SEMESTER: Spring 2019

COURSE NUMBER: EWMBA 295T.11

This course is dual-listed with the Full Time MBA program

COURSE TITLE:  Growth Hacking

UNITS OF CREDIT: 1

INSTRUCTOR: David Charron

E-MAIL ADDRESSES: david.charron@berkeley.edu

MEETING DAY/TIME:

Sunday, April 14:        9:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Sunday, April 28:        9:00 AM to 5:00 PM

Please note the unorthodox nature of this course, which meets all day on 2 Sundays. To earn a passing grade, you must attend BOTH class sessions in their entirety. While the times listed are the formal instruction part of the class, participants should recognize that the course will require significant work between sessions and in preparation for the course.

PREREQUISITE(S): None

CLASS FORMAT: Lecture plus experiential

REQUIRED READINGS: The class will have several online resources and articles. No required textbook

BASIS FOR FINAL GRADE:

• Deliverables to the startup after day 1
• Experimentation results prior to day 2
• A final presentation.

CAREER FIELD: Students interested in working on growth oriented projects in venture-backed startups or corporate-funded new product ideas.

ABSTRACT OF COURSE'S CONTENT AND OBJECTIVES:
Over the past ten years the concept of growth hacking has developed into a defined entrepreneurial skill centered on a person or small team dedicated to driving product adoption and business growth. This focus is a high priority when a startup has transitioned to having product-market fit and then turns to producing high growth in order to achieve their next round of funding. Growth Hacking can be useful for early stage startups with the following characteristics:

• They are small teams, typically less than 20 people
• Their product has achieved product-market fit but the team still hasn’t fully understood the baseline data to help drive growth
• The companies are often undercapitalized and must look to creative methods to drive growth

Students will work in teams of five or six for startups who have crossed this line and are seeking high-growth. This requires the team to operate on multiple aspects of the problem including product optimization; rapid experimentation in marketing techniques and across the funnel; behavior and customer adoption model; and, sales cycles along with detailed analytics. These will be hands-on projects and possibly very high intensity. The instructor will choose the startups before the class and will assign teams well before the first class session so that the teams can work collectively on the required pre-work. .

This is an interdisciplinary course for students from marketing, product management, finance and economics backgrounds across multiple industries. Teams will be constructed with a diversity of skills and backgrounds as a goal. The course teaches and relies on methodologies from entrepreneurship, consulting, product design, behavioral economics, and finance. 

OBJECTIVES

• Develop skills to rapidly recognize problems and opportunities to leverage low-cost alternatives to traditional marketing and product design.
• Gain startup experience through hands-on work with new ventures
• Experience the importance of team composition and team dynamics in a young startup
• Create and deliver a compelling final recommendation presentation supported by data

INSTRUCTOR
David Charron has been a member of the professional faculty at UC Berkeley since 2003. He teaches courses in innovation and entrepreneurship including Business Model Innovation and Entrepreneurial Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Applied Innovation/Design Thinking, Product Market Fit in Health, and Venture Capital Investing for Executives (in the Center for Executive Education). He has taught many other courses and designs new courses to fit the demands of customers and clients.

Mr. Charron started UC Berkeley’s National Science Foundation I-Corps Node as Lead Faculty and teaches the Customer Development methodology through various programs and disciplines from software to life sciences. He is currently lead faculty of the National Institutes of Health’s I-Corps program. He co-teaches the Lean Launchpad Educators program and trains faculty for the NSF I-Corps program.

He is a consultant to MD5, the Defense and National Security Technology Accelerator where he helps change the mindsets of DOD agencies towards enabling innovation and culture change.

Mr. Charron is an entrepreneur, having founded Scientific Learning Corporation, the first successful neuroplasticity company. He has also started several other ventures and advises startups, inventors, entrepreneurs and companies.  He is an angel investor in several companies (World of Good, sold to Ebay; Yardbarker, sold to Fox Sports; Magoosh; donut.io, Neurotrainer and others) and is on several Boards of Directors (Impact Carbon, a non-profit improving health, reducing poverty, and improving local environments while slowing climate change; Think-now, focused on neural commercializing fundamental understanding of human attention). He is actively advising Cadence Health, a company moving the birth control pill to over the counter status in the United States.

Mr. Charron has held several leadership positions at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business School, including Executive Director of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program (formerly known as the Lester Center) and Executive Director of the Berkeley Innovative Leadership Development Initiative (BILD). He ran the Berkeley Entrepreneurship Lab, a small incubator/accelerator that produced three venture backed startups per year (including Revolution Foods, CommandCad, TubeMogul, Indiegogo, Aurora Biofuels, Silicon Clocks, Alphabet Energy and others) for five years.

He has worked in and studied the field of technology commercialization and entrepreneurship for over 30 years. Mr. Charron’s experience in this field has been at corporations such as Xerox PARC, academic institutions including MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley and UCSF, and the national labs such as LBNL, LLNL and Sandia.

He was a founding member of the faculty team for Intel Corporation’s Global Technology Entrepreneurship Education project teaching international faculty how to teach entrepreneurship and create entrepreneurial ecosystems.  With that program he traveled and taught extensively in Europe, Asia, South America and Africa.

He holds a B.S. degree from Stanford University and an MBA from UC Berkeley.