CS183B WELCOME - Sam Altman

So welcome to CS183B.

I am the President of Y Combinator. Nine years ago, I was a Stanford student and I dropped out to start a company.

At YC, we’ve been teaching people how to start startups for nine years. Most of it’s hands on and specific to the startups. But, 30% of it’s pretty generally applicable. And even though that’s only 30% of the way there hopefully it’ll still be really helpful.

We’ve taught a lot of this at YC already, we’ve now funded 720 companies. And 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. Guests speakers are gonna teach 17 of the 20 classes. I’m only teaching three.

Counting YC itself, every guests speaker has been involved in the creation of a billion plus dollar company. So the advice shouldn’t be that theoretical. It’s all from people who have done it. All the advices in this class is geared towards people starting a business where the goal was hyper-growth. And eventually building a very large company. Much of it doesn’t apply in other cases and I wanna 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 than normal companies.

So over the course of toady and Thursday. I’m gonna try to give an overview of the four areas that you need to excel at in order to maximize your chances of success at a startup. And then throughout the course, the guests speakers are gonna drill into all of these in more detail.

1. Why Startups

2. 产品创意与执行

3. 产品中违背直觉的地方

4. 保持与用户的交流

5. 商业策略与垄断原理

6. 如何获得用户量的增长

7. 如何做出用户喜欢的产品

8. 创业公司的公共关系

9. 如何高效融资

10. Airbnb 创始人谈企业文化

11. 从零开始招聘与培育人才

12. 如何创造企业级产品

13. 如何做一个优秀的创始人

14. 如何运营一家创业公司

15. 如何管理