How to Start a Startup: Free Course

About this course

How do an idea, a product, a team and day-to-day execution fit together when you start a company? This free course presents Y Combinator’s recorded How to Start a Startup lecture series taught at Stanford. Founders, operators and investors discuss the early choices behind building products users want, getting customers, forming teams, creating a company culture and managing growth.

Course at a glance

What you’ll learn

• Connect an initial idea with product development, user feedback and execution, and recognise how these activities influence each other.
• Explore how young companies acquire users, build products people care about and approach enterprise customers and growth.
• Examine the role of founders in hiring, culture, management and operating decisions as a company develops.
• Understand the scope of startup fundraising, legal and accounting discussions while distinguishing recorded examples from current professional requirements.

Skills you’ll gain

• Entrepreneurship
• Product thinking
• User interviews
• Startup growth
• Hiring and culture
• Founder leadership
• Company operations
• Startup mechanics

Course Overview

The original 2014 curriculum develops a broad founder perspective rather than focusing on a single software tool. Its early lectures consider ideas, products, teams, execution and the work that comes before a startup. Later sessions address user conversations, growth, competitive strategy, fundraising, hiring and culture. The curriculum then expands into enterprise customers, founder responsibilities, operating and managing a company, hardware product design, startup legal and accounting basics, and later-stage considerations. Different speakers bring practical examples and different emphases, making it useful to compare their assumptions instead of treating every statement as a universal rule.

How the course develops

• The source playlist mixes the numbered lectures. The classroom restores the curriculum sequence from Lecture 1 through Lecture 20 while preserving the original lesson titles and every source entry.
• Nineteen lecture videos are available. The source’s unavailable entry is retained in the missing Lecture 19 position, before Lecture 20, with an honest placeholder and SOON WILL UPLOAD because its original title is not supplied.
• Expect a mixture of product, people and business topics. Use the early lectures to establish the broad framework, then return to individual topics when your own project raises a specific question.

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.

One source entry is currently unavailable. Its original title is not supplied by YouTube, so the classroom retains an honest placeholder with SOON WILL UPLOAD in its proper place.

Who is this for?

This course is for aspiring entrepreneurs, early-stage founders, students exploring company creation and product professionals who want a wider understanding of startup work. It also suits people moving from delivering projects to owning a product or business outcome. The recorded university format provides depth and multiple perspectives, but it does not include the experience of running a company or personal feedback from the speakers.

Before you start

No previous startup experience is required. Familiarity with basic business terms is helpful, and you will benefit from thinking about a real or imagined product while studying. The recordings come from the original 2014 class. Treat references to companies, market conditions, funding practices and legal requirements as historical context and check current information before applying them.

Put the lessons into practice

Choose a product idea and create a founder decision notebook with four sections: problem and users, product and feedback, team and culture, and operations and growth. After each relevant lecture, add one decision you would need to make, the evidence you would want and a question that remains open. Draft an interview guide for a potential user and a small experiment you could run before committing to a larger build. Compare two speakers’ approaches to the same challenge and explain which assumptions make each useful. This exercise helps turn a broad lecture series into a practical map of decisions.

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.