Teaching Entrepreneurship
When I was asked to teach entrepreneurship, I thought it would be an easy four-step process:
Get the prior professor’s course
Make some minor nips and tucks
Map my book and the other material I’d developed from the two startups I’d founded and from over two decades of investing in and mentoring startups onto the syllabus, replace whatever boring textbook or Harvard Business School cases he was currently using
Teach
Yeah, that was naive.
The Problem
The prior course was designed around observing startups and deconstructing what made them successful. I suppose that can work but I don’t know how to teach that way. The only way I can teach entrepreneurship is to teach by doing.
Fortunately, there were other entrepreneurship courses that were designed around developing an idea into a startup that was more aligned with my approach. The challenge is that students, especially undergraduates, typically don't have the life experience to come up with genuinely good ideas. So the entire exercise is doomed from the start. Garbage in, garbage out.
The Solution
The solution I hit on was to get seed stage pitch decks from my VC colleagues, select the ones that were accessible to students without detailed industry knowledge, boil them down to a one sentence idea and then offer up a dozen of them to the class teams to adopt as the basis for the startup they were going to create during the course. It didn’t matter to me if they took that idea in the same direction as the pitch deck I extracted it from or if they took it in an entirely new direction. What mattered is that I had seeded them with painful, prevalent, and frequent problems that had potential solutions that could pass the ‘Why now?’ test.
How It Works
After that, we just worked backwards from the outline of what a great, fundable, startup’s pitch deck had to have. I took them through the same steps I took the real startups who went through my accelerator programs. To nail their Problem and Solution slides, they needed to learn how to do customer discovery. To calculate their Total Addressable Market, they needed to learn to do the research. And so on.
I took the training material I developed at Dreamit Ventures and beyond and expanded them into lecture material. Each group of pitch deck slides became a course module. Each module mapped onto the chapters of my book that told the story of a fictional founder going through the exact same steps to build his startup. Here’s what it looked like in practice:
Interested in using The Entrepreneur's Odyssey with your entrepreneurship course?