Career Focus

Scaling Technology Ventures (STV) is designed for students who aspire to found, join, or invest in growth-stage technology ventures. Students will learn how leadership teams address the challenges and opportunities ventures face after achieving product-market fit – and how to activate and manage exponential growth.

The course reflects the recent shift in market sentiment from “growth at all costs” to “find a path to profitability,” in placing particular emphasis on how ventures scale by achieving not just product-market fit, but profit-market fit.

Classes cover a diverse array of tech and tech-enabled businesses, including e-commerce, ed-tech, SaaS, HR-tech, mobile apps and gaming, marketplace platforms, mobility solutions, social media, two-sided platforms, robotics, and cybersecurity.

Educational Objectives

The course exists to address a gap in management scholarship between two fundamental stages of corporate development – exploration and exploitation. This model leaves out a critical phase connecting these two stages, which the course calls extrapolation – the period of dramatic top-line growth that occurs midway through a typical S-curve, after a venture has confirmed product-market fit and raised its first round of VC financing.

Adopting the perspective of a founder and CEO, a functional leader, or an investor, cases in the course frame many of the critical opportunities and challenges associated with activating exponential growth and managing through the extrapolation phase as a venture scales. Scaling situations are presented through a variety of functional lenses, including strategy, product management, sales and marketing, engineering and technology, talent, and operations.

In nearly every class, the course hosts case protagonists – founders, CEOs, and some VCs – as guests, mostly in person and on campus. Many guests also stay for roundtable lunches with students after classes.

Students have the opportunity to participate in several optional workshops with guests and outside experts. In past years, topics have included product management, performance marketing, venture capital, and diversity in tech.

Scaling Technology Ventures is a natural companion, and complement to, the EC course Launching Technology Ventures (LTV), though there is little if any overlap between the two courses.

Enrollment in STV is limited to 70 students per section.

Course Content

Through case discussions and dialogue with company founders, STV examines executive leadership and functional management challenges in scaling ventures after the "search and discovery" stage of startup evolution. Case companies have included Asana, BlaBlaCar, Catalant, Chegg, Chewy, Cobalt Robotics, Darktrace, FIGS, Mistral, Nextdoor, OhmConnect, Perch, Linden Lab, Supercell, Shopify, thredUP, TikTok, Wayfair, and Zoom, among others. The course also features an online computer-gaming simulation that enables students to compete against one another as rival SaaS firms vying for users, market position, and capital investment.

Case classes are organized into six modules that comprise the course’s Six S Scaling Framework. These variables represent external and internal enablers of successful scaling:

Activating Growth

Strategic Opportunity and Market: What does it take to “cross the chasm” to the early majority? How large is the serviceable addressable market, and will it support scaling? How scalable and repeatable is the business model?

Scope and Speed: How does a venture scale by expanding into new geographies, products, and markets? What does it take to manage multiple revenue streams? How fast should your expansion or diversification take place?

Solution: What constitutes a repeatable and scalable offer? How does the offer maintain sufficient homogeneity to address an extensible market, while establishing sufficient differentiation to fend off competitors?

Managing Growth

Structure: When and how should a rapidly scaling venture introduce more formal roles, systems, and processes? What organizational design choices favor scaling? What are the trade-offs between autonomy and control?

Senior Team: When should a venture replace its founder with a “professional” CEO? At what point should you recruit experienced executives into leadership positions? When should you start hiring specialists over generalists?

Spirit: How do scaling ventures design culture? How do they assimilate hires who are less mission-driven and more political than the first wave of recruits? How do ventures mitigate friction between the old guard and new talent?

Final Deliverable

Students have a choice between taking a final exam or completing a final project. The exam consists of a course-relevant case with assignment questions. The project invites students to apply course concepts to a scaling venture. For the project, students are encouraged to work in teams to address opportunities and/or challenges presented by their project sponsors and then prepare a report outlining their research, analyses, and recommendations.

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