Welcome

Welcome to this class! The goal of the class is to help you build a software startup.

Sounds simple, right? Well...

We will learn about a number of different aspects of the process, including technical (CS), 

business, law, and other related information. 

Most of the learning and hard part will be done on your own; thus, be prepared to

take ownership of what you are doing! Do not sit back and wait for the class to come

to you.

Basic Info

Time: Mondays at 4-6:30pm

Place: CS 1221 (might change)

Materials

There is a lot of terrific material available on the web for free; an enterprising student

will find and digest as much of this as needed. That said, for class we will focus on

(some subset of) the following materials:

• Lean Startup
• Getting Real
• Startup Owner's Manual 
• How To Get Startup Ideas (or anything by PG) 
• Founder's Institute and Founder's Workbench 

More will be added here as the semester goes along. 

Work

Class will consist of a set of four warm-up mini-projects to (a) get your feet wet in the

area of web development and (b) meet as many other potential partners as possible,

and a final project where you start your own company, build a prototype, and pitch

what you have done to the Professors and others. 

The mini-projects are to be done in groups of three, with different team members

each time. Each mini-project will be demo'd in class in front of everyone. Be prepared!

We'll also assign a few other bits of work, such as pitches, demos, etc., as related

to the class. 

The assignment list:

• Twitter (due 2/03): Build a little twitter clone. Requirement: Deploy it on Heroku.
  Show off your skills! Consider using Bootstrap to make it look good. Any framework
  is fine; choose one and spend time learning it (e.g., Rails, Django, Meteor, even PHP). 
• Instagram (due 2/10): Build some kind of photo sharing application.
  Deploy again on Heroku. Be creative! Requirement: Use Amazon S3 to store photos. 
• Twilio (due 2/17): Build some kind of communication-oriented web service that uses Twilio.
  Something that uses text messaging or other Twilio offerings in a cool way. Make it fun! 
  Requirement: Awesomeness. And, using Twilio.
• Stripe (due 2/24): Use stripe to actually charge someone for using one of your services;
  the service can be anything that you can think of which a human being might pay for. 
• Pitch #1 (due 3/03): Get ready to pitch an idea to the class. Time limit: 60 seconds or so.
  The idea is to (a) come up with something you'd really like to do and (b) convince others
  to join you on your quest for world domination (or, at least, a single paying customer). 

Agenda

Each week we will touch on various topics that relate to starting a company. The agenda:

• 01/27: Class Begins; Entrepreneurons panel; Initial brief meeting back in CS. 
• 02/03: Intro (Remzi); Startup experiences (Barford); Demos (Twitter); Reading
• 02/10: Entrepreneurons event - Valley of death; Demos (Instagram); Video
• 02/17: Legal Issues (U.W. Law Clinic); Demos (Twilio)
• 02/24: Lean Startup (Book + Video); Demos (Stripe)
• 03/03: Venture Capital (Great Oaks); Pitch Attempt; read PG again
• 03/10: Scott Cooper - Three Questions Every Business Must Answer; Real Pitches and Feedback
• 03/17: Spring break: Have fun! Or actually get some work done.
• 03/24: Progress Report #1
• 03/31: 100 State: Field trip!
• 04/07: Greg Robinson (4490 Ventures)
• 04/14: Eric Martel and Alex Wyler (EatStreet)
• 04/21: Joe Kirgues (Gener8tor)
• 04/28: Andy Konwinski (Databricks)
• 05/05: No Class
• 05/14 (EXAM SLOT @ 10:05AM - 12:05PM): Final Pitches

Random

Some random links will show up here.