startup advice

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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

Chubbyemu presents a case study of a man who followed AI health advice, replaced salt with sodium bromide and developed bromism with severe neurological effects. It is told as a dramatized medical case by a doctor.

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.

A five-minute clip from Donald Knuth's Web of Stories interviews in which he gives advice to young people, including being wary when too many people adopt an idea.

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.

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.

A Startup School talk by YC partner and former Airbnb growth head Gustaf Alstromer on how startups get their first customers. It covers doing things that don't scale, founders learning sales, the sales funnel, and charging your first customer.

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

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.

Paul Graham's keynote at PyCon 2012, in which he talks about startup ideas and what kinds of companies are likely to matter in the future. He discusses ideas such as a better email client and a search engine for hackers, and argues for looking back at the present from the future.

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.

The original music video for Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen, a spoken-word piece built on Mary Schmich's 1997 column of life advice, produced by Baz Luhrmann.

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.

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and partner at 37signals, argues that planning is guessing and startups should focus on today. He says constraints are an advantage and that startups can bootstrap profitably in sizable markets.

A five-minute CBC Radio WireTap farewell video in which people of all ages offer words of wisdom to younger people. The advice is short and funny, and keeps coming back to the point that nobody really knows what they are doing.

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.

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.

A cappella parody song by The Richter Scales, set to Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start the Fire', lampooning the Web 2.0 startup bubble. It won a Webby for viral video in 2007.

Paul Graham gives a keynote in his hometown of Pittsburgh, reflecting on the old and new city and arguing that it could become a startup hub.

Balaji Srinivasan's Startup School 2013 talk on Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit, arguing for building alternatives outside existing institutions. It is the primary source for a much-retold and much-distorted idea.

A short clip from the show Silicon Valley in which the Pied Piper team meets a money guy who offers advice about having no revenue.

An Adult Swim infomercial parody for Smart Pipe, a fictional startup that turns toilet waste into data and social connectivity. It satirizes everything-connected tech culture.

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.

Jason Calacanis interviews investor Chris Sacca on This Week in Startups. Sacca discusses what makes a founder, his investments such as Kickstarter, and his personal story of losing money and recovering.