In this article, I would like to share some online education resources that you can use to help you in the early stages of developing your invention or idea as an entrepreneur.
These online educational resources includes videos, podcasts, recorded interviews and articles that often times are mostly free allowing you to easily prepare for yourself a self training plan on almost any subject, giving you the opportunity to listen to some of the most experienced entrepreneurs or lecturers explaining their views and experiences as well as giving their sales pitch.
Stanford University’s Entrepreneurship Corner
Stanford University’s Entrepreneurship Corner offers 2000 free videos and podcasts that feature entrepreneurship and innovation thought leaders. It is a free online archive of entrepreneurship resources for teaching and learning. The site is easily browse-able and has also a by html#TeachingGuides" target="_blank">subject collections
You can find interesting lectures from many known entrepreneurs. For example, here Eric Ries lectures about “Evangelizing for the Lean Startup”
And here Tony Hsieh speaks about “Core Values of Culture “
Startup Plays
StartupPlays are the actual project plans of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs. Each play is a step-by-step process with the founder’s pro tips, their file templates, and links to the tools they use to achieve success in a specific part of their startup.
The site offers each guide at a price are $15 and up while some plans are free. For example
How To Build A Startup: The Lean LaunchPad
or
Key Metrics for Software-As-A-Service Startup
Ted
While TED already hosts thousands of talks, I have found many good talks here which can help entrepreneurs cultivate their ideas at the early stage of a start-up.
A simple search in Google for ” Ted startup talks” will return several already made lists of useful Ted talks, one for example is entitled: 12 Must Watch TED Talks for Entrepreneurs
Using TED’s own search engine can help you find talks by famous entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Seth Godin.
For example:
Seth Godin on “How to get your ideas to spread”
Ted recently introduced playlists curated by the TED team and also by users themselves, some of them have some interesting playlists that cover similar topics and subjects related to entrepreneurship.
The Startup Corner
With a focus on purpose-driven entrepreneurism, StartupCorner was founded with the mission of creating an inspiring, informative and educational online resource for entrepreneurs worldwide through an aim to provide quality content, community dialogue and a common ground for discussion.
This is a different website from Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner because it also includes interviews also with entrepreneurs themselves at the early stages of their ventures and therefore becomes a resource with lots of practical advice to give. It also encourages other entrepreneurs to share and tell their stories.
However some of this content is not free, StartupCorner works on a pay-per-use model and listening to select recorded interviews can cost around $5
Mixergy
Mixergy has hundreds of interviews and online courses to explore, membership includes either Basic and Premium benefits which give you exclusive access to educational courses taught by entrepreneurs themselves. These courses can teach you everything from how to find customers, to how to get funding, how to grow your revenue and more. Some of the free interviews of entrepreneurs sharing their stories are noteworthy like:
Evan Schneyer who is the founder of Wanderfly, a site that helps travelers discover and share personalized travel recommendations, gives his advice to fellow entrepreneurs.
Coursera
Coursera partners with some of the top universities in the world to offer courses online that anyone can take for free. You can choose from courses according to university, category or subject. This is a really good place for getting deeper into a subject matter.
Some more interesting courses that I have come across are:
- Metadata: Organizing and Discovering Information
- Stanford’s Human-Computer Interaction
- University of Michigan Social Networks Analysis
Summary
Online Education Resources for Startups and Entrepreneurship is a growing venue with lots of instructional videos, podcasts and articles. Most content is given for free while in some sites pay per use model is used. Early stage Entrepreneurs can use this resources to gain initial knowledge from the industry leading experts.
