start menu

The opening lecture of the How to Start a Startup course at Stanford, with Sam Altman covering ideas and products and Dustin Moskovitz discussing why to start a startup.

Paul Graham's lecture in the 'How to Start a Startup' course, covering counterintuitive parts of startups and how to have ideas. It is the video form of his essay 'Before the Startup'.

Peter Thiel's lecture from the How to Start a Startup course on business strategy and monopoly theory, arguing that competition destroys profits and that startups should aim to build monopolies. It covers the ideas of Zero to One.

Alan Kay's Stanford Startup School lecture covers his career at Xerox PARC and how to think about inventing the future. He goes through what came out of PARC and why companies fail to capitalize on such ideas.

Part two of Alan Kay's Stanford Startup School lecture on inventing the future. He draws on his time at Xerox PARC and elsewhere to discuss how to think about new technology and what makes ideas useful.

Segment co-founder and CEO Peter Reinhardt recounts how his company found product-market fit, including how a product grew out of a small feature of another. It is a lecture from Stanford's Startup School course.

Guy Kawasaki's UC Berkeley Haas talk on the top ten mistakes entrepreneurs make, covering a startup from inception to exit.

Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel lectures at Startup School on building a product people want: identifying the problem, the customer, an MVP and which customers to pursue first.

Y Combinator partner Pete Koomen, who led Optimizely to $100M ARR, walks through the enterprise sales funnel. Chapters cover prospecting, outreach, qualification, pricing, closing, procurement and implementation.

Tyler Bosmeny, CEO of Clever, gives a Y Combinator Startup School talk on how early-stage companies should approach sales and build an enterprise sales team.

A December 2005 guest lecture by Mark Zuckerberg in Harvard's CS50, discussing Facebook's early days, its technical choices and computer science. It captures him as a 21-year-old founder before Facebook's rise.

A short clip from Udacity's Web Development course in which Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman describes how Reddit grew early on. He explains seeding the site with content from fake accounts.

Patrick Winston's long-running MIT lecture on public speaking teaches heuristic rules for talks. It covers how to start, use time and place, boards, props and slides, and how to inform, persuade and finish.

Andrej Karpathy's first Neural Networks: Zero to Hero lecture, which builds micrograd, a tiny autograd engine, from scratch in Python. It explains backpropagation and neural network training step by step, assuming only basic Python and some high-school calculus.

The opening lecture of Robert Sapolsky's Stanford course on Human Behavioral Biology, explaining the course premise and how to avoid categorical thinking. It starts a roughly 25-lecture series on how biology, genes, hormones and environment shape behavior.

Robert Wills of TNMoC explains the Apollo Guidance Computer hardware and software, then walks through the Apollo 11 landing procedure step by step, including the 1202 alarms.

Regent Law professor James Duane gives startling reasons why people, even innocent ones, should always exercise their Fifth Amendment rights rather than talk to police. It is based on his article and book on the subject.

Jack Szostak's lecture covers how cellular life could have arisen from chemistry on the early Earth, starting from the odds of life elsewhere in the galaxy. It is part of a series on protocells and the RNA world.

The opening lecture of Steve Brunton's Control Bootcamp, covering the kinds of control and why closed-loop feedback matters. It starts a series that follows the control chapter of the Brunton and Kutz data-driven science book.

Leonard Bernstein's 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard, starting with Musical Phonology. He draws analogies between music and linguistics, including references to Chomsky.

Vladimir Voevodsky's IAS lecture starts from Godel's second incompleteness theorem to explore whether first-order arithmetic could be inconsistent. It motivates his vision of univalent foundations and computer-checked proofs.

The first lecture of Leonard Susskind's Stanford Continuing Studies course on modern physics, beginning with classical mechanics. It is the start of a six-quarter sequence on the theoretical foundations of physics.

Noam Chomsky's 2011 University of Oslo lecture on Newton's contributions to the study of mind. He argues Newton abandoned mechanical explanation and lowered the bar for scientific intelligibility, with consequences for the limits of human understanding. Q&A starts at 45:33.

First lecture of Stanford's CS106A Programming Methodology by Mehran Sahami, giving a course overview and starting on programming. The course teaches software engineering principles using Java.