What was it like to take CS 183b?

by Larry Chiang

CS 183b, it’s like I am still taking that class.

Let me explain. #HTSAS has a every video loaded up on YouTube. Yesterday, I just referred to Lec 8; #cs183b in a tweet. (citation to come… Upvotes if you comment with the tweet 🙂

Yup #LeanStartup works great. See @doordash “case”. Lec 8; #cs183b @youTube. And @stanleyTang‘s MVP

— Larry Chiang (@LarryChiang) November 17, 2015

I am also still taking that class because its taught by a VC with an IQ over 200 that kinda makes it up, along the way. This was in stark contrast to Peter Thiel’s lectures which looked like a lawyer’s Congressional testimony. Prior to PG’s (Paul Graham’s) lecture 3, I b-e-g-g-e-d for an agenda. Course syllabi for classes are available and archived at Stanford. Thus, if you know a course number, you can pre-study the content and preview the lectures before you take the class. For example, #stramgt353. For example #ENGR145; Engineering 145. e.g. Engineering 245: ‘Lean Launchpad.’ For example, the entire business school “GSB”.

YCcombinator is all about unconscious comptetance. We, as students are by nature “conscious incompetants”. We know that we do not know. But, at times, asking the teachers and mentors was like pinning down a millionaire with an IQ of 288, with the question: “How did you know to start by doing that?!”

Answer: I just knew.

Also, students asked, “How can we be like James Bond?” and the response was a nonverbal, ‘Watch the movie.’ The lack of structure in a first time class meant this to me, a student of entreprenuership: Big splattering of knowledge nuggets. No particular order. [Note: This is from the perspective of a person who was only recruited to Stanford as an athlete. I ended up going to Illinois. My IQ is below 100]

Studying, curating and making order in Computer Science 183b, “How to Start a Startup”. Similar to a person who has to comb thru code that has not been annotated… Let us study #cs183b via the subroutines hiding inside this explosion of awesome.
– #dttdsBHM
– #cs183Do
– James Bond.
– “Do Things That Don’t Scale” #dttds