: post #25

Building a startup is different than building a web app. It's sad to see that the instructors are not aware of the massive difference between the two. Building a startup course should have no technical details. I'd recommend Udacity "How to build a startup" course any time and even for small businesses.

The main lecturer co-founded one of the biggest personal genomics companies in the US, so I'm quite certain that he realizes the difference between the two.

The course emphasizes using CS-related skills in any startup for product development and getting insight into your market. Example exercises are things like scraping competitor data, wading through genomic data from the cmd line and building internal APIs for managing company data.

Re: Stanford's new course on building a startup

#33

Post by hasenj »

abromberg wrote: post #28
hasenj wrote: post #23

Sounds more like a "how to build a web app" course. [0] 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. When I saw the title, I hoped that it would focus on those aspects of building a startup, sort…

I've mentioned this in a couple comments below, but I think that this class teaches you a lot more than that. I took the class when it was offered at Stanford and one of the most valuable things I took out of the class was how to build APIs for different business functions. Being able to automate huge parts of your business, regardless of what industry you're in, is a huge advantage. Think about an energy company bui…

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.

Re: Stanford's new course on building a startup

#34

Post by cjbarber »

hasenj wrote: post #23

Sounds more like a "how to build a web app" course. [0] 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. When I saw the title, I hoped that it would focus on those aspects of building a startup, sort…

Also took this class at Stanford - extremely valuable, and it does devote a significant portion to marketing and discovering what is valuable to build.

Things such as ways to create extremely minimum viable products, how to generate, and quickly validate ideas are all covered - so it definitely covers more than just the things you note.

Re: Stanford's new course on building a startup

#36

Post by hasenj »

cjbarber wrote: post #34
hasenj wrote: post #23

Sounds more like a "how to build a web app" course. [0] 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. When I saw the title, I hoped that it would focus on those aspects of building a startup, sort…

Also took this class at Stanford - extremely valuable, and it does devote a significant portion to marketing and discovering what is valuable to build. Things such as ways to create extremely minimum viable products, how to generate, and quickly validate ideas are all covered - so it definitely covers more than just the things you note.

Hm, interesting. Though the skeptic in me wonders how much of the course is focused on these aspects? A lecture or two? vs a week or two?

Re: Stanford's new course on building a startup

#37

Post by Smirnoff »

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).

Hi Balaji. I plan to build a website as a part of your class. Since I am not very tech savvy (basic knowledge of html, css, and python), will you still recommend taking your course?

Re: Stanford's new course on building a startup

#38

Post by balajis »

Smirnoff wrote: post #37
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).

Hi Balaji. I plan to build a website as a part of your class. Since I am not very tech savvy (basic knowledge of html, css, and python), will you still recommend taking your course?

Hi Smirnoff: try out the first few lectures and see if it fits your background. The key is how quickly you can pick up the web programming stuff.
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