I'm surprised David Rose's talk on pitching to VCs didn't make it: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_s_rose_on_pitching_to_vcs.htm...

As someone who has never been in the position to pitch to a VC, I found it really interesting and informative.

about the "Top #{x} of #{y}" title, please see http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

  >If the original title begins with a number or number + 
  >gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. 
  >E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 
  >Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is 
  >meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

If anyone's interested in more entrepreneurship talks, I just launched http://tedocracy.com, which recommends TED videos for you based on talks you've enjoyed or disliked. We also have an 'Entrepreneurship' category under 'Business' on our homepage.

Great list, but if you had to pick a single one, I'd do Simon Sinek's (http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspi...). It should utterly transform the way you think about how to pitch anything, from yourself to your company to whatever.

I could have sworn there was another post with the exact same title a month back.

Thanks for this link, and also all the commenters adding other useful links - I'm looking forward to watching these.

There was a similar article somewhere, I think on 'The Verge'. But this list looks better.

here's a little ted talk transcript downloader i threw together. because watching videos is a timekill (sounds like the author learned this the hard way :) sometimes we'd rather just skim a document - focus on the words not the delivery. below is a filter - the way UNIX utilities are supposed to be written, remember? it's bourne shell, sed and curl (no bash needed). no ruby python perl nonsense; no release on github; just simple stuff; simple. i'm not endorsing curl as an httpclient but seems like people like curl so that's what's used. 1st the filter fetches an index of all the speaker names called "ted.idx" if ted.idx does not already exist. you then feed speaker names to the filter and it outputs the transcript text to stdout (if there is a transcript) with each transcript separated by a line of 80 dashes. each line is prefixed with a colon and a space. you read the output file however you want; maybe something like this:

    less -Gp--------- file.txt

would you like to download all the ted transcripts? this will do it:

    filter < ted.idx > file.txt

(note: \&#039 does not need the backslash in sed; that's only to get past the HN forum software without being translated)

    read -p'what should we call this command? ' d 
    [ x$d = x"" ]||
    echo don\'t forget to place $d in your PATH
    [ x$d = x"" ]||
    cat > $d << done

    c=http://www.ted.com/speakers

    [ -f ted.idx ]||{
    echo fetching ted.idx... >&2
    b=\$(curl -s \$c/atoz |sed '
    /Showing page 1 of/!d;
    s/.* //;
    s/<.*//;
    ') 
    curl -s \$c/atoz/page/[1-"\$b"] | sed '
    /href=.*speakers\/.*html/!d;
    s/</\
    /g;' |sed '
    /speakers/!d;
    s,.*=\",,;
    s,\".*,,;
    s,.*/,,;
    s,\.html\$,,' > ted.idx
    }

    echo >&2;
    echo "usage: less ted.idx" >&2;
    echo "usage: grep speaker_name ted.idx |\$0 > file" >&2;
    echo "usage: sed 'line-no!d' ted.idx |\$0 > file" >&2;
    echo "usage: \$0 < ted.idx > file" >&2;
    echo "usage: less -Gp----- file" >&2;

    while read a;do
    curl -s \$c/\$a.html |sed '
    /notranslate.*href=.\/talks\//!d;
    s,.*href=.,http://www.ted.com,;
    s/\">.*//;
    s/.*/url = \"&\"/;
    ' | curl -sK - | sed -n '
    s/\&#039;/'"'"'/g;

    done

When I visit the page, none of the videos show up (Chrome on MBP)

No Derek Sivers? :(

This is linkbait garbage. Giving Shopify the benefit of the doubt, I clicked on it expecting it to maybe be a parody of these types of articles. Disappointing.