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Tech Startup: Building Your Company


95-798

Units: 6

Description

Every tech business needs a concept of the business, money to finance it, and a team to make it happen. Conceiving, building, and financing a business are tasks rarely done but evolve and interact as the business evolves. For example, a person critical to the early success of the company may not have the same role (or status) in the company only a or two later. As Stanford Entrepreneurship Professor Steve Blank often says, “Startups are not little versions of big companies.” The first three years of a technology start-up are the most critical; when the company's DNA or trajectory is set. Too few entrepreneurs appreciate this fact and, as a result, many start without the essential skills talents, and capabilities needed to set the company on a successful path. Some of these entrepreneurial skills can only be learned through starting and growing a business while others can be learned. This course attempts to bridge the challenging gap between learning and doing entrepreneurship. We introduce you to the essential skills of building a team and raising money for your business. Identifying managing and evaluating a start-up team. Do I have the skill motivation and ability to be a tech entrepreneur? Can I build a company from scratch (really?)? Should I be the CEO Sales Account Manager VP of Engineering or something else altogether? What should my team look like on day 1 a year from now or three years from now? How do I incent them? Manage them? Lead them? How do I evaluate whether people have the skills knowledge abilities and attributes necessary for a) this team generally b) the role I've picked for them specifically and c) the long haul? I know I need money what but how much, where, when, from whom, and what kind of money? This course will offer a new approach to understanding how, why, where, and when these seemingly disparate ‘tasks’ are in reality one piece of ‘whole cloth.’ Specifically, this course moves away from a traditional linear approach to thinking about your business to iterative conceive-do-assess-reconceive thinking. The best way to learn entrepreneurship is by doing, which is why this course will use two ‘true-to-life’ scenarios as the anchor for the course. The class will be divided into teams will focus on a company that is either (1) a student idea for a new start-up, (2) an existing start-up (ideally local) or (3) a hypothetical start-up proposed/conceived by the students, the professor or both.

Learning Outcomes

Each student will be better able to do the following by the end of the course:

● Understand and anticipate how when, where, and why each of the three features of starting and building a tech-based business (i.e., financing the business and building the team) interact and impact one another.

● Understand how new information and data about the concept of the business, financing, and the team can be quickly integrated into the company’s ongoing strategy and tactics.

● Think of tech startup planning, not as an occasional activity, but as a continuous, daily process.

● A fuller understanding of creating and evaluating your business's concept, financing it, and building a team to support it.

Prerequisites Description

None