Overview:

Field Y: Projects in Business Management welcomes both students who have taken Field X and those who have not. If we reach the enrollment limit, preference will be given to students who took Field X. Field Y is a course designed to enable students to develop and grow their businesses. Doing so while on campus has several advantages: access to resources, advice from your peers in a structured environment, and devoted blocks of time during your EC year to move your business forward. The course employs a combination of field methods, classroom exercises, cross-team interactions, and access to faculty/guest experts/other advisors. The largest single allocation of time is for working with your team to make meaningful progress on your own business. This course can be thought of as occupying a space between an IP and a traditional course, giving you an opportunity to work on something of great interest to you, while preserving many of the benefits of a larger course, including opportunities for guest speakers, feedback from your peers, and clearly delineated deliverables and milestones that act as commitment devices to push the business forward.

Career Focus:

Field Y is suitable for students who took Field X and are still running and growing their businesses as well as students who are starting and/or running businesses in Spring of their EC year who did not take Field X. Ultimately, anyone interested in entrepreneurship would get a lot out of this course: whether you want to be a founder or a joiner, which is a student who works with an already established team for the semester. Field Y is not geared towards any one type of business; we always have teams working in the consumer, healthcare, finance, real estate, tech, arts and entertainment, AI, and social enterprise industries. If you are a student who is sufficiently excited about a business you are running, or a business you want to start immediately, and you want to focus on it in a serious way, Field Y would be a great fit for you. For some, because they treasure the lessons they are learning from building a business. For some, because they think their business has a legitimate opportunity to grow rapidly and create a successful career path for them. And for others because they believe their business can do a substantial amount of good for the world and so they want to continue working on it during their EC year and perhaps after graduation.

Educational Objectives:

Students can expect to:

Summarize and critique their existing business, its strengths and weaknesses, and set priorities for moving the business forward, including the most pressing priorities to be addressed during the course itself.

Develop a strategy for taking the business to the next level, including a plan for funding, and a plan and timeline for reaching scale.

Give and receive feedback from other highly motivated student teams.

Meet frequently as a team with the faculty advisor.

Receive feedback and counsel from outside business advisors.

Have opportunities to pitch your work to angel, seed, and venture capital investors.

A substantial number of Field Y businesses have been funded by mentors and investors they met through the course. Dozens of teams from previous semesters are running their businesses full-time now, most of whom have received funding of $500,000 or more, in some cases far more!

Course Content and Organization:

There will be a weekly class meeting, but there will not, in general, be substantial weekly homework or required preparation for class, other than that you work to push your business forward. Each class is organized into two parts: an interactive talk with a luminary, followed by in-class office hours where student teams get to meet either 1:1 or in small groups with industry experts and course mentors to get their advice on their businesses. Past speakers have included venture capitalist Tim Draper, Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary, entrepreneurs like Yvonne Hao of PillPack and Charles Curran of Armored Things, and many others with wisdom to share!

Grading / Course Administration:

The main deliverable is the team’s final presentation with accompanying slide deck and written report. There will also be intermediate deliverables building up to that point. In short, students can expect to produce a Word document and a PowerPoint deck with descriptions of your business at the beginning of the course and a (perhaps similar, perhaps very different) version at the end of the course.

On the final day of class, students who wish to have the opportunity to present their business to an audience of angel, seed and venture investors at our Pitch Day event. At our most recent Pitch Day, over 300 investors and industry leaders attended. After the pitching portion of the event, there is a catered reception which is an opportunity for students to network with these investors and industry leaders.

Course Content Keywords: Entrepreneurship, Venture Creation, Startups, Venture Capital, Mentorship, Business Strategy, Growth & Scaling, Experiential Learning, Pitching, Innovation

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