Building an Aerospace Startup from the Ground Up

Silicon Valley has experienced a dramatic increase in aerospace-focused, venture capital-backed companies over the last decade. This course will examine what drives success and failure in these ventures, with applicability to prospective founders, employees, investors, or those with a general interest in understanding how real companies operate on a day-to-day basis. The course will cover the entire life cycle of aerospace startups, from idea to product, first financing to exit. Half of the class sessions will be lectures focused on the nuts and bolts of building an aerospace startup. The other sessions will explore critical decision making of recent aerospace startups, through case studies. Often, the protagonists from the case studies will join the class to provide their thinking as they navigated these bet-the-company decisions. Grading will be determined by a combination of hands-on projects and class participation. The instructors are former aerospace entrepreneurs who have raised more than $100 million in capital, launched satellites and derived products from those satellites, and who successfully exited their venture which returned 10x to initial investors.