Y Combinator President Sam Altman to Teach Startup Course at Stanford

From their privileged perch a short distance from Silicon Valley, MBA students at Stanford Graduate School of Business have never experienced a shortage of entrepreneurial role models, but this fall they’re about to be inundated with them.

Sam Altman, the president of the Y Combinator startup accelerator, is teaching a course, ‘How to Start a Startup’, or CS183B as it’s known on campus, that will include presentations by a veritable who’s who of the tech and venture capital world.

According to the course description for Sam Altman’s class, it will cover “how to come up with ideas and evaluate them, how to get users and grow, how to do sales and marketing, how to hire, how to raise money, company culture, operations and management, business strategy, and more”.

Stepping up to the lectern will be Paul Graham, the Y Combinator founder; PayPal founder Peter Thiel, Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, among many others.

Sam Altman: another Stanford dropout startup success story

Sam Altman, who dropped out of  Stanford’s computer science program after founding a mobile location startup his freshman year, plans to post videos of the lectures, reading materials and assignments—1,000 minutes of content in all—online for free. Earlier this week, Sam Altman tweeted to his more than 32,000 followers that the class had more than 5,000 signups in the first three hours.

The course, which will run twice a week for 10 weeks starting Sept 23, is being offered by the Stanford engineering school, not the business school. But MBA students, many of whom came to Stanford for just this sort of thing, can watch it online.

And it’s not like the MBA students don’t have their own star faculty member with startup street cred. Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft CEO, is teaching a course called ‘Leading Organizations’ with Stanford GSB faculty member Susan Athey. In the spring Ballmer takes his act on the road, teaching a class at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business.