Startups courses

Browse public Startups courses with structured lessons, visuals, and practice on Wondering.

  • How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1,000 users

    Lenny Rachitsky's study of how Tinder, Uber, DoorDash, Pinterest, Product Hunt, Netflix, and dozens of other apps found their earliest users, told through the founders' own stories, and how to choose and run the two or three strategies that fit your consumer app.

  • How to Raise Money

    Paul Graham’s 2013 essay explains how early startup fundraising really works: why investors stall and then rush, how to run parallel conversations, how much to ask for, how to think about price and dilution, and when to accept an offer or stop raising.

  • The Lean Startup

    Eric Ries's 2011 book argues that startups, from garages to large companies, need a management method built for extreme uncertainty. It covers validated learning, MVPs, innovation accounting, pivots, and engines of growth, so founders can test their riskiest assumptions before scaling.

  • Venture Deals

    Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson's guide to how venture capital deals work, from the economics and control terms in a term sheet to convertible notes and running a raise. Founders come away able to read a term sheet, run the key math, and spot which points deserve a fight.

  • How to Start a Startup

    Paul Graham's 2005 essay argues that a startup needs three things: good people, something customers actually want, and spending as little as possible. You will be able to judge co-founders, test a version 1 with users, raise seed money wisely, and keep costs low.

  • How to Earn a Billion Dollars

    Paul Graham connects startup wealth to compound growth, a large market, and products users recommend. Founders can work through the arithmetic, examine its assumptions, and trace useful ideas back to a deep understanding of a group of users.

  • How Universities Should Prepare Founders

    Paul Graham argues that universities prepare founders through deep knowledge, a habit of building, and room for students’ own projects. Students and educators can compare those conditions with programs that emphasize pitching an idea before making something users want.

  • Schlep Blindness

    Paul Graham explains how aversion to tedious work can hide valuable startup ideas. Founders can distinguish customer demand from their own reluctance and reconsider problems that require negotiations, operations, or unfamiliar work.

  • Default Alive or Default Dead?

    Paul Graham examines whether a startup can reach profitability before its cash runs out. Founders can use the distinction to separate a survival plan from fundraising hopes and judge whether hiring will help growth or shorten the time left to fix the product.

  • How to get your first customers

    Gustaf Alströmer explains Y Combinator's practical approach to early customer acquisition: founder-led sales, manual recruiting, simple funnels, charging for value, and working backwards from customer goals.

  • How to get startup ideas

    Jared Friedman's Y Combinator Startup School talk explains how founders can avoid bad startup ideas, evaluate promising ones with concrete criteria, disable filters that hide good opportunities, and generate ideas through expertise, personal problems, market changes, and customer research.

  • Finding Product-Market Fit

    A practical course for founders and product teams on turning customer pain into traction, based on David Rusenko's Y Combinator talk about how Weebly found product-market fit.

  • How to Succeed with a Startup

    In this 2018 Y Combinator talk, Sam Altman explains recurring conditions behind successful startups, from products people recommend and fast-growing markets to ambitious founders, high-agency teams, durable advantages, and situations where startups can outperform large companies.

  • The Arc Product-Market Fit Framework

    Sequoia Capital’s Arc framework describes three distinct paths to product-market fit: Hair on Fire, Hard Fact, and Future Vision. The course helps founders identify which path matches their market, evaluate fit through recurring customer and market questions, and avoid applying the wrong startup playbook.

  • Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution

    Uri Levine, co-founder of two billion-dollar companies (Waze and Moovit), shares his entrepreneurial wisdom in this comprehensive handbook for startup founders. The book's central thesis is that successful entrepreneurs obsess over problems, not solutions—enabling flexibility, rapid iteration, and genuine value creation. Readers will learn to navigate the complete startup lifecycle from identifying worthy problems through achieving product-market fit, fundraising, scaling, and managing inevitable crises.

  • The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn

    Paul Graham identifies seven counterintuitive lessons that startups repeatedly struggle to learn, derived from his experience funding companies through Y Combinator. The lessons are 'hard' not because they're complex but because they're counterintuitive—they contradict what founders expect or want to believe. Many represent inversions of how established companies operate, which makes them particularly difficult for founders coming from corporate backgrounds. The essay emphasizes action over planning, continuous improvement over one-time launches, user happiness over competitive positioning, and commitment over intelligence.

  • Startups in 13 Sentences

    Paul Graham distills the essence of startup success into 13 concise principles that serve as a practical roadmap for founders. Written in February 2009, these sentences emerged from his experience funding and advising hundreds of startups through Y Combinator. The essay's core philosophy centers on a counterintuitive insight: it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy. This principle of depth over breadth runs throughout the 13 sentences, informing advice on user relationships, product development, and growth strategy. The sentences range from foundational to psychological to tactical, forming a coherent philosophy.

  • Startup = Growth

    Paul Graham establishes a precise definition that cuts through common confusion: a startup is not simply a newly founded company or a tech company—it's specifically "a company designed to grow fast." This definition has profound implications that explain everything distinctive about startups: why they cluster in technology, why venture capital exists, why founders seek acquisitions, why failure rates are high, and why successful founders become wealthy. The essay provides practical guidance on measuring and achieving growth, with Y Combinator considering 5-7% weekly growth solid performance and 10% exceptional.

  • Ideas for Startups

    Paul Graham addresses why generating startup ideas seems difficult and offers practical advice for overcoming this challenge. His central argument: people overvalue startup ideas, treating them as million-dollar concepts that must be perfect before beginning. In reality, most startups end up nothing like the initial idea. Initial concepts function better as exploratory questions rather than rigid blueprints. The essay emphasizes environmental factors over brainstorming techniques: exposure to promising new technologies and conversations with the right people. The best startup ideas emerge as byproducts of genuine problem-solving rather than forced brainstorming.

  • How to Convince Investors

    Paul Graham argues that inexperienced founders should focus on building something genuinely worth investing in rather than perfecting their pitch. His counterintuitive insight: the best way to convince investors is to 'let your startup do the work' by first convincing yourself, then transparently explaining why your company merits investment. The essay identifies three essential elements investors seek: formidable founders, promising markets, and evidence of success. Rather than recommending that founders fake these qualities, Graham advises becoming genuinely formidable through deep domain expertise.

  • Do Things That Don't Scale

    Paul Graham challenges a core assumption many founders make: that successful startups must be built on scalable processes from day one. The essay argues that the most common Y Combinator advice is to do things that don't scale—manually recruiting users, obsessively delighting early customers, and performing labor-intensive work that seems inefficient. These unscalable activities aren't just acceptable; they're essential to building momentum and discovering what actually works. Successful companies like Stripe, Facebook, Pebble, and Wufoo all began with founders doing things that couldn't possibly scale.

  • Billionaires Build

    This essay connects what Y Combinator looks for in startup founders with how people actually become billionaires from starting companies. Paul Graham's central insight: the defining quality of people who become billionaires from starting companies is genuine interest in their work, not exploitative behavior. Successful founders who became billionaires could have stopped sooner by accepting acquisition offers, but they continued because they found their work intrinsically motivating. They built products users genuinely wanted, and scale created wealth—not exploitation or rent-seeking.

  • 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups

    Paul Graham identifies 18 critical mistakes that kill startups, with the overarching theme that all failures ultimately trace back to one fundamental problem: not making something users want. Each mistake represents a different path to this same destination—from foundational choices like single founder and bad location, through execution problems like slowness in launching and hiring bad programmers, to psychological traps like obstinacy and half-hearted effort. The essay provides both diagnostic patterns and preventive guidance, revealing how seemingly unrelated problems often share common roots.

  • Zero to One

    PayPal co-founder and first Facebook investor Peter Thiel presents unconventional advice arguing that the most valuable startups create something entirely new ("zero to one") rather than incrementally improving existing products ("one to n"). The book makes the counterintuitive case that creative monopolies drive progress by giving customers more choices through new categories of abundance, while perfect competition yields no profits in the long run. Thiel's strategy: start small by monopolizing a niche market where you dominate a large share, then scale to larger markets—every startup should begin with a very small market.