This course provides real world, hands-on learning on what it’s like to actually start a high-tech company. This class is not about how to write a business plan. It’s 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. You’ll work in teams learning how to turn a great idea into a great company. You’ll 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.

Steven Blank

Lecturer in Business

Blank is credited with revolutionizing how startups are built and how entrepreneurship is taught around the globe. A retired eight-time serial entrepreneur turned educator and author, Blank launched the Lean Startup movement, described in the May 2013 Harvard Business Review cover story, Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything. Blank is a prolific writer...

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