Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, And Marissa Mayer Want To Teach You 'How To Start A Startup'

Some of the most prominent investors and entrepreneurs are joining startup incubator Y Combinator’s Sam Altman to teach a class called “How to Start a Startup,” starting next week.

The 20-session course will be taught at Stanford within its computer science department. But all videos, reading materials, and assignments will be posted online on Altman’s website, so anyone can follow the class content for free.

Altman, Y Combinator’s president, will teach the first two sessions. But from Sept. 30, he will be inviting a star-studded lineup of guest lecturers, including Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, and Marissa Mayer. They will cover topics from business strategy and monopoly to how to raise money.

Altman said on the class website: 

“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.”

Here’s the full course schedule: