COURSE NUMBER: MBA236V.1
This course is dual-listed
with the Evening-Weekend MBA Program.
COURSE TITLE: New Venture Finance
UNITS OF CREDIT: 3 units
INSTRUCTOR: Adair Morse
E-MAIL ADDRESS: morse@haas.berkeley.edu
PREREQUISITE(S): None
CLASS FORMAT: Mixture of cases,
lectures, and in-class practice.
REQUIRED READINGS: The main focus of
class preparation will be the case or cases to be covered in class. Additional
required and suggested reading will be included in the course materials.
BASIS FOR FINAL GRADE: Class participation
accounts for thirty percent of the grade. Case memos account for ten percent.
An in-class midterm is twenty percent of the grade. The final exam (an
out-of-class case) counts for the residual.
CAREER FIELD:
This course is intended for anyone who might be interested, now or later in
their careers, in becoming an entrepreneur. The material is relevant for
for-profit as well as impact entrepreneurs. The course is also essential for
those interested in working on the funding side – as a VC, angel, corporate
business development, government development, investment banking M&A, or
impact investor – or for those interested in working in the FinTech industries
of business finance.
ABSTRACT OF COURSE'S CONTENT AND
OBJECTIVES:
How do entrepreneurs successfully raise finance? In New Venture Finance,
we are all entrepreneurs, and our first step is to figure out the rules of the
game: What type of investor might be interested in our new venture and why? How
will the venture capitalist or angel value our idea, and what will the
financing package look like? How will funding evolve as the startup grows, and
how will investors exit the deal? As we put the pieces of our knowledge into
practice in cases, the course evolves into the second step, of understanding
not just which investors might be interested in our startup, but which
investors are optimal for our business. We want to use the investor’s funds and
expertise to position our venture for success.
The course
mainly focuses on raising equity finance, covering angel finance, incubators,
accelerators, platform funds, and VC finance. Pools of capital are changing,
and thus, we also take a serious look at alternatives: crowdfunding, micro-alternatives,
credit, social and impact funds, corporate VC, and search funds. We also need
to understanding the rising importance of the special world of venture debt and
the innovations in debt platforms. Many of the cases are local, as California
is indeed a special place, but we also take the world as large and study
successful startup finance in new markets globally. NVF is a structured,
case-based, practical class with the goal of ensuring that class members leave
the course knowing the venture finance landscape and have the knowledge and
skill to be strategic and wise in raising finance, particularly, early-stage
finance. As for logistics, class participation in cases and exercises is
essential. Exams are either cases or case-like. We will do a lot of in-class
exercises to master an understanding of the financial contracts and learn which
features to negotiate. No financial background is needed for NVF, other than
core finance.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF
INSTRUCTOR:
Adair Morse is Associate Professor at the Haas School of Business at the
University of California at Berkeley, where she teaches New Venture Finance.
She is on the Expert Panel (for oversight of the Oil Fund) to the Ministry of
Finance of Norway, the advisory board of the Haas Impact Investing Network and
FinTech Club, a mentor to Gender Equity Initiative, and faculty co-director of
the Haas Impact Research Prize. She holds a Ph.D. in finance from the
University of Michigan. Adair’s research spans three areas of finance:
household finance, corruption, and asset management, with the unifying theme
that she tries to choose topics useful for leveling economic playing fields.
She has won a number of top finance research prizes, and her various works have
been directly implemented into policy via U.S. Congress Acts, U.S. and Canadian
state banking regulations, and Greek Parliament tax reform. Adair’s work on
asset management includes work on factor investing of delegated asset managers,
objectives of sovereign wealth funds, and impact investing. Her recent work
studies many aspects of FinTech on the lending and equity investing sides, and
she has been invited to give a number of keynote addresses on the future of
FinTech for consumers and investors. Adair’s other noteworthy publications in
household finance include work on the effect of income inequality on
consumption and disclosure in financial services. Adair’s new research includes
topics in platform discrimination, impact investing, pension fund governance,
and asset management delegation efficiency.