Your Startup Journey: Ready or Not?

Catalog description

Most entrepreneurship courses start with the assumption that you have an idea worth pursuing. This one starts earlier — with you. Before building anything, students will grapple with the questions that actually determine whether a venture succeeds or fails: Is this a real problem? Do the right customers care enough to change their behavior? And perhaps most importantly: Do I actually want to do this? Working in teams around ideas they bring to class, students spend the semester in the early trenches of startup creation. You will talk to prospective customers, mapping their worlds, stress-testing assumptions, and iterating toward something worth building. The work is hands-on and often uncomfortable in the best way, designed to simulate the emotional and intellectual reality of the startup rollercoaster, not just the mechanics of it. Some students will emerge more convinced than ever. Others will make the equally valuable decision to get off the ride before it costs them more than a semester. The course culminates in a venture definition artifact that is a concrete, customer-validated articulation of what to build and why. (For students who also take Foundations of Entrepreneurship, this becomes the operational complement to the business plan: one grounded in customer validation and product definition, the other in business model and financial planning.)