Founder Mindset
Course Number 1676
28 Sessions
Paper/Project
Qualifies for Management Science Track Credit
COURSE OVERVIEW
Founder Mindset examines the critical decisions founders make when starting and building a venture, and provides helpful frameworks and practical tips and tools for founding, scaling, and eventually exiting the business. These critical decisions are often made without careful consideration of the range of options available and tradeoffs between them. How do you assemble, motivate and lead a team when you have big ambitions, limited resources, and a compass instead of a map? We walk you through practical actions, such as committing to an idea, choosing and negotiating with a co-founder, selecting a team, securing a first customer and initial investor. You will learn tactics for dealing with difficult situations, like firing an employee, pivoting your business model, or selling the business. The course supplements case studies and discussions with simulations and role-plays, where you will be faced with challenging situations and forced to make difficult decisions with imperfect information. You will gain a sense of the intense pressures, difficult decisions, incredible learnings and extremes—highs and lows—that every founder confronts in some way.
The goal of the course is to increase the probability of entrepreneurial success by providing prospective founders with a tool kit to make better decisions. It provides students with practices and frameworks for succeeding in the face of uncertainty and for increasing their resilience while pursuing difficult challenges. Students will be introduced to founders and seed investors and will be given the opportunity to pitch and debate their ideas and ventures. This course is targeted to those students who have a strong desire to become founders.
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