How to Start a Startup

Startup School is a free, 10-week online course designed to help early-stage founders start and improve their companies through lectures, peer community, and weekly advisor meetings. Participants can audit the course or apply for the advisor track, which includes a forum, exclusive deals, and eligibility for one of 100 equity-free $10,000 grants. The talk outlines the course curriculum, its application and in-person options, and how group meetings help founders tackle practical challenges. Geoff Ralston and Adora Cheung describe Startup School as a way to make startup knowledge and mentorship accessible beyond Silicon Valley.

Avni Patel Thompson explains how her consumer research experience helped her spot problems people struggle to describe, and how talking with parents led her to identify childcare as a missing support network. After closing an earlier subscription box startup, she tested Poppy with simple tools, caregivers, and local parents, then used early bookings and steady growth to validate demand. She advises founders to run focused tests, learn from rejection, have honest conversations about career and family trade-offs, and start before an idea feels perfect. For venture-backed startups, she argues that founders should pursue a large, ambitious mission while solving the immediate problem in front of them.