Career Focus

Scaling Technology Ventures (STV) is designed for students who plan to launch or join a hypergrowth technology venture, or who plan to invest in growth-stage tech companies. The course addresses key challenges founders and their teams face after achieving product-market fit – and how to plan for, activate, and manage exponential growth. The course addresses scaling challenges in a variety of sectors, including e-commerce, ed-tech, enterprise SaaS, HR-tech, mobile apps, marketplace platforms, mobility solutions, social media, two-sided platforms, and virtual worlds.

Educational Objectives

The course defines a scaling venture as one that has achieved product-market fit and secured at least one round of institutional financing. Adopting the perspective of a CEO, a founder, or a functional leader, cases in the course frame many of the critical opportunities and challenges associated with activating rapid growth, and then managing such rapid growth as a venture scales. Scaling situations are presented through a variety of functional lenses, including strategy, business development, product management, sales and marketing, and engineering and technology.

In nearly every class, the course will host case protagonists – largely founders and CEOs – as in-person guests. Cases include Asana, BlaBlaCar, Catalant, Chewy, Nextdoor, Perch, Second Life, Supercell, Shopify, thredUP, Tiktok, Wayfair, WeWork, and Zoom, among many others.

Students will also have the opportunity to participate in several optional workshops with guests and outside experts. In past years, topics have included performance marketing, product management, investing in hypergrowth, and managing the customer experience.

STV is a natural companion to the MBA elective Launching Technology Ventures (LTV). LTV focuses on early-stage ventures that are searching for product-market fit, while STV focuses on later-stage ventures that have confirmed product-market fit. 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. These challenges are organized around six modules that represent external and internal enablers of successful scaling:

Strategic Opportunity and Solution: In what directions should a new venture grow? When should a startup expand into new geographies/markets or diversify product lines versus growing its customer base for existing offers? How does a venture gauge market readiness, and what does it take to “cross the chasm” to the early majority?

Scope and Speed: When is scaling a venture premature, and at what pace should a scaling venture grow? How fast should a venture drive its internal processes, such as strategic decision-making, market and purchase funnel testing, and cycle times of service operations and supply chain? What role can metrics play, such as OKRs and NPS?

Staged Resources: In what ways should scaling ventures finance growth with or without VC financing? How do scaling ventures use analyses, such as unit and customer economics, to make their case to investors? How does a venture maximize its private-market valuation through growth and composition of revenues?

Structure: When and how should a rapidly scaling venture introduce more formal roles, systems, and processes? How quickly should scaling leaders design organizations to define functions, and then to assure cross-functional integration? How does governance, starting with the board of directors, evolve as a venture matures and scales?

Senior Team: When should a scaling venture replace its founder-CEO? How do professional CEOs differ from founders when coming into a venture? How should ventures optimally onboard experienced executives recruited into leadership positions, and when does it make sense to start hiring specialists instead of generalists?

Spirit: How do leaders in rapidly growing ventures design and shape culture? How do they assimilate hires who are less mission-driven and more political than the first wave of recruits? How can they mitigate the friction between OG’s and newer talent?

Students have a choice between taking a final exam and completing a final project. The project asks students to apply course concepts to a scaling venture. For the project, students are encouraged to work in teams with a venture and then prepare a report presenting their analyses and conclusions.

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