For a number of years, Greg Gottesman and his fellow Madrona Venture Group Managing Director Matt McIlwain have taught an entrepreneurship course in the Foster School of Business. During Winter 2014 they taught the course in Computer Science & Engineering, targeted to a technical audience that included Foster School MBA students as well as CSE undergraduate and graduate students. Greg offered a repeat of the course in Winter 2015 - an offering that added students from Interaction Design to the mix - and will offer it again in Winter 2016. Greg is now a Venture Partner at Madrona, and Managing Director and Co-Founder of Pioneer Square Labs.

Greg joined Madrona in 1997. Madrona has funded more than 15 UW CSE startups. Greg is the very best. He and the colleagues he will rope into providing guest lectures and student feedback have a wealth of experience to share. The course is, above all, practical - interdisciplinary teams will develop a pitch, product demo, and business plan.

This course is open to CSE undergraduates, combined BS/MS students, Professional Masters Program students, and Ph.D. students, as well as to Foster School MBA students, students in Interaction Design, and students in the Master of Human-Computer Interaction Design program - all by permission of the instructors in order to ensure balance among the participants. There will be no auditing - everyone needs to be all-in. And teams will form early - if you hang on for a while and then bail, you'll be letting others down, so please don't do this.

The course will meet Wednesday evenings from 6:00-9:15, from January 6 through March 16 (that is, including Exam Week) in PACCAR 395. It will be a four credit, graded course. The CSE faculty contact (and the author of this web page - don't blame Greg!) is Ed Lazowska.

Course Syllabus, Reading Assignments, and Homework Assignments

Here is a detailed syllabus in Word and pdf that includes the content of each evening's presentation, the schedule of reading assignments, and the schedule of homework assignments. The two sections below are quoted from the syllabus:

Course Objective

The course objectives are two-fold: (1) to develop an awareness and understanding of the range, scope, and complexity of issues involved in starting a technology business; and (2) to gain insight into how entrepreneurs conceive, adapt, and execute strategies to create new, successful businesses.

Course Overview

This course is about entrepreneurship and specifically about starting, growing, managing, leading, and ultimately exiting a new venture. Of all the courses you take at the University of Washington, this one will likely be the most hands-on. Forty percent of your grade will be based on a pitch, product demo and business plan that you develop with your team.

The course sessions will follow the natural order of starting a new business: choosing your idea and your team, validating that idea with customers, honing your initial pitch, dealing with the legal issues of starting a business, building a great product, deciding among financing strategies, developing a go-to-market and operating plan, and exiting successfully. We will spend part of nearly every three-hour block giving you feedback on your actual pitch, your product, and your business generally. To ensure that this course is practical, we will invite numerous guests who are currently working in the venture ecosystem: CEOs, venture capitalists, lawyers, journalists, etc.

It should be a fun ride. We hope you enjoy it!

Course Email

Send email to course members by using the address multi_cse490a_wi16 at uw.edu.

The archive of email is available here.

Readings

The schedule of readings is noted on the syllabus (Word or pdf).

Texts - please be sure you have access to these!

• David Cohen and Brad Feld, Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup (UW Libraries electronic copy available here)
• Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

Additional readings during the quarter - here's the lineup:

• Some Thoughts on Business Plans (HBS Case #9-897-101)
• The Art of Pitching, Chapter 3 (Guy Kawasaki)
• Demo Day TechStars Pitches (watch the video linked from the article)
• Bootstrap Finance: The Art of Start-ups (Amar Bhide, Harvard Business Review, November-December 1992)
• The Legal Forms of Organization (HBS Note #9-898-245)

Homeworks

The schedule of homeworks is noted on the syllabus (Word or pdf).

Homeworks should be emailed to Cindy Petek at Madrona Venture Group - cindy at madrona.com.

Lecture Slides

Slides will be posted following most lectures ...

• Class 1 (Introduction): Greg (Entrepreneurship Overview) pdf pptx
• Class 3 (Customer Validation): Scott Jacobson (Amazon's Approach to Product Definition) pdf pptx
• Class 4 (Building a Great Product): David Zager (Designing your Product) pdf; Aria Haghighi (Prototyping Your Product) pdf; Greg Gottesman (Rocket Closing pitch) pdf pptx; Bill Mitchell (PicoBrew pitch) pdf;
• Class 6 (Building Teams and Culture): Greg (Thirteen Key Characteristics of a Great Startup Culture) pdf pptx; What Defines Hulu? pdf; What Defines Pioneer Square Labs? pdf
• Class 7 (Business Plans and Financial Modeling): Julie Sandler (Pitching Investors) pdf pptx; David Rosenthal (Business Plans - aka What We Look For) pdf
• Class 8 (Go-To-Market Planning and Sales): Matt Bencke (spare5) pdf; Grant Ries (A Few Helpful Tips for Enterprise Technology Sales) pdf pptx
• Class 9 (Fundraising): Matt McIlwain (Financing Your Venture) pdf pptx term sheet pdf term sheet lsx; Craig Sherman (Startup Legal Issues): term agreement pdf term agreement doc

Final Presentations

March 11 or March 14 (TBD), 2:00-5:00 p.m., Madrona Venture Group, 999 Third Avenue, 34th Floor