The interesting possibility that the spontaneous breakdown of the electroweak symmetry relies on the formation of condensates of the quarks of the third generation was recently pointed out by several authors. In these lectures we discuss the recent efforts towards the understanding of the physical implications of such a possibility. The minimal class of models are just equivalent to the Standard Model with specific ultraviolet boundary conditions, the so called compositeness conditions, on the renormalization group trajectories of the physical couplings. Sharp low energy predictions for the top quark and Higgs masses appear within this framework. The possible generalizations of these models are discussed and different proposed dynamical scenarios for the generation of the effective short distance interactions are described.