Course Overview
All startup ideas start as theories. They are conjectures, hypotheses, and predictions about how a firm might make lots of money by solving a problem that the market has yet to solve. As with any new theory, knowing with one hundred percent certainty if a startup idea will work is impossible. Worse yet, a startup idea is a bet with an unknown probability of success (P) and an unknown payoff (V). When inspiration strikes, and you write down an amazing startup idea on a napkin, you don’t know if it will work, and you don’t know how much value it will generate.
A good startup strategy helps you effectively learn about your idea’s chances of success P and the value your firm might create V. The benefits of learning are twofold. First, you generate signals about your idea’s potential that can convince others—from investors to employees—to join you. Second, if you learn your idea stinks, you can iterate and pivot to a new, more promising idea.
But learning—especially about startup ideas—is challenging. Signals are biased and noisy. Designing experiments is non-trivial, and running them is expensive. Failure is hard to admit and learn from. Startup ideas are often vague and illogical. Getting to and listening to feedback is never easy. The ideas with the most potential and impact are often also the ideas that are hardest to test. And even when you learn as best as possible, your odds of minting a billion-dollar company are slim.
This course is structured to help you learn in the face of all these challenges.
Course Deliverables
Beyond the required reading and in-class exercises, the course requires you to complete four written assignments and to give feedback to your peers thrice. Each assignment is cumulative and involves developing a single “Strategy For Entrepreneurs” (SFE) memo over the semester. Your first memo will be the basis for your second memo and, eventually, your final submission. The memos will follow a standardized template with a hard limit of 10 pages! The template will be shared with you in class. Alongside your memo, you will, as the semester develops, build a 5-slide deck that summarizes your memo and crystalizes what you have learned from the experiments you have run this semester. You will use this deck to share your learnings at the end of the course.
The SFE memos will help you, as you might have guessed from the name, build and develop an entrepreneurial strategy for a venture idea you have been considering or have already started. The memos aim to help you resolve the core sources of uncertainty at the heart of any entrepreneurial venture: Is my theory of value creation and capture valid? In testing whether your theory of value is correct, you will also be asked to generate signals that (in)validate your theory by running experiments during the semester.
You can find the memo, with instructions about how to use it, here.
You can find a blank memo you can copy and fill in yourself here.
The template for the deck will be shared later in the semester (start by writing, not by PowerPoint!)
If you are in my course, Strategy for Entrepreneurs, I will send a blank memo with your name to work on during the semester. This makes it easier for me to assign peer feedback partners and track progress.
Complementing the SFE memos, you will give your peers feedback on their memos three times during the course. This feedback will happen both outside of class (you will leave comments and questions in their memo Google Docs) and in class (you will sit with a peer and give real-time feedback after reading the memo beforehand). These will let you practice giving constructive feedback on each other's ideas and build stronger relationships with your peers in the course. My research shows that peer advice and improved social feedback dramatically improve startup performance and strategy development. To incentivize helpful feedback, you will be partially graded on how well your randomly assigned feedback partners perform.
The SFE memos and peer feedback exercises are due at the following times:
- 📝 SFE Memo Draft 1: Complete the first draft by Sunday 2/15 11:59pm.
- 📝 SFE Feedback 1: Complete online peer feedback by Thursday 2/19 11:59pm.
- 📝 SFE Memo Draft 2: Add experiment results to your memo by Sunday 3/08 11:59pm.
- 📝 SFE Feedback 2: Complete online peer feedback by Thursday 3/12 11:59pm.
- 📝 Individual Feedback: Complete a required one-on-one with Rem, Jero, or Thomas by Sunday 4/26 11:59pm
- 📝 SFE Memo & Deck: Updated memo & deck draft by Sunday 4/12 11:59pm.
- 📝 SFE Pitch Feedback 3: Submit feedback from live pitch sessions by Friday 4/17 11:59pm.
- 📝 SFE Final Memo & Deck: Final memo is due by Sunday 4/27 11:59pm.
Course Grading
- Participation during classroom discussion + individual feedback session
- 30% of your course grade. In-class case discussion participation is graded in terms of how well you listen, how often you participate, and the quality of your comments. Individual feedback session by whether you scheduled it and came to learn.
- Your memo drafts 1, 2, and 3.
- 15% of your course grade. Graded on your arguments' quality, evidence, and how much you learned (5% each)
- Your online feedback #1, #2, and #3
- 30% of your course grade (evenly split across the 3)
- You will be graded on the usefulness of your comments, measured by the quality of your edits to their HBS memos, the quality of the questions you ask in their FAQs, and the observed improvements in the final project scores for the peers you are randomly assigned to give feedback to. (10% each)
- Final version of your SFE memo and deck
- 25% of your course grade
- Graded similarly to the first two assignments above. It is worth noting that you can receive high grades for realizing your startup isn’t going to work or if you get stymied by one of your peers’ FAQ questions. That said, the value of startup “failure” drives learning. Good “failure” memos will reveal deep learning and meaningful insights.
- If requested, I am more than happy to provide extensive comments on your final draft and meet with you to discuss the next steps in developing your idea.
Course Norms
This class only works if we build, as a class, a shared sense of psychological safety. Dreaming up startup ideas requires generating seemingly “dumb” ideas (e.g., Airbnb’s “silly” couch-surfing origins) and also helping one another realize that sometimes our ideas are—despite our best efforts—kinda dumb (e.g. Juicero). Our goal as a community is to be frank in our assessments of a startup’s strategy and constructive in our approach. To do so, we need to feel comfortable asking each other for more evidence, critiquing each other's ideas, and pushing back against untested assumptions while making everyone feel like our class is a place where mistakes are okay, and we all can learn. If startups are all about experimentation and learning (and they are!), our classroom must also be.