Course Overview

Hello, and welcome to E145, Technology Entrepreneurship.
In this video I´ll given an overview of the course
Today´s agenda is to do some introductions
and talk a little bit about what you´ll be learn in this class
and to talk about definitions of technology entrepreneuship
I´ll talk a little bit about the course design and logistics
and then some others opportunities for entrepreneurship education at Stanford
So, first of all an introduction to the teaching team which includes myself
a couple of course assistants and a number of exciting guest speakers in Silicon Valley who we will be bringing in
So, as for me, my name is Chuck Eesley, I am a faculty member in the Stanford´s department of Management Science & Engineering
and also part of the Standford technology ventures program
and before Stanford I spent four years at MIT dong my PhD there in the Sloan School of Management
studying the success factors and early strategic decisions
that played a role in technology-based entrepreneurs
both in the US and in China.
Prior to MIT, I did my undergraduate studies as Duke University, where I got my start in entrepreneurship
working on a company called Sundance Genetics
with a professor in the biology department.
So, in addition to studying entrepreneurship, I've also been an entrepreneur.
Well at MIT, I worked on an educational software firm and also created a life sciences consulting firm
called Lobby10 Consulting.
In addition, I work with two venture capital firms
Lux Capital, where I focussed on biotech and clean energy
and worked with one of their portfolio companies, Genocea Biosciences.
and also with Flagship Ventures, where I focussed on medical devices investments..
I've also mentored many startups in the MIT 100K business plan competition
and the Ignite Clean Energy competition
The course assistants for the class are Tim Ott and Henning Plezunka
they are both PhD students in our department
and have backgrounds in IT consulting,
and also co-founding companies of their own.
We have an exciting line-up of guest speakers for you
which will both be coming into the class
and also recording some videos here for those students watching online.
So this includes entrepreneurs, including a co-founder at LinkedIn
Lew Cirne who founded Wily Technologies
Corey Reese who founded Ness, an exciting mobile search app
as well as venture capitalists from Silicon Valley
including Henry Wong, of Garage Ventures
Miriam Rivera and Clint Corver
and Randy Komisar from Kleiner Perkins
So now it's your turn
For the students who are watching online
I encourage you to go to the forum and
tell us a little bit about yourself and your background.
Hopefully you might be able to also find
other students who are taking the class online
area and get together to talk about your
ventures and even the cases and issues coming up
in the class.
For the Stanford students, this is the point where we will
talk a little bit about where you're from
what year you are at Stanford, what your major is
and so on
So what's different about this course?
First of all, this is a class in the engineering department at Stanford
We'll be taking a science and engineering approach
to building high-tech ventures.
This will include applying a version of the scientific method
to the start-up process.
We'll also be combining both theory and practice
in the class.
You'll be working on your own start-up ventures,
and we'll also be providing a broader framework
and way to think about what it is you're doing
in an entrepreneurial venture.
The class will be driven by research.
Most entrepreneurship classes tend to be a successful entrepreneur
coming in and telling stories from their own experience.
But, we have an opportunity in this class to look at some of the research
that actually examines across many, many
ventures, what are the characteristics of those
that tend to be successful, versus those that tend to
be more likely to fail.
So, what will you learn as part of this class?
You'll learn to articulate a process
for taking a new technology
and finding a high-potential, commercial opportunity.
You'll create and verify
a business plan for gathering resources
such as talent and capital
and you'll also create and verify a business model
for how the marketing, distribution - all the various pieces
that go into a new technology-based venture come together
You'll then be able to generalise this entrepreneurial mindset
in this process to something that kind be applied in larger companies
or other settings, even to create new
non-profit organisations.
These are important skills for 21st century technology leaders
and so we're going to be building some of these skills
as well as dispelling some common myths and misconceptions
about entrepreneurship.
So what's our way of teaching and learning technology entrepreneurships?
We will be providing some basic terminology
and concepts through the readings that we're going to be doing
and the lecture discussions.
You'll be learning critical thinking through
some of the case studies, as well as teamwork
through your own start-up ventures and the presentations you'll make as a team
for the opportunity analysis
and opportunity execution projects.
And then finally, you'll be doing a bit of career planning
through the personal business plan you'll be writing towards the end of the course.
So, what is entrepreneurship?
What do you think the definition of entrepreneurship is?
One definition that I particularly like is that
entrepreneurship is a management and leadership style
that involves pursuing opportunity without
regard to the resources currently controlled.
So what does this mean?
This means that you see some opportunity
either in a technology or in the market
and despite the fact that you don't currently control
all of the capital or all of the people that you need
to take advantage of this opportunity
you're going to pursue this opportunity nonetheless.
So this comes from Greg Dees
and my it's my belief that this process can be learned
and it can be taught.
There's of course a large component that's luck
but for the rest of it we want to eliminate as many mistakes as possible.
What is High-Technology?
This is a class that's focussed on high-tech
highly scalable ventures
as different from starting a small business.
Many of these things that you'll learn in the class
can also be applied to a small business
but our focus is going to be on technology-based ventures.
And so, the thing that Intel, Google,
Amazon.com, Apple,
all of these diverse companies have in common
is that they're applying some type of
science or technology to solve a problem in society.
So we'll be taking a close look throughout the course at
technology entrepreneurship.
This is an important topic because entrepreneurship is
known to be a key driver of economic growth
and, according to the ??Coffin?? foundation
start-ups create, in the US, approximately 3 million new jobs per year.
So it's important for job creation as well.
We'll be talking about the different types of technological advancements
that start-ups use.
These can either be revolutionary: something that's totally new to
the world and create a whole new category or a whole new industry
or they can be more evolutionary
more incremental.
Some faster, better, cheaper way of doing something that we're all already doing now.
We'll talk a little bit in the next video about how we can see certain
patterns. Here you can see various waves
of technology that have been commercialised over time.
So we'll be talking about whether we can use some of these patterns
to inform us about how to go about creating
a technology start-up.
These are some of the start-ups created by Stanford alumni.
So one thing I hope you get out of this course
is that it was previous students who were very similar to you
who were able to go on and form the teams that wound up creating
these great companies that we all benefit from now.
Just these twelve largest companies out of Stanford
created almost half a million new jobs