Look, Peter Thiel was passionate about CS183 “Startup” but lacked the effort to help start. The onus to sit on student startup boards, engineer up business models (EUBM #EUBM), and get distribution for non existent prototypes via Y Combinator (minimum viable) landing pages proved too burdensome.
CS 183B looks to be exactly the same spirit. The class is called “How to Start a Startup”. At the end of session 2, it’s all theory. Massive lecture hall in the spirit of Maples Pavillion (or Foellinger auditorium), and as much interaction as a Dinkelspiel hosted “Startup School”
Lets follow our effort
My other mentor, Mark McCormack, followed his effort in self-funding a $3.5B startup called IMG. As CS 183 students, do what Sam Altman glossed over when he said: “Get a ‘W’ under your belt”
A “w” is a commercially viable hit.
An example of a pattern of effort that, worst case scenario, yields a legendary internship at Box…
Do you know anyone from the mortgage industry?
I call mortgage industry professionals C3PO’s because they are literally protocol, paperwork and credit report pulling robots. If you’re not a JJ Abrams, Star Wars fan, C3PO is a retarded protocol droid. He is tall, pretty and pretty useless. Like a mortgage executive.
Tall.
Pretty.
Shiny.

Photo credit: Raychel Gregg NY Fashion Week. Fall show. February.
Larry Chiang = pretty, dumb
Completely worthless and void of technical ability. His role is to talk and bother R2D2 while R2D2 is working. Seriously, mortgage professionals just do credit lead generation and then navigate archaic credit protocols as per the
Fair
Credit
Reporting
Act (FCRA)
As a CS major, I recommend that you fork yourself and be csMajorCRO (chief revenue officer), and help these C3PO’s. Expend minor effort to understand the American, 1970s law that rules the land, “Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA)”. By CRO, I mean when you work for a C3PO, every R2D2 ends up running the show. R2D2 hacked the Death Star main frame and saved 5 Jedi’s 10 minutes into the Death Star’s tech conference Luke Skywalker was crashing.
As a CS major, understanding these three tweets will be 1/10th the effort you expended in Jerry’s CS106B. If you haven’t at least taken Jerry Cain’s 106A, puh-lease leave this blog
Ok, so with your half-class of Stanford CS, basic HTML knowledge and ability to hire an eLance to do a wordpress site (then hone, update and augment a WordPress site), read:
Do you realize that your grandmother is more technically competent than a mortgage professional.
Download the Twitter feed, #CS183B here
Question: I understood nothing of what I just read.
LARRY CHIANG answer: trust that this fact is true. The difference between you the 20 yo CS major and a 30 year-old pro, is very small. But your lack of effort to understand Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) blocks you.
What I’m saying is that CS was hard. Explaining how stuff works in the world boggles the mind because 40 year olds in industry went to college and was taught content that’s wholly useless
QUESTION: I still don’t get it.
Larry CHIANG answer: Ok, so there I this CS 183B recommended reading you didn’t read. It’s called “Do things that don’t scale” [
https://bit.ly/pgrahamCh6]. Paul Graham wrote it.
So, you combine that PG
[PG = Paul Graham https://bit.ly/pgrahamCh6 :-] post with your knowledge of CS 106B. And then follow your effort for a very specific vertical of old, rich, retards. Follow your Mark-Cuban-effort and lock in that Paul Graham graph
Make those C3PO’s love you.
Just like a batch of un-annotated code, this blog post was meant to filter out non CS majors. If you’re still trying to make sense of it all…
Don’t.
Don’t analyst analyze (lol I said anal twice. Now thrice)
Don’t make sense
Do go and make cents per API call
Remember, expTransFax charges a dollar per API call and mortgage companies gladly pay. ExpTransFax =
Experian
Trans Union
Equifax.
Do not analyze my padawan, just execute, get a commercially viable “W”, build your stackoverflow / GitHub and be a Silicon Valley insider.
Be a Jedi in Business Administration and go from student #21 of 63,030 CS 183B students to Stanford guest lecturer (like Lisa Falzone
Step one. Tweet at me at @larrychiang and use the hashtag #CS183D. Yeah, I forked #CS183B :-))