COURSE NUMBER: MBA 236V-2

 

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 twenty-five of the grade. Case memos account for ten percent. Two take-home quizzes (solo & longer homeworks) account each for twelve 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, asset manager, philanthropist, 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 and quizzes 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.