lambda school

David Heinemeier Hansson's talk at Startup School 2008 on building a profitable startup. He argues for bootstrapping and small, well-run companies instead of chasing investment and exits.

Paul Graham speaks at Startup School 2008 about how to create a successful startup. His talk emphasizes being good, not just avoiding being evil, as a strategic advantage.

Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail and founder of FriendFeed, speaks at Startup School 08 about listening to users. He covers feedback, features, aiming for 100 happy users, and treating "that's impossible" as a statement of limited experience.

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch speaks at Startup School 2008 about how to get press coverage for a startup and how to respond to it.

Peter Norvig, then Director of Research at Google, talks at Startup School 2008 about leveraging large amounts of data and about technical challenges in Google projects such as image search. A central idea is that data can beat hand-written programming.

Sir Ken Robinson argues, with humor and stories such as that of choreographer Gillian Lynne, that education systems undermine creativity and should be changed. It is one of the most viewed TED talks.

Ed Catmull of Pixar speaks at Stanford's 2007 Entrepreneurship Conference on running a creative company. He argues for surfacing small problems early and building good teams, with stories like the Toy Story 2 crunch.