
New Coursera class, "Startup Engineering" - msprague
https://www.coursera.org/course/startup
======
balajiss
Primary instructor here. Was going to wait to post this to HN till I had more
material up, but please check out <http://startup.stanford.edu>.

We'll have a bunch of speakers over the course of the class from more than a
dozen of the top startups in the Valley (Square, Uber, Stripe, AirBnB, etc.)
to round out the technical material. Agreed with one commenter that there are
indeed a lot of TLAs, but that's for the SEO ;)

The class is being taught on the Stanford campus now from January through
March, and the lecture notes will be open sourced (probably under AGPL) in
April. This will provide a free textbook to combine with the MOOC itself, so
that those in the developing world have access.

Any constructive feedback would be most appreciated, and my email is balajis
at stanford dot edu.

~~~
qdnguyen
Looking forward for your course on Coursera! By the way, while looking at your
introduction slide on <http://startup.stanford.edu> I've noticed that
"Frontend JS Framework" and "Frontend CSS Framework" are in the wrong order
(Page 11, Column name "Type").

~~~
balajiss
Thanks. Will fix this and a few other typos (DCVS -> DVCS).

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danso
I signed up for the class. In the confirmation email is a pitch they should've
used on the class page:

 _Finally, perhaps one anecdote will give a sense of what you will gain from
the course. In 2007 a relatively small Stanford class of 75 students wrote
apps for the then-nascent Facebook platform. Within ten weeks, the students
had amassed more than sixteen million users and one million dollars in
revenue. And that was five years ago, before the worldwide installation of
hundreds of millions of smartphones and tablets. What will happen today once
we have 100,000+ students learning startup engineering in parallel, building
apps with mobile platforms as a first class target?_

The link it refers to is:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/technology/08class.html?pa...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/technology/08class.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

~~~
hkmurakami
Well, I think what would happen today is that those apps will be buried in the
noise of Facebook app streams and will be less successful (in expectation at
least) than their 2007 counterparts (unless the course comes with an
equivalent focus on marketing efforts for such apps). There are just _so_ many
more commercial apps with heavy marketing resources behind it, that the
average student app would unfortunately have a much tougher time getting the
attention of eyeballs.

That being said, I have enrolled :)

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mendocino
> Learn the engineering skills needed to build a technology startup from the
> ground up.

"Learn the engineering skills needed to build a web startup from the ground
up." FTFY

~~~
tmh88j
I guess the web isn't technology...

~~~
namdnay
Technology is not the web

~~~
tmh88j
You don't know what technology is, do you?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology>

~~~
pavedwalden
I think the point he was making is along the lines of "all squares are
rectangles but not all rectangles are squares"

------
msprague
Looks pretty cool:

Syllabus:

Introduction and Quickstart Tools: VMs, IAAS/PAAS, Unix Command Line, Text
Editors, DCVS Frontend: HTML/CSS/JS, Wireframing, Market Research Backend:
SSJS, Databases, Frameworks, Data Pipelines APIs: Client-side templating,
HTTP, SOA/REST/JSON, API as BizDev Devops: Testing, Deployment, CI,
Monitoring, Performance Dev Scaling: DRY, Reading/Reviewing/Documenting Code,
Parallelizing Founding: Conception, Composition, Capitalization Business
Scaling: Promotion, CAC/LTV/Funnel, Regulation, Accounting Summary and Demo
Week

------
jtchang
Wow the topics look pretty solid. I've never met Dr. Srinivasan but his
credentials look impressive.

What I like most about the topics are that they are focused on what is needed
from the tech side when starting a company.

In fact I would argue that a technical cofounder should be able to offer
pros/cons and at least a few suggestions for each of these topics. Being semi
opinionated about these types of topics is sometimes what separates a senior
engineer from a junior one. (But not blindly opinionated).

For examples:

\- VMs - Big leader is VMWare followed by a host of others. Almost any cloud
service will be based around some form of virtualization such as Xen. Most
startups use VMs because it is cheaper than buying regular hardware.

\- IAAS/PAAS - Talk a bit about Amazon EC2 for infrastructure services. Jump
into stuff like Heroku and why it is different than EC2.

\- Text Editors - Pick whatever one you like. Don't be afraid to learn a new
one if it helps your productivity.

\- Frameworks - Use one. Don't write your own unless your startup is
predicated on selling a framework to developers.

Etc...etc.

~~~
chii
bth, the set of topics seems like an amalgamation of buzzwords and TLAs. I
seriously doubt they can go into any sort of depth if they are all covered.

~~~
rgrieselhuber
Sometimes a view of the entire landscape puts everything into perspective
enough that it's much easier to go deeper on your own into the areas that you
need the most.

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jiggy2011
This looks like an extremely expansive menu of topics, pretty much anything on
that list could be an entire 10 week course in itself.

~~~
balajiss
Right, the idea is a survey course with links for depth. Many of these are
areas you need to have at least some familiarity with at the inception of a
new company, and they really aren't taught well (even at a survey level)
within academia at the present time. This is a first step towards remedying
that; hopefully more in-depth courses will follow.

~~~
priyadarshy
This is a powerful approach. I know a lot of really brilliant people who want
to "do a startup" but they don't have the tools and don't even know what tools
they need to start building. Thanks in advance for teaching this course!

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hnwh
this looks perfect for all those who "want to do a startup"

~~~
salemh
Sincere question though, I imagine the linking too the pre-req cs198 Standford
course work, that even doing, e.g. Udacity intro to CS101, Learn Python the
Hard Way may be too "light" of knowledge to sign up.

Should I try and gear up C++/burn through as much as possible of:
<https://cs198.stanford.edu/cs106/> (I did some C++ in highschool YEARS ago,
but was mostly a mIRC script kiddie).

In preparation for this course to be valuable to a non-coder (that's
learning), like myself?

~~~
hnwh
I'd say don't waste your time going through C++. Python is a great language to
get started with, and will serve well for many web focused startups, as well
as with dev ops and systems administration. This course will likely emphasize
giving you the broad base of tools and habits you need to succeed, not
drilling code syntax and algorithms into your head (which you can always do
later). So imho, do your CS101 and dive in. // CTO, and tech advisor to
several startups

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cing
I find it unusual that Vijay Pande is co-instructing this course. Of course
I'm intrigued because computational structural biology is my area of research,
but is Dr. Pande really qualified to teach about the topics in the syllabus?

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aorshan
Definitely signed up for this. Should be really interesting.

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dschiptsov
_Bringing up node.js REPL:_ \- No, thank you.)

