Applications will be accepted through 5pm ET on August 9, 2024

A maximum of 20 teams/60 students will be accepted into the fall cohort

Application can be found here. Accepted students will be notified by August 21, 2024

Application FAQ can be found here.

All ventures enrolled in the course may be eligible to receive non-dilutive grant funding.

Career Focus

Startup Operations is designed for three types of students:

1. Those who have already launched or are about to launch a startup. See the course FAQ for more details about company stage expectations.
2. Those who are curious about working for early stage startups or know they want to found a venture but don't have an idea yet.
3. Those who are interested in investing in startups.

There is no specific industry focus for this course - all sectors and business models apply - including CPG, social enterprise, nonprofits and bootstrapped businesses.

This field course complements concepts covered in Launching Tech Ventures, Entrepreneurial Sales and Marketing, and Founders Mindset.

Educational Objectives

This course is designed to provide hands-on guidance through the early stages of building your business. Students will test assumptions and hypotheses to evolve their product, build their strategic and operating roadmaps, create organizational plans and develop skills necessary to manage the many complexities of operating a startup. Sessions will feature skill-building exercises led by the instructor and outside experts as well as weekly peer-to-peer critiques on work-in-progress. Students are encouraged to work as a cohort to support each other through their networks and to offer insights based on their own experiences.

Students who successfully complete Startup Operations will be eligible to apply for the Startup Operations Studio course 6675 offered in the spring.

Course Content

Through a series of class exercises and intimate conversations with experienced startup leaders, students examine operational challenges in early stage startups. Enrolled students’ ventures are “live” cases in the course, thus each student will not only learn through the startup they are working on, but through the 19 other startups in the course. Taking the perspective that there is more to just “build it and they will come”, the course will explore four modules:

1. Getting To Product Market Fit: Exploring best practices for customer feedback, solution iteration, metrics that matter and developing a product and operations roadmap.
2. Establishing The Startup Organization: Structuring early teams and the processes by which to operate your business. Topics will include: Who to hire and when - from technical hires and managing freelancers/first hires to product managers, operations, support and other key team members. Cross-functional communication from across and between the organization to external communication with customers, partners and investors - and role shifting as the organization scales.
3. Startup Business Operations We will explore legal matters, budgets, contracts and early go-to-market strategies such as pricing and product marketing. We will also discuss the why/when/hows of raising venture capital.
4. Startup Evolution As companies grow and scale, operations and products will evolve. We will explore when and how to pivot, shift and adapt to these changes as your companies evolve.

The course is highly focused on ensuring each team’s business evolves towards success criteria unique to their product and organization. Therefore, each team will build a Goals & Milestones plan as their first deliverable. The work to achieve these milestones will be a large percentage of the course grade. Session participation, including weekly peer-to-peer critiques, routine session deliverables, and a final reflection will make up the remaining elements of the individual grade. Light weekly readings, podcasts and films will be required in prep for each session. All readings and deliverables are designed to move student companies forward.

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