Faculty
Professor Gregg Fairbrothers
Objectives
The course is designed to provide a global introduction to the process of turning an idea into a successful startup enterprise. There will be a special emphasis on commercializing innovations derived from research and technology development. The track will be useful for anyone having little or no pre-existing entrepreneurial experience, but having an idea he or she would like to pursue. For Tuck first-year students, the course should provide a comprehensive foundation for additional entrepreneurial learning in the spring First-Year Project course, summer internships in entrepreneurial environments, the second-year Advanced Entrepreneurship course, and self-generated independent studies for credit. The course objective is to have students exiting this class:
prepared to intelligently evaluate potential start-up opportunities for personal involvement
fully knowledgeable of the major components of full-cycle development of an idea into a successful enterprise
capable of beginning the implementation process on ideas that merit development
AUDIENCES
The format is designed as a resource for multiple audiences for credit or audit:
Tuck students who would like to learn more about entrepreneurship, particularly first-year students seeking an entrepreneurship background as a foundation to undertake a First-Year Project in entrepreneurship. The course is not open to students who have previously taken the Advanced Entrepreneurship course.
Dartmouth Medical School and other life sciences constituents – faculty, researchers, medical school students.
Thayer Engineering students, faculty.
Selected auditing undergraduates, by application to the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network.
Other Dartmouth students, faculty, staff, or alumni with an interest in startup entrepreneurship, possibly in connection with a personal idea or focus via application to the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network.
Anyone eligible for a dartmouth.edu, hitchcock.org or alum.dartmouth.org email address is eligible to audit the course via application to the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network.
Dartmouth Regional Technology Center tenants are also eligible for inclusion upon application and approval via application to the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network.
Class size is restricted. For-credit students have first priority registration, with remaining seats available for audit. Anyone interested in auditing can contact sandy.rozyla@dartmouth.edu for more information.
FORMAT
Tuesday evenings, 4:45-6:45 PM, commencing 1/7/09 for 9 weeks in Georgiopoulos Classroom, Tuck School of Business.
The course will draw on lectures, discussions, group project presentations, sample presentations by existing Dartmouth startups, and tuest lecturers with distinctive experience and expertise. There will be required and suggested readings. Assignments will be organized around a self-selected business idea and a summary presentation prepared for public review and scrutiny at the end of the half-semester. Final written deliverables for students taking the course for credit will be:
an executive summary document suitable for wide distribution in promoting a startup idea;
a PowerPoint pitch presentation, and;
a due diligence analysis of another project presented in the class.
Group work will begin with a focus on defining ideas and gathering teams. It will proceed to preliminary group presentations of ideas with feedback from faculty and fellow class members in to-be-scheduled sessions outside regular class hours, and will culminate in a final pitch to a panel of business-experienced reviewers on March 3, 2009.
Requirements
ASSIGNMENTS
The course is intended as an introductory, survey course covering all the main challenges in starting a new business. Toward that end, assignments for the course include readings, case discussions, interaction in presentation sessions as presenters and questioners, and an entrepreneurial startup project (summary/pitch sheet and pitch presentation). We will not develop a full business plan, but will address at a first-pass level most of the early-stage development elements that appear in a plan.
Learning entrepreneurship depends in large part on integrating business knowledge tools acquired elsewhere, and is heavily experiential. Accordingly, much entrepreneurial learning happens outside the reading material. But setting out to learn without reading at least some useful material is senseless. On the subject of entrepreneurship, there’s a mountain of literature, online information (the last Google search I did on “business plans” yielded 708 million results) and textbook material. This course has a series of readings from a textbook, assigned for the simple purpose of providing a foundation in key areas of new enterprise development. I’ve identified additional sources and relevant chapters for each week as a means of highlighting where you can go for more in-depth information. Nothing makes a student look worse than complaining to the instructor that he or she has no idea how to approach something which appeared in the assigned readings for the previous week – and this actually happens every year.
Choice of a source textbook is always a difficult balance in a survey course in entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship texts range from technical, detailed and scholarly to short, trendy and inspirational. I feel the selected text for required readings falls between the extremes: Bruce Barringer’s and Duane Ireland’s Entrepreneurship – Successfully Launching New Ventures (Prentice-Hall). I suspect this text is targeted more to undergraduate level classes. But its pragmatic and market-oriented focus is better than most other texts I’ve reviewed and it comprehensively addresses issues in ventures ranging from consumer-oriented, small-scale businesses to high-technology, venture-backed startups. Texts don’t have to be dense to be useful.
I’ve identified a number of additional resources in this syllabus which we have on reserve for the class term in Feldberg Library. I would greatly appreciate feedback on the text and any supplemental readings you elect to explore.
For each of the written assignments a folder will be placed in the course folder for this course. Students taking this course for credit should submit their Word documents electronically into the respective folder for their assignments. I like to have the option to return comments to students embedded in their documents using the “track changes” feature of Word. This is not possible in PDF documents. Assignments submitted in a form other than Word will not be accepted. Once an assignment is placed in the folder it cannot be edited or removed. There is no need to turn in hard copies of the assignments.
Assignments for all students taking the course for credit will include:
Preliminary project defined: All students taking the course for credit must do a project in groups of 2-4. Students in the past have tried doing projects solo, but it has seldom worked out well. A brief (1 page maximum) preliminary description of the idea and business model will be due Friday, January 16. It should contain a concise description of the basic idea and why the team feels it’s promising. All team members should be identified. Substantiation of the idea, or definition of the business model, are not expected at this stage and should be deferred. Written comments will be returned prior to class time, January 20. Please submit all written material in Word, and I will return all comments using the “track changes feature” in a copy of the submission.
First draft of 1 page executive summary and PPT pitch presentation: Due Wednesday, 2/11/09. Written comments will be returned by end of day 2/13/09.
Preliminary class presentations: Approximately 2 weeks before the end of the term, we will schedule one or more out-of-class sessions in which each project team will make a preliminary presentation for feedback and comments from the class. These sessions are intended to offer the opportunity to test ideas and presentation elements in advance of the final presentation.
Due diligence report: To provide an exercise in looking at projects from “the other side of the table,” students will work in pairs to do a due diligence review on another team in the class and provide a written recommendation to an investor (or a previously agreed alternative context if the plan doesn’t call for outside investment).
The reports are due by end of day, Friday, 2/20/09 from all students taking the class for credit, submitted to the academic coordinator electronically in Word. It is not necessary to submit a hard copy report. All reports will be furnished to the project groups as received for use in preparing the executive summary and final PowerPoint pitch presentation.
Sample reports from previous classes will be made available on TuckStreams and Blackboard. Non-credit students may join any for-credit team by mutual agreement with the team if they desire.
Final executive summary (2 page limit) and final PPT pitch presentation:(electronically, in Word, due to course folder by 9 AM on 3/2/09. No PDF files for the summary or the pitch deck.
Final presentation event: a final presentation event, before entrepreneur and investor reviewers will take place on Tuesday, 3/3/09 beginning at the regular class time of 4:45 pm. Presentations will run 30-40 minutes each before a panel of entrepreneur and investor reviewers. Length of time available will depend on the number of projects in the class and number of reviewer panels working. Presentation sessions will have 3 components:
a presentation of no more than 15 minutes
questions intended to impose scrutiny on the business idea and presentation
constructive feedback on the business and executive summary
ATTENDANCE AND CLASS PARTICIPATION
Students are expected to attend every class session. Tuck policy does not recognize recruiting trips as excused absences from class. Per the Tuck Attendance Policy, please notify the instructor before class by email or phone if you are unable to attend a session due to illness, emergency, or an unavoidable conflict. Please contact the instructor at least a day in advance if you will be absent for non-emergency reasons. All excused absences, approved in advance by the instructor, will require the student to review the class session on videotape and submit to the instructor a thorough, written review of the material covered in class and takeaways relevant to the student’s class project. Missed Classes due to “unexcused” absences will negatively affect your grade. Please see below a schedule of classes and topics. Check TuckStreams regularly for changes, primarily to visitors, whose schedules are subject to change. Class members will have first priority on access to visitors for office hours and meals.
Class interaction is integral to the structure of the class; students are dependent on each other for attendance and participation. The value of this class experience is directly related to your level of preparation and active participation in each class session. Quality and quantity of participation are both important.
Materials
Required reading
The textbook is available from Wheelock Books and Dartmouth Bookstore to purchase OR on 24 hour reserve at Feldberg library.
Barringer, Bruce R., and R. Duane Ireland. Entrepreneurship: Successfully Launching New Ventures. Pearson Prentice-Hall, 2006 (2nd ed).
HBS Case study, Explore, Inc (9-300-011)
Purple Tie case - (to be distributed - permission approval pending)
Optional readings
You can look at these books on reserve at Feldberg and see if you think they’ll be valuable to you in the course or to help you with your idea. They are not reserved at the bookstore, but you may want to buy one or more online for the course and future reference. The Bagley book on entrepreneurial business law is a good reference if you plan to start a company.
Bagley, Constance E., and Craig E. Dauchy. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law, West Educational Publishing Co., 1998 (1st ed), 2003 (2nd ed.), or 2007 (3rd ed.)
Bygrave, William D. (editor) and Andrew Zacharias (editor). The Portable MBA in Entrepreneurship, 3rd Edition. John Wiley and Sons, 2004.
Dorf, Richard C. and Thomas H. Byers. Technology Ventures, McGraw Hill, 2005.
Heath, Chip and Dan. Made to Stick, Random House, 2007.
Kawasaki, Guy. The Art of the Start, Portfolio, 2004.
Farso, Richard and Ralph Keyes. Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins. Free Press, 2003.
Klein, Maury. The Change Makers: From Carnegie to Gates, How the Great Entrepreneurs Transformed Ideas into Industries. Times Books, Holt & Co., NY, 2002
Krass, Peter (Editor). The Book of Entrepreneurs' Wisdom: Classic Writings by Legendary Entrepreneurs. John Wiley & Sons, 1999.
Robbins, William L., Seed-Stage Investing, Apspatore Books, 2006. (Bill Robbins is a Dartmouth ’83 who has worked in large corporations, startups and venture investing in the medical technology sector. Bill is currently an overseer at the Thayer School.)
Sahlman, William A., et al. The Entrepreneurial Venture, 2nd edition. Harvard Business School Press, 1999.
Sahlman, William A. and Howard H. Stevenson. The Entrepreneurial Venture, 1st edition. Harvard Business School Publications, 1992.
Stoller, Gregory. Strategies in Entrepreneurial Finance. Northcoast Publishers 2006.
Timmons, Jeffry A. New Venture Creation: Entrepreneurship for the 21st Century, 7th edition, Irwin/McGraw-Hill, 2006.
Timmons, Jeffry A., Leonard E. Smollen, and Alexander L. M. Dingee, Jr. New Venture Creation: A Guide to Small Business Development: R.D. Irwoin, 1977
Articles:
Available on Dartmouth Digital Collection, TuckStreams and Course BlackBoard (https://www.dartmouth.edu/~blackboard)
Alimansky, Burt. "Eight Ways to Ruin Your Chances of Raising Venture Capital" The Journal of Private Equity, (Summer 2000): p. 78-82.
Gumpert, David E. and James McNeill Stancill. "How Much Money Does Your New Venutre Need?" Harvard Business Review (May/June 1986, Vol. 64 Issue 3): p. 122.
Sahlman, William A. “How to Write a Great Business Plan” Harvard Business Review, July-August, 1997, pp. 98-108.
Websites:
DEN website, Resources section: http://den.dartmouth.edu/resources/index.htm
“How Can You Make the Annual Financial Plan Even Better” Michael Gonnerman: http://www.gonnerman.com/finreptannualplan.asp
Glossary: http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/pecenter/resources/glossary.html
Tuck Honor Code and Intellectual Property
The Tuck Honor Code applies to your work in this course. If you have questions concerning the application of the Honor Code in this course please do not hesitate to ask my advice.
During the course, you may be exposed to confidential information or proprietary materials from guest lecturers, class members, and the instructor. Improperly disclosing such information could cause competitive harm and reputation damage to Tuck. By enrolling in this course, you commit to safeguard the confidentiality of proprietary information and you commit not to disclose such materials outside of the course - including to peers not taking the course.
Please discuss with the instructor in advance any concerns you may have regarding public disclosures of potentially patentable concepts or inventions. The treatment of public disclosures, and their consequences differ in US and international jurisdictions, and under certain conditions you may forfeit the opportunity to sustain a patent filing due to a public disclosure.
Laptops-Down Policy
Students in past years have strongly recommended to me that we operate under a laptops-down policy in this class. In order to promote class discussion and facilitate participation without distractions, please do not use laptops in class.
Grading
Preliminary market sections 20%
Written sections and in-class presentations; market validation interviews; preliminary operations, financial and etc. sections - written sections and in-class presentations
Due diligence reports 15%
Due diligence reports
Preliminary pitches in class 25%
Preliminary pitches in class; executive summary, and PPT pitch presentation
Final presentations 20%
Final presentations
Regular class participation 20%
Regular class participation
Schedule
01/07/2009
Wednesday, January 7
Lecturer: Gregg Fairbrothers, D'76 (60 minutes)
How are research and commercialization related?
What is entrepreneurship?
The process from idea to exit
Milestones-valuation curve
Key issues to consider
The importance of execution and the key steps involved
Concept development and validation
Defining expectations and getting started
The roles of experience and learning
Course overview
Company presentations by Dartmouth startups with Q&A (60 minutes)
Dax Kepshire TH'06, SustainX
Mike Adair T'09, Red's All Natural
Jason Freedman T'08, OpenVote
Barringer & Ireland
Chapter 1, “Introduction to Entrepreneurship”
Chapter 2, “Recognizing Opportunities and Generating Ideas”
Optional:
Dorf and Byers, chapter 2
Kawasaki, chapters 1 & 2
Bygrave and Zacharakis, chapters 1 & 2
01/13/2009
Tuesday, January 13
Lecturer: Michael Clarkin, D'85, VP of Marketing, Sykes Enterprises (90 minutes)
Who is the customer?
Market and competitive assessment
Market validation
Effective sales and marketing plans
During class: Define idea-pitch project (30 minutes)
Pitches of ideas by any students seeking team members
Teams self-select and organize
Barringer and Ireland
Chapter 3, “Feasibility Analysis”
Optional:
Dorf and Beyers, chapter 11
Assignment: Due end of day 1/16
Define project team and a startup idea to pitch
Limit of 2-4 members per team
All for-credit students must participate in a team; optional for others
Draft a preliminary idea summary (1 page), drop in the electronic course folder (Word format, not PDF)by end of day 1/16/09. PDFs will not be accepted
Comments will be returned electronically before class time on 1/20/09
After this date, definition of projects will be considered committed and final for the duration of the term
01/21/2009
Wednesday, January 21
Lecturer: Gregg Fairbrothers D'76 (90 minutes)
What you should need
How to find the right people
Attracting and signing the right people
Board and advisors
Company presentation: Ricky Joshi TH'02, Karim Motani D'01, FanDome.com (30 minutes)
Barringer and Ireland
Chapter 9, “Building a New-Venture Team”
Optional:
Kawasaki, chapter 6
Dorf and Beyers, chapter 12
Bagley, chapters 6 & 10
01/27/2009
Tuesday, January 27
Lecturer: Gregg Fairbrothers, D'76 (90 minutes)
Business plan development
elements and organization
uses of plans
financial projections
presentations, pitches, the “ten slides” and summaries
Company presentation by Dartmouth startup: Jordan Cooper D'04, Untitled Partners (30 minutes)
Barringer and Ireland
Chapter 4, “Writing a Business Plan”
Chapter 5, “Industry and Competitor Analysis"
Optional:
Dorf and Byers, chapters 17 & 19
Kawaski, chapters 3 & 4
Bygrave and Zacharakis, chapter 4
02/03/2009
Tuesday, February 3
Lecturers: Gregg Fairbrothers, D’76 & Tom Naughton D'89, T'96,(80 minutes)
Financing
Seed
Venture capital
Strategy
Process and term sheets
Managing expectations
Alternative sources (grants, sales, etc.)
Market and competitive assessment
Company presentation by Dartmouth startups (40 minutes)
Mac Dougherty T'09 (AskOnline)
Kate Reiling T'09 (Mind Share)
Purple Tie Case
Barringer and Ireland
Chapter 10, “Getting Financing or Funding”
Optional:
Dorf and Byers, chapter 18
Article: Gumpert, David E. and James McNeill Stancill. “How Much Money Does Your New Venture Need?” Harvard Business Review (May/June 1986, Vol. 64 Issue 3): p. 122
Article: Alimansky, Burt. "Eight Ways to Ruin Your Chances of Raising Venture Capital" The Journal of Private Equity, (Summer 2000): p. 78-82
Kawasaki, chapters 5 & 7
Bygrave and Zacharakis, chapters 6-8
02/10/2009
Tuesday, February 10
Lecturer: Sarah Hoit D'88, President and Founder, MyWay Village, Case study (90 minutes)
Company presentation by Dartmouth startup: Dave DeLucia D'80, ImmuRx (30 minutes)
Barringer and Ireland
Chapter 6, “Developing an Effective Business Model”
HBS Case study, Explore, Inc. (9-300-011)
Optional:
Dorf and Beyers, chapters 5 & 6
Assignment: Due by end of day, Wednesday 2/11 (see assignments section)
First draft of 1 page executive summary and PowerPoint presentation for feedback. Drop in electronic course folder (Word format, not PDF).
Written comments will be returned by end of the day (2/13).
02/17/2009
Tuesday, February 17
Lecturer: Patrick Byrne D'85, Overstock.com (90 minutes)
Founding of Overstock
Build-out, financing, growth
IPO
Building effective teams and boards
Important things to keep in mind when approaching investors
Company presentation by Dartmouth startup: Greg Ames D'90, T'07, Sportspage (30 minutes)
Barringer and Ireland
Chapter 13, “Preparing for and Evaluating the Challenges of Growth”
Optional:
Dorf and Byers, chapter 20
Assignment: Due by end of day, 2/20/09
Due diligence reports dropped in electronic course folder (Word format, not PDF).
All reports will be furnished to the project groups as received
Written comments for use in preparing their final presentations and summaries
02/24/2009
Tuesday, February 24
Lecturer: Andy Palmer, T'94, founding CEO, Vertica Systems (105 minutes)
Case histories in the first person
Compare and contrast between different industries
Personal and operational lessons learned
Wrap-up and preparation for final presentation session (15 minutes)
Optional:
Kawasaki, Chapter 11
03/03/2009
Tuesday, March 3
Final class presentations
4:45-6:45 PM
Presentations will run 30-40 minutes each before a reviewer panel of entrepreneurs and investors
Length of time available will depend on the number of projects in the class and number of review panels working
A detailed schedule will be provided in mid-February
Final assignment: Due no later than 9 AM, Monday, 3/2/09
Final executive summary and PPT pitch presentation
Drop into course folder to allow time for preparation of presentation books for reviewers and installation on network
