Course Principles
No business plan survives first contact with the customer.
This is the guiding principle behind Lean LaunchPad. In this course, you learn to build a startup by getting out of the building and testing your business assumptions.
Unlike other entrepreneurship courses, you will not work on toy problems, theoretical models, or case studies. Throughout the course, you and your team spend most of your time talking to real customers and iterating on your ideas.
If you are serious about pursuing a startup, this course is a hands-on, intensive and experiential opportunity to advance your idea or product.
Course Highlights
FLIPPED CLASSROOM
True to form, the class will follow a flipped classroom format. You will watch lectures online available at udacity.com as homework. These lectures are only intended to serve as background context for the customer conversations you have everyday. Making these conversations happen productively is your chief responsibility, just as in a real startup. Classroom discussion and feedback helps you hone what you have heard and learnt, as well as improve your natural instincts and processes for customer discovery.
VENTURE BACKED FACULTY
The class is taught by venture-backed faculty. With active and extensive experience running companies in domains such as enterprise software and hard tech, supplemented by teaching assistants with further complementary experience, you are in great, battle-tested hands.
10 DAYS, 100 USERS
Over the course of 10 classroom days, you are expected to speak to 100 users. This means that you have around 10 to 15 customer conversations every day. These conversations will focus on the business model canvas topic discussed at the end of the previous class. By providing a clear framework for analysis for every conversation, the course allows you to distill unstructured information you get from customers into business and product insights.
BUILD A TRIBE
Beyond the classroom, the course will serve as a resource for you should you choose to pursue a startup in the future. Whether you are looking for co-founders in your classmates, or for advice and connections for fundraising or product design, Lean LaunchPad will be a tribe and a resource for you.
Instructors
Dan manian
Dan (‘06) is the co-founder and CEO of Donut. Donut’s software tools help a company engage, onboard and retain employees while building an amazing company culture they can track. In addition to his experience as a startup founder, Dan has taught entrepreneurship to over 1000 students, across undergraduate, masters, PhD, and MBA programs, at Brown, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UCSF, as well as in the National Science Foundation I-Corps program.
rick fleeter
Rick (‘81) is currently a visiting professor for Aerospace Design at La Sapienza, Italy. Additionally, he also serves as a consultant to a long list of leading private and public space organizations globally, such as NASA, European Space Agency, US Air Force at Space Command, among many others. Over a career spanning three decades, Rick has extensively taught, consulted, published research and led companies in aerospace engineering, working with innumerable world-class institutions across the globe.
Schedule
Interested?
Fill out Interest form
Before you can register for the course, you must fill out a short interest form.
Formulate a tean
Once the instructor reaches out to you for a phone interview, you can join an existing team, or post your idea to get team members!
REGISTER for the course
Course registration deadline is Dec 03. If you have finalized a team and had your interview, you are ready to register!