Building Entrepreneurial Ventures

Catalog description

This course will take students through the entire entrepreneurial journey - opportunity recognition and evaluation, fundamentals of business model design and implementation, building the founding team and hiring early employees, evaluating funding options and acquiring financial resources, managing risk and uncertainty, growth and scaling up, and finally, realizing the (financial as well as personal) value of the venture through exit options. The course will help students learn and apply the lean startup methodology, popular among new digital ventures. We will primarily use case studies of a variety of digital entrepreneurial ventures and case-based exercises to illustrate these concepts and practice real world applications. BEV will equip students with the lean startup toolkit and is primarily designed for students interested in starting, working at, advising, or financing new ventures, but can also be of use to someone interested in leading entrepreneurial innovation in established firms. The final deliverable will be student choice: a take-home case analysis, or a business plan.