Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital: Partnership for Growth

This 3 unit course is designed for students interested in entrepreneurship, early-stage investing, and/or venture capital. With US venture capital investment doubling from 2020 to 2021, it is an exciting time to get the insiders' view of the entrepreneurship & VC ecosystem. STRAMGT 330 adds a unique and essential dimension as you consider the dozens of other great GSB courses about entrepreneurship and investing such as Start-up Garage, Venture Capital Finance, Entrepreneurial Finance, Formation of New Ventures, and Lean Launchpad. Notably, students are permitted to use the same business idea project they use for these courses as the team project for our course (with instructor permission). We have seen a marked increase in students who want to learn about both the investors' and the entrepreneurs' point of view. Students have realized that learning about just the investors¿ POV or just the entrepreneurs' POV gives them only half of the story. More importantly, as students see the strategic positioning and the conversation between the entrepreneur and the investor, the learning experience can be closer to what they will see in real life. The course is fast-paced and has very current content. You will hear from over 15 investors and a half dozen entrepreneurs. A few classes will have both the entrepreneur and investor participate in the same class discussion. Claudia and Peter have designed the course content and the projects to give you that tactical edge! The course takes you through several topics that are useful whether you are interested in an entrepreneurial career path, an investor career path, or some combination of the two. We also see more than a few students each year who are new to entrepreneurship and who want to experiment as entrepreneurs and / or investors to see whether it is something for them. We take pride in offering a few class topics that are typically not covered in other business school courses ¿ such as how Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) can make or break how your early-stage company is evaluated, how co-founders split their equity, and what do they say behind closed doors at the VC's partners meeting after we give the company presentation? The class uses case based instruction in combination with two class projects. The team project helps you prioritize the insights that an entrepreneur presents to the investor or investors use to discover their next area of interest. The individual project examines the most current practices on how the founding team should (and should not) split their founders¿ equity. Both projects have direct implications as to how attractive your company will be to investors. We encourage challenging and meaningful class discussion to take the guests off-script and focus on sharing the street smarts of the entrepreneur and investor community. The course attracts students from diverse backgrounds those who are experienced entrepreneurs to those students who are experimenting with the idea of entrepreneurship for the first time. We also see students with significant investment experience share their start-up experience as they add to the class dynamic.