Venture Fluent

We will kick-off the course with Orientation, where I'll lay out my course promise and set norms and expectations. There will also be time for you to introduce yourself to your peers. Next, we'll cover a brief overview of the different players who are involved in capital formation for early-stage technology companies, including venture capital investors. Finally, we'll begin our exploration of how some of the most successful venture capitalists have spent years honing and refining an investment thesis. You will learn what purpose an investment thesis serves, become familiar with its components, and start constructing yours.

The syllabus items marked "Bonus" are provided for those students who want to further their exploration and learning beyond the what is covered by the post-work. Remember, students will have lifetime access to the course site, so you are free to come back any time to engage with bonus content, including after the course ends.

What makes a great entrepreneur? How do you find one? What should you be doing to make sure they find you? We'll cover the frameworks investors use to assess the growth potential of entrepreneurs and the methods they employ to generate deal flow.

We will cover the ways venture investors assess risk in transactions involving early- stage technology companies. You'll learn how to spot the red and green flags venture investors look for when they evaluate opportunities and explore some of the biases that overlay the process of selecting investments.

This module covers the ways early-stage venture capital investors structure investments and how they mitigate the risks of partnering with companies with short operating histories. Students will learn about the relative merits of equity versus debt securities, explore the key economic and control terms that govern most transactions, practice the basic math of private company valuations and their associated transactions, and encounter the ways that successful investors align their own interests with those of the entrepreneurs they support.

Where do venture capitalists get the money they invest in startups? In this module, we will cover how fund managers meet the specific needs of one of their key constituencies – limited partners. We will touch on basic concepts of asset allocation, such as portfolio construction and diversification. Additional topics include the types of LPs; motivations and objectives of LPs and how they underwrite investments in venture funds; characteristics of VC managers who generate outsize returns; GP fundraising and building strong working relationships with LPs. Finally, we will touch o the quantitative and qualitative metrics limited partners use to measure the performance of venture capital investors. Our guest speakers are Michael Lints of Singapore-based Golden Gate Ventures and Ben Choi of Next Legacy, a fund-of-funds based in Silicon Valley. 

How should you be thinking about managing a career in innovation investing? What are the frameworks, mindsets, and tactics that top venture capital investors have used to advance in their careers? In this module, we'll explore these topics and more as we conclude our time together in the course.

Our guest speaker will be Miriam Rivera of Ulu Ventures who will share her incredible story, which includes earning 4 degrees from Stanford, serving as in-house counsel at Google while their annual revenue went from $80MM to $1B+, and creating one of Silicon Valley's enduring seed-stage investing platforms.