Lean Launchpad Enrollment Open

This is for the entrepreneurs among us. It was announced almost a year ago that Steve Blank would be teaching his famous Stanford Lean Launchpad course online for free, but then the whole thing went radio silent. I just got an email this morning from Udacity that the course is starting on September 14 and enrollment is open now at the following link:

http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/ep245/CourseRev/1

This is an opportunity to learn from one of the masters of Silicon Valley. Chuck Eesley (also of Stanford) did something similar a few months ago where he taught a start-up class for free online, and it has since produced three companies that are raising VC rounds as we speak. I have to believe that Steve Blank is going to produce similar results.

I'm continually amazed at the quality and variety of online learning these days. I took the Stanford CS-101 course offered on Coursera a couple months ago and it was excellent. I've been following Gautam Kaul's Intro to Finance as well (more out of curiosity than anything else), and I'm really surprised by the rigor.

I know a lot of you dream about starting your own company, and this looks like a great way to get that ball rolling. As far as I know, these are the texts for the course:

The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company
and
Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers

I've recommended both of these books to some of you individually, and they're really top notch.

Good luck to you if you decide to take the course. Maybe WSO will throw off the next Zuckerberg!

15 Comments
 

Eddie, I swear you find a way every week to make me less and less productive at work. That Coursera is a clutch website. I had been doing some of the open ware courses from Carnegie Mellon recently, but these look pretty awesome. I think I just signed up for like 5 classes.

 

A bunch of top tiers are opening up free courses online which is great as a supplement to standard UG/B-School coursework. Opportunity to learn from some of the greats.

 

Nice - thanks for the tip. I enrolled in this and a couple others.

"If you want to succeed in this life, you need to understand that duty comes before rights and that responsibility precedes opportunity."
 

Yea Eddy, you gotta calm down man. Your threads be all giving me confidence that I can do stuff and everythang.

If you can't kill them with kindness, just kill them.
 

Do any of these free courses allow you to transfer credits at all?

I'm talking about liquid. Rich enough to have your own jet. Rich enough not to waste time. Fifty, a hundred million dollars, buddy. A player. Or nothing. See my Blog & AMA
 

Yeah, I understand that. But the whole idea behind all these free ivy league level courses would be so much better if they allowed you to earn actual credit for free. That would really kick some university's ass throughout the US/UK.

I'm talking about liquid. Rich enough to have your own jet. Rich enough not to waste time. Fifty, a hundred million dollars, buddy. A player. Or nothing. See my Blog & AMA
 

I'm glad I could remind you....I do that to my grandparents sometimes too

I'm very excited for this, as I have a startup idea that more and more grows in me. I think this course will help me decide to quit everything and go for it

 

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