COURSE NUMBER: EWMBA295A-11

COURSE TITLE: Entrepreneurship

UNITS OF CREDIT: 3 Units

INSTRUCTOR: Steve Gertz, Todd Morrill

E-MAIL ADDRESSES: sagertz@well.com, morrill@haas.berkeley.edu

MEETING DAY(S)/TIME: Saturdays, 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

PREREQUISITES: EWMBA Core Curriculum

CLASS FORMAT: Lecture, case study and class participation. Students will be expected to read and understand a case (or business plan) for most classes and provide email responses to simple questions from the case before class. Students will be graded on class attendance and participation, as well as on the plan and presentation. Perhaps more than most courses, this one will depend heavily on input provided by students. It will combine readings, lectures, case materials and regular class involvement by entrepreneurs and business professionals. Well-prepared and intellectually engaged students are essential for the class to succeed. Please come to class prepared and please be prepared to work hard on your plan.

REQUIRED READINGS: Textbook: New Venture Creation, 7th Ed. (Timmons and Spinelli), and a class reader

BASIS FOR FINAL GRADE: Business plan, including draft deliverables 50%; oral presentations 25%; class participation and other deliverables 25%.

ABSTRACT OF COURSE'S CONTENT AND OBJECTIVES:
This is a course about how to start a business. Since the Haas School is principally about professionally managed businesses, the course will focus on businesses that are not small by design, but on those businesses that with hard work and good luck can be expected to develop into complex enterprises. The course will survey how to evaluate possible opportunities, create an unfair competitive advantage, develop a business and financial model, and how to find and develop strategic partnerships, and will provide an overview of financing methods, legal issues, customer development, building a high performance management team and creating liquidity.

The driving force behind start-up ventures are entrepreneurs – those individuals who have the courage, insight, knowledge, intensity and luck to attempt to achieve great business results without resources remotely sufficient for the job (or so it seems at first). A key vehicle for the entrepreneur’s effort is the business plan. The plan helps the entrepreneur attract support and resources from others because it tells them what the business is about, what its strategy will be, how its management thinks and what the financial risks and rewards most likely will be. It also helps the entrepreneur to manage a growing and necessarily complex set of dynamics by providing mileposts and indicating the resources that will be necessary to achieve them. Finally, it provides a set of standards against which actual performance can be compared. But a great plan by itself is no guarantee of success. A successful startup requires relentless execution against the plan and flexibility in reevaluating and changing the plan. The ultimate validations are customers’ orders and a scalable, repeatable and profitable business.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH:
Steve Gertz - Steve is President of Sage Associates, providing management consulting and investment banking services to early stage technology companies. He is also an adjunct professor and entrepreneur-in-residence at Miami University (Oxford, OH), teaching Entrepreneurship, and sits on Miami’s Boards of Advisors for Entrepreneurship and Interactive Media. Steve has more than thirty years of senior operating management and strategic consulting experience at both start-up and established technology-application companies, domestically and in Europe and Asia. Steve holds a Master of Business Administration degree with a concentration in finance from Long Island University, and a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He resides in Marin County with his wife and two children.

Todd Morrill – Todd currently leads a team performing acquisitions, licensing and strategic research at a Mid-Cap biotechnology company. He has been a founder and entrepreneur at several life science startups, including Novex, Trellis Biosciences, IO Informatics and Venture Merchant Group. He teaches Entrepreneurship in Biotechnology, Entrepreneurship and other courses at Haas and the Haas Executive Education program. His bio can be found at http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/faculty/pdf/morrillcv.pdf. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1982, from the Tato School, where they teach you everything, in 1993, and received an MBA from Haas in 1997.