Startup School: Free Entrepreneurship Course

About this course

Building a startup involves more than having an interesting idea. You need to understand a customer problem, make something useful, find people willing to try it and learn from what they actually do. This free Startup School course brings together practical lessons from Y Combinator on those early decisions, alongside focused guidance on sales, pricing, co-founders, metrics, technical execution and building with AI.

Course at a glance

What you’ll learn

• Evaluate a startup idea through the problem, potential users and evidence available, instead of relying only on enthusiasm or a broad market label.
• Plan a focused MVP, talk to users, launch an initial version and connect customer acquisition with what the product actually delivers.
• Distinguish consumer and B2B startup metrics, connect goals with useful measures, and examine pricing, retention and founder-led sales.
• Recognise common co-founder and early hiring decisions, and understand how technical execution and fundraising fit into the broader work of building a company.

Skills you’ll gain

• Startup ideas
• Customer discovery
• MVP planning
• Founder-led sales
• Startup metrics
• Pricing
• Co-founder collaboration
• AI-enabled building

Course Overview

The curriculum covers the work of an early-stage founder from evaluating ideas and talking to users through planning an MVP, launching and getting customers. It then develops the operating side of the company: choosing useful metrics, keeping users, setting goals, pricing products and selling to businesses. Other lessons address co-founder relationships, equity mistakes, fundraising, technical founder decisions and the first hires. More recent additions explore AI-native companies, coding workflows and targeted outreach. The playlist is an evolving self-paced curriculum rather than a numbered university lecture sequence. Its newer topical lessons appear first, while the foundational explanations remain available further down the lesson list.

How the course develops

• For a first pass, begin with Should You Start A Startup? and How to Get and Evaluate Startup Ideas, then find the lessons on talking to users, building an MVP and launching. These provide a foundation for the more specialised topics.
• Use the customer, pricing and retention lessons to connect product decisions with observable behaviour. A launch is a starting point for learning, not proof that the business is working.
• Return to technical, enterprise sales, AI and hiring topics when they match a current decision. All 31 source lessons remain available so that you can revisit the relevant explanation without losing the wider curriculum.

The classroom retains every entry from the selected source playlist, including introductory or review videos when present. Follow the lesson sequence, or use the lesson search to return to a specific explanation. The source lesson titles are preserved so that you can match your place with the instructor’s materials.

Who is this for?

This course is for aspiring founders, people turning a side project into a business, first-time entrepreneurs and early employees who want to understand how a young company makes decisions. Product managers and project professionals can also use it to examine customer discovery, experiments and outcome-focused work. The lessons concentrate on early-stage startups; they are not a full operating manual for every type of established business.

Before you start

No previous founder experience is required. A rough product idea is useful but optional. Bring a notebook and be willing to separate what you know about a customer from what you are assuming. Some technical and AI-focused lessons will be more useful if you have experience building software.

Put the lessons into practice

Choose one customer problem and write a one-page experiment plan. Identify a specific user, the problem they experience, the smallest useful version of your proposed solution and one behaviour that would indicate real interest. Prepare five neutral questions for a user conversation, avoiding questions that simply ask someone to praise your idea. After the conversation, record what changed in your understanding. Then choose one metric and one next action, such as testing a prototype or contacting a small group of potential users. Keep the plan small enough to act on and revise it when the evidence changes.

This optional activity is provided by WikiFree for independent study. It is not a graded assignment from the instructor. Keep your working notes and separate evidence from assumptions so that you can review your reasoning as you progress.

Certificate / Assessment

The public YouTube videos are free to watch. Viewing them through WikiFree does not include a certificate, academic credit, admission to the Y Combinator accelerator, instructor feedback or admission to a university program.

Mark complete records your study progress; it does not assess your work or award a qualification. Examples and figures belong to the source recordings. Use the lessons to learn the analytical methods and verify current inputs before applying them to a real decision.

Frequently asked questions

Provider: Y Combinator. Videos play from the Y Combinator channel on YouTube.