Jeff Bussgang and three colleagues teach a 27-session course on launching tech ventures at Harvard Business School using the case method. The curriculum covers ideation, go-to-market, business models, and financing, with real founders like David Hornick from Aardvark and John Rubenstein from Zipline as case studies.
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Hey, everyone. Jeff Busgang here from Flybridge Capital and Harvard Business School trying again to experiment with LinkedIn Live. In this example and in this episode, I'm going to share with you my syllabus for my course launching Tech Ventures. In the first episode I talked a little bit about the reopening of Harvard Business School and how we were planning for that. In this episode I'm going to go into a bit more detail about the course that I'm teaching and who's teaching it with me and what are the cases that we're going to focus on. So let's begin. The class syllabus can be found at the website hbsltv.com and the game plan is for the four of us, the four faculty members who I'll introduce in just a minute to teach two sections of 160 students each, roughly at times we'll gather as the full 160. At times we'll break into two sections of 80 and at times we'll break into four sections of 40. Joining me this year on the faculty team are three terrific instructors. Donna Levin from MIT previously who had been executive with me at UPROMISE, one of my startups over 20 years ago where we had great fun building that company together with others. She then co founded care.com and after the IPO joined the MIT faculty. And we're just thrilled to have her on our teaching team this year. Sam Clemens, who's joining for the third time the LTV team, is a general partner at Accomplice and an accomplished entrepreneur. And then Reza Satchu, who is like Donna, a rookie this year. We're very excited to have him from Toronto. Reza is a prolific investor and entrepreneur. So we've got a great lineup for the faculty in terms of the syllabus. As you can see on the syllabus tab here on the website, we've got a fantastic syllabus across the four modules of the course. The game plan is that in each case, which is taught using the traditional HBS case method, we'll have the case protagonist. So in the example of Aardvark, we'll have the lead investor, general partner from August Capital, David Hornick. And then we'll also have subject matter experts, folks who can provide us with perspective on the industry broader than the individual company that we'll be studying. So in the case of Mattermark, we'll have Danielle Morrell, the co founder and CEO, but we'll also have Bessemer general partner Elliot Robinson, who's an expert in sas in the Case of Class Tivity, we'll have Simon Rothman from Greylock, who's an expert in marketplaces. In the case of Zipline, we'll have John Rubenstein, who is the lead director from Amazon and has a huge amount of experience in logistics and drone delivery, which is the field that that company is in, and so on and so forth. So we'll have that across all four of our modules. The ideation and customer value Proposal Experiments module, the Go To Market Experiments module, our third module, which is on business model experiments, and our fourth module, which is on financing, exits and ethics. To wrap, we'll have a case on Founder Field Day, which is a company or a firm known as Rothenberg Ventures. And we'll have, joining us, one of the former general partners from Rothenberg Ventures, Brandon Farwell. And then we'll wrap. It was brought to my attention that the HBS calendar this year had a class date for November 3rd, election day. That's a bad idea. I realized more than ever this week. And so I've elected to cancel that class, which I hope folks will appreciate and use that time to volunteer at the polls or make calls for the candidates that they choose. But in any event, we'll have 27 sessions, not 28 sessions, which is a late breaking change. Also in the syllabus tab, you can see the various readings that we're assigning as part of the class. So for example, for Aardvark, you need to not only read the case, but also Chris Dixon's seminal article, the Idea Maze and Sean Ellis's terrific blog post on the 40% rule incorporated in this article, the Startup Success. And then we have some optional readings in this case from Marc Andreessen, from Steve Blank, Balaji Srinivasan. So we've got a terrific set of readings that are relevant for each of the cases, which should be great fun. So that's the game plan for the class. We kick off in early September. So just a couple weeks from now. I hope this website and this video help introduce you a little bit to the materials in a bit more depth, as well as the instructors. And we'll look forward to continuing this dialogue online and continuing to blog and video log about the class as we progress throughout the fall. Thanks so much.
