Stanford classes for future founders

SEP 25, 2016

Recommended classes and majors for future startup founders.

Founding teams of the most successful companies have at least the following skills: sales, an ability to see things in the future that others haven't yet, building things, and building things that people want.

They also tend to know other excellent people. Classes that are good for meeting other people have been italicized.

Sales

Some classes in the business school exist on this topic

EDUC 193A Peer Counseling Skills (Sales involves being excellent at communication, and this class helps)

ORALCOMM 117 The Art of Effective Speaking

ENGR 103 Public Speaking (as an alternative to or in addition to the ORALCOMM class)

The future

ME 410A/B/C Foresight and Innovation

Could argue that many of the "building things" classes also go here. i.e. Deep learning classes, anything around genomics/bioinformatics (BIO 109A is a seminar that I believe is good on this), virtual reality

Self-awareness

ME 104S Designing Your Stanford (Freshmen and Sophomores) or ME 104B Designing Your Life (Juniors and Seniors)

Building things

CS 1U Practical Unix

CS 107 Computer Systems

CS 42 Contemporary Javascript

CS 142 Web Applications

CME 250 Introduction to Machine Learning (and others like CME 193 Scipy, CME 151 Dataviz, CME 195 R, CME 253 GPU computing)

Any other engineering/CS classes (e.g. CS 229, 228, 221) depending on what it is that you want to build

Building things that people want

PSYCH 1 Introduction to Psychology

PSYCH 70 Social Psychology

Classes in the d.school that teach their customer development method (http://dschool.stanford.edu/classes/)

CS 147 Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction Design

CS 377 Classes — Offerings change each year. See ExploreCourses here

Misc

MS&E 180 Organizations: Theory and Management (I took with Eisenhardt, she was great)

ME 178 The Spirit of Entrepreneurship

CEE 146A Engineering Economy (super easy, can skip all lectures and only lose 10% of grade or so, learn useful excel commands and learn about cash/present value/discounted cash flows/etc)

In general

Follow your interests.

Excerpt from How to Get Startup Ideas:

"You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally."

I've wondered about that passage since I read it in high school. I'm not sure how useful his advice is for painting specifically, but it fits this situation well. Empirically, the way to have good startup ideas is to become the sort of person who has them.

Being at the leading edge of a field doesn't mean you have to be one of the people pushing it forward. You can also be at the leading edge as a user. It was not so much because he was a programmer that Facebook seemed a good idea to Mark Zuckerberg as because he used computers so much. If you'd asked most 40 year olds in 2004 whether they'd like to publish their lives semi-publicly on the Internet, they'd have been horrified at the idea. But Mark already lived online; to him it seemed natural.

Paul Buchheit says that people at the leading edge of a rapidly changing field "live in the future." Combine that with Pirsig and you get:

"Live in the future, then build what's missing."

That describes the way many if not most of the biggest startups got started. Neither Apple nor Yahoo nor Google nor Facebook were even supposed to be companies at first. They grew out of things their founders built because there seemed a gap in the world.

If you look at the way successful founders have had their ideas, it's generally the result of some external stimulus hitting a prepared mind. Bill Gates and Paul Allen hear about the Altair and think "I bet we could write a Basic interpreter for it." Drew Houston realizes he's forgotten his USB stick and thinks "I really need to make my files live online." Lots of people heard about the Altair. Lots forgot USB sticks. The reason those stimuli caused those founders to start companies was that their experiences had prepared them to notice the opportunities they represented.

The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not "think up" but "notice." At YC we call ideas that grow naturally out of the founders' own experiences "organic" startup ideas. The most successful startups almost all begin this way.

That may not have been what you wanted to hear. You may have expected recipes for coming up with startup ideas, and instead I'm telling you that the key is to have a mind that's prepared in the right way. But disappointing though it may be, this is the truth. And it is a recipe of a sort, just one that in the worst case takes a year rather than a weekend.

If you're not at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field, you can get to one. For example, anyone reasonably smart can probably get to an edge of programming (e.g. building mobile apps) in a year. Since a successful startup will consume at least 3–5 years of your life, a year's preparation would be a reasonable investment. Especially if you're also looking for a cofounder.

You don't have to learn programming to be at the leading edge of a domain that's changing fast. Other domains change fast. But while learning to hack is not necessary, it is for the forseeable future sufficient. As Marc Andreessen put it, software is eating the world, and this trend has decades left to run.

Knowing how to hack also means that when you have ideas, you'll be able to implement them. That's not absolutely necessary (Jeff Bezos couldn't) but it's an advantage. It's a big advantage, when you're considering an idea like putting a college facebook online, if instead of merely thinking "That's an interesting idea," you can think instead "That's an interesting idea. I'll try building an initial version tonight." It's even better when you're both a programmer and the target user, because then the cycle of generating new versions and testing them on users can happen inside one head.