Overview of Strategy for Entrepreneurs

All startups start as ideas. They are conjectures, hypotheses, and predictions about how a firm can make money by solving a problem that the market has yet to solve. As with any new idea, knowing with certainty if your startup idea will work is impossible. Worse yet, a startup idea is a bet with an unknown probability of success and an unknown payoff. When inspiration strikes, and you write down an exciting startup idea on a napkin, you don’t know if it will work, and you don’t know how much value it will generate.

Strategy for Entrepreneurs (SfE) will teach you how to effectively learn about your idea’s chances of success and the value your firm might create. 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 tests is expensive. Failure is hard to admit and learn from. Getting to and listening to feedback is challenging. The ideas with the most potential and impact are often also the ideas that are hardest to test. SfE is structured to help you learn in the face of all these challenges. The course is designed for entrepreneurs, but the examples, cases, and exercises are relevant for future investors and joiners, too.

Course Structure and Content

The course structure is unusual.

Roughly 50% of the sessions are case discussions.

The other 50% of the course focuses on developing, testing, and receiving feedback on a startup idea you develop over the semester.

Students should enter the course with an idea they would like to develop into a startup, either now or in the future, or an idea they have already started to build. The course will then push you to develop your idea through writing and experimentation. On the writing front, you will be pushed to clearly articulate the problem you are solving, outline a solution, and describe how you will make money; throughout the course, you will give and receive written and in-person feedback on the idea you write. At the semester's mid-point, a week of class is devoted to running an experiment testing your startup idea.

SfE’s unusual structure and focus on developing and testing a startup idea make it an excellent complement to more case-centered early-stage entrepreneurship courses like Launching Technology Ventures (LTV), Avoiding Startup Failure, and Founder’s Journey.

The cases and exercises focus on early and growth-stage startups. The cases feature startups from across the globe and a diverse set of protagonists. While focused on for-profit ventures, many cases feature founders focused on broadening the benefits of innovation and technology. The course includes startups from across the globe, including the US, India, Ghana, and Colombia, and startups working on a range of problems, including women’s and mental health, cloud kitchens, the circular economy, b2b compliance training, on-demand laundry, and even toothbrushes. The course will help you develop the following skills:

• How to run convincing startup experiments.
• Map a startup’s traction and business model into funding and valuation numbers.
• How to give other entrepreneurs effective feedback on their startup ideas.
• Write cogently, persuasively, and effectively.
• When to ignore and when to listen to advice from VCs and other key stakeholders.
• Identify and evaluate market gaps with customer interviews, minimum viable product tests, pricing surveys, and more.
• Decide in the face of uncertainty and limited data.

You can learn more about the course on the public version of the course website: www.sfehbs.com

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