Foundations of Family Enterprise

This course provides real world, hands-on learning on what its like to actually start a high-tech company. This class is not about how to write a business plan. Its not an exercise on how smart you are in a classroom, or how well you use the research library to size markets. And the end result is not a PowerPoint slide deck for a VC presentation. And it is most definitely not an incubator where you come to build the hot-idea that you have in mind. This is a practical class essentially a lab, not a theory or book class. Our goal, within the constraints of a classroom and a limited amount of time, is to create an entrepreneurial experience for you with all of the pressures and demands of the real world in an early stage start up. You will be getting your hands dirty talking to customers, partners, competitors, as you encounter the chaos and uncertainty of how a startup actually works. Youll work in teams learning how to turn a great idea into a great company. Youll learn how to use a business model to brainstorm each part of a company and customer development to get out of the classroom to see whether anyone other than you would want/use your product. Finally, based on the customer and market feedback you gathered, you would use agile development to rapidly iterate your product to build something customers would actually use and buy. Each day will be new adventure outside the classroom as you test each part of your business model and then share the hard earned knowledge with the rest of the class.