This course is intended for students who are interested in starting new entrepreneurial businesses. It is a tactical and hands-on class that covers the nuts and bolts of starting a company, with a lesser emphasis on investing in entrepreneurial ventures. Course material is organized around the milestones and phases that entrepreneurs must complete in pursuit of building their business. Students will learn how to identify worthy problems to solve, how to go about testing and validating business hypotheses, getting to a minimal viable product, learning the viability of businesses, raising seed funding, when to bootstrap, hiring early employees, importance of culture, selling your first customers and standing up a predictable GTM motion, and the "secret truths" of building and scaling large, successful businesses. The emphasis is managerial and entrepreneurial, essentially a working model for starting an enterprise.
Paralleling the course content is the YourCo project in which teams of four to five students simulate building a new venture. Although this course touches on topics relevant to a venture in the growth/scaling phase, the majority of course content focuses on the early launch, proof-of-concept, and traction phases of a new venture. At the beginning of the class, teams describe a product or service they would like to bring to market, determine the necessary seed funding amount, and outline current staffing and development status. Throughout the quarter, students explore the critical activities required to engage customers, build their product or service, scale operations and build teams. Each week, teams have specific written deliverables for their YourCo based on the course material. Assignments include customer discovery, product validation, choosing an initial target customer, building the unit economics of the business, selling to prospects, hiring employees, and creating a pitch deck. The culmination of YourCo comes in the last class where each team will pitch and present their semester's long work in front of world-class early stage investors who will give real feedback to each team. The course content and structure is applicable to all types of businesses, whether B2B or B2C. Class projects range from software and digital solutions, to consumer products, to services, to industrial applications.
Cases will be used to illustrate the challenges that entrepreneurs face when building their companies, and are written specifically for this class to illustrate and reinforce course content each week. Through these case discussions, students will put themselves in the shoes of the entrepreneur and analyze how to navigate difficult circumstances under extreme resource constraints. You will be expected to come prepared each class having read the case materials
Guest entrepreneurs will also used frequently to reinforce course and case materials in in-depth, real world examples. Guest entrepreneurs will talk about their journeys, take questions from students, and be available to teams and individuals at the end of class to be a resource. Please reference the syllabus for confirmed guest entrepreneurs this semester.
NOTE: WEEK 1 CLASS ATTENDANCE IS MANDATORY. IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING ADDING THE COURSE BUT DO NOT YET HAVE A SEAT, YOU MUST ATTEND THE FIRST CLASS IN ORDER TO REGISTER DURING DROP/ADD.
