start with why

Simon Sinek's TEDx talk arguing that great leaders and companies inspire action by communicating why they do something before how or what. He uses Apple as his main example.

A 16-minute Y Combinator Startup School talk in which Sam Altman lays out what makes a startup succeed. It covers building a product people tell friends about, exponential markets, real versus fake trends, and having an ambitious vision.

A Startup School 2013 session where Paul Graham and Sam Altman hold live office hours with startups including CodeCombat, Flexport and others. The founders pitch and get on-the-spot feedback.

Bill Gross, who has founded and incubated many start-ups, ranked hundreds of companies on five factors. He presents the one factor that stood out as the biggest predictor of success.

A fireside chat at LAUNCH Festival 2014 where Paul Graham tells Jason Calacanis why he is handing Y Combinator's presidency to Sam Altman. He also shares startup advice drawn from nine years and 500+ startups.

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.

Practical Engineering explains what a black start is: restarting a power grid after total collapse. It shows why most plants need outside power to start and why rebuilding a synchronized grid is delicate and high-stakes.

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.

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.

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

Simon Sinek's TED talk presents the 'golden circle' model: great leaders and companies inspire action by starting with why they do something, before how or what. He illustrates it with Apple, Martin Luther King, the Wright brothers and, as a counterexample, TiVo.

Pieter Levels talks at Dojo Bali about building startups without venture capital through bootstrapping, persistence and learning many skills as a generalist. He reviews his own past projects.

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'.

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.

An episode of This Week in Startups in which Jason Calacanis interviews Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson. They discuss startups, bootstrapping and 37signals' approach to business.

Jon Stewart interviews Ezra Klein about his book Abundance and why progressive goals get stuck in procedure and regulation. They discuss how to streamline government and what could be built without bureaucratic obstacles.

Chase Adam, founder of the nonprofit Watsi, speaks at Startup School 2013 about building a nonprofit startup.

Tim Dodd's hour-long deep dive on how rocket engines start, from solid motors to liquid engines. It covers thermal conditioning, spin-up, ignition methods, starting in space, and a step-by-step RS-25 startup.

Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software and StackExchange, speaks at Y Combinator's Startup School in 2012. He shares his perspective on building startups.

A CollegeHumor sketch from the Hardly Working series in which a pair of startup founders pitch a website using incomprehensible buzzwords and branding nonsense. It parodies Silicon Valley startup culture.

A short clip of Dr. Robert Zubrin, author of The Case for Mars, answering why humanity should go to Mars. He argues that societies grow by challenging themselves and that exploration inspires young people.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day undergoes hypoxia training and experiences his own impaired thinking as oxygen is withdrawn. The video shows how quickly and unnoticeably oxygen deprivation degrades judgment, illustrating why you put your own mask on first.

A roughly 3.7-hour Lex Fridman podcast with Pieter Levels, the solo developer behind over 40 startups. They discuss programming, viral AI products, indie hacking and digital nomad life.

A two-hour Oxide and Friends session answering questions after shipping the first Oxide rack. Topics include making hardware as a startup and why Oxide chose illumos.

Y Combinator's Geoff Ralston interviews Paul Graham about startups and founders in a Startup School conversation. It touches on Viaweb, Robert Morris and what makes founders effective.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths explains why people keep making the same mistake with millions and billions, using a Bloomberg cash calculator example. He looks at the unit slip behind the repeated arithmetic error.

Robert Scoble interviews Paul Graham at Y Combinator's Mountain View headquarters as 36 new startups debut. They discuss what YC is, and Graham's no-assholes rule.

A Startup School SV 2014 conversation between Sequoia's Jim Goetz and WhatsApp founder Jan Koum. They discuss how Sequoia pursued WhatsApp, its tiny engineering team, and how it handled growth and support.

A This Week in Startups episode in which Jason Calacanis interviews David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals. They discuss bootstrapping, company philosophy and views on the tech industry.

Part two of Jason Calacanis's long interview with investor Chris Sacca on This Week in Startups. Sacca discusses his investments in Facebook, Twitter and Uber, and how he hustled his way to the top.

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.

Jason Cohen's MicroConf talk on designing a bootstrapped business by starting from your own strengths, goals and constraints. He works backward to the business model, pricing, market and product that fit, with practical points like annual prepay and pricing tiers.

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.

A short How to ADHD explainer, featuring Brendan Mahan, on why simple tasks can feel impossible for people with ADHD. It introduces the 'wall of awful', a pile of past failures, shame and anxiety that builds up in front of a task and blocks starting it.

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.

A short clip of Richard Feynman answering an interviewer's question about why magnets repel, explaining that a 'why' question depends on a shared framework of understanding. It illustrates how hard it is to explain fundamentals to a layperson.

The first stream in the Emacs From Scratch series, building a custom Emacs configuration from zero while teaching basics. It covers a usable baseline setup and the packages for completion, themes and productivity.

Daniel Dennett gives a Royal Institution talk toward a unified theory of information, tying together evolution, learning and engineering. He argues that design can arise bottom-up through small steps without a designer.

Chef Jon Kung explains why he cooks almost exclusively on induction, citing fast heating, cleanliness and precise temperature control. He shows a rounded induction wok burner.