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Building a startup is different than building a web app. It's sad to see that the instructors are not aware of the massive difference between the two.

Building a startup course should have no technical details. I'd recommend Udacity "How to build a startup" course any time and even for small businesses.

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The main lecturer co-founded one of the biggest personal genomics companies in the US, so I'm quite certain that he realizes the difference between the two.

The course emphasizes using CS-related skills in any startup for product development and getting insight into your market. Example exercises are things like scraping competitor data, wading through genomic data from the cmd line and building internal APIs for managing company data.

It's also the case that this course is designed as a follow-up to CS183. So it's expected that students have a full course that wasn't programming related on start-ups already. It's designed as 1-semester of non-tech skills and 1-semester of build.

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