Sam Altman (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
We will screening the lectures of the How to Start a Startup class at Reykjavik University, the room, time and schedule are TBD and I will share in the Startup Iceland Facebook Page. I was excited to see Sam Altman of Y Combinator publicly launching a business class“How to Start a Startup“at Stanford University , the purpose of the class is to teach a business course for people who want to start a startup. Simple enough, but the lineup of speakers and material is stellar. I volunteered to organize a group for Reykjavik and Iceland. I have been trying to get a classroom in Reykjavik University to see if we can screen the videos there.
It has been exciting to see the momentum of signups and the number of universities worldwide which are signing up to make sure their students participate in this class. The Facebook Group is 19842 as I type this. This signup happened in less than 3 days! Pretty impressive to see a lot of young entrepreneurs volunteering just like I did to monitor, help and facilitate the class in their location. I believe the whole notion of startups is global now.
The speaker list if you have not clicked on the link yet, is impressive like Marissa Mayer, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Reid Hoffman, Paul Graham, etc I cannot wait to absorb all of this.
We’ll cover how to come up with ideas and evaluate them, how to get users and grow, how to do sales and marketing, how to hire, how to raise money, company culture, operations and management, business strategy, and more.
You can’t teach everything necessary to succeed in starting a company, but I suspect we can teach a surprising amount. We’ve tried to take some of the best speakers from the past 9 years of Y Combinator dinners and arrange them in a way that will hopefully make sense.
We’re doing this because we believe helping a lot of people be better at starting companies will be good for everyone. It will hopefully be valuable even for people who don’t want to start startups.
Talks like these have really helped Y Combinator founders create their companies. We hope you find it helpful too!
For those of you who don’t know Y Combinator they started this whole accelerator revolution. Some of the companies that came out of Y Combinator are Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, Docker, Hipmunk, Stripe, Wufoo, Coinbase, Disqus etc So, they kind of know what they are talking about. The combined valuation of Y Combinator companies is $30.000.000.000 (yes 30 Billion USD which is one and half times the GDP of Iceland in a year)
