Startup Investing: Free Seed Investment Course

About this course

Early-stage startup investing involves evaluating uncertain businesses before a long operating history exists. This free course presents Y Combinator’s recorded Startup Investor School curriculum, covering how seed investors think about companies, funding structures, portfolio decisions and working with founders. It is a focused educational course for understanding the process and vocabulary, rather than a promise of investment returns.

Course at a glance

What you’ll learn

• Describe the main activities of a seed investor, including finding opportunities, evaluating a young company and deciding what further evidence is needed.
• Examine how portfolio construction, uncertainty and ownership fit into early-stage investing without treating any single example as a guaranteed outcome.
• Recognise the vocabulary of equity, SAFEs, convertible notes, cap tables and dilution, and identify questions that require current professional guidance.
• Compare the perspectives of different instructors and prepare a structured set of questions for understanding a startup and its founder relationships.

Skills you’ll gain

• Seed investing concepts
• Startup evaluation
• Due diligence questions
• Portfolio thinking
• Cap table literacy
• Dilution awareness
• Investor-founder relationships

Course Overview

Startup Investor School was taught as a four-day course in 2018. Its recordings include an introduction, individual teaching sessions and full-day streams. The curriculum examines getting started as a seed investor, finding opportunities, evaluating companies, making decisions and building a portfolio. It also introduces ownership, dilution, cap tables and the differences between forms of startup financing. Contributions from experienced investors and Y Combinator educators add perspectives on how investors work with companies. The course is preserved as a historical recording; references to program access, particular deals, legal rules or market conditions belong to the time it was taught.

How the course develops

• Begin with Geoff Ralston’s introduction and the individual sessions grouped by course day. They provide a manageable way to follow the instructional material.
• The playlist also retains four full-day recordings. These overlap with the individual sessions, so you can choose a viewing format while still having access to every original source entry.
• Fifteen videos are available: eleven individual segments and four full-day streams. One unavailable source entry is retained in its original position with SOON WILL UPLOAD. YouTube does not provide its original title.

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 suits people studying angel or seed investing, founders who want to understand investor thinking, entrepreneurship students and professionals supporting early-stage companies. It is best approached as an introduction to a specialised process, not a substitute for experience, due diligence or professional advice. A founder can use the lessons to understand the questions an investor may ask without assuming that completing the videos leads to funding.

Before you start

Basic familiarity with a startup’s product, customers and business model is helpful. You do not need to invest money to study the course. A spreadsheet or notebook can support the practice exercise. The recordings are from 2018, so verify current legal, tax and financing information before using it in a real transaction.

Put the lessons into practice

Use a fictional startup to write a short evaluation memo. Separate the team, customer problem, product evidence, business model, risks and unanswered questions. For every positive claim, note what evidence supports it and what would weaken the claim. Create a simple illustrative ownership table, then explain in plain language what information you would need before analysing dilution. Do not choose real investments for this exercise. Finish by listing three questions for the founder and three matters that would require current legal or financial expertise. The objective is disciplined reasoning, not selecting a winner.

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.