ALS 457
Building an Entrepreneurial Organization

The purpose of this course is to explore the specific key aspects of the many dimensions of seed-stage venture creation and growth in new venture formation. The course will be concerned with new venture (seed-stage) business formation and implementation issues that relate to conceptualizing, developing and managing successful new ventures. These issues include corporate governance, entrepreneurial financing, competition, negotiation of term sheets and special issues related to seed-stage firms concerning intellectual property and technology transfer.

Second year students or permission of faculty

A key function of the entrepreneur, as manager, is to raise money for the organization from private individuals, private equity firms and grants.  This requires structuring the company to be able to accept money from these sources as well as an understanding of these sources of revenue and how to deal with them.  To accomplish these ends a detailed understanding in several key areas will be sought: business types and corporate governance, entrepreneurial financing from angel and venture capital firms and under what terms is such financing reasonable, the Venture Capital Method, Capitalization Tables, raising money from grants, negotiation, negotiation of term sheets and IP, as well as the problems of competition and scarce resources in new ventures. 

There will be one lecture section devoted to an in class negotiation. Students will divide into investors and entrepreneurs and negotiate a term sheet, determine post money valuation and share price for a B round of funding for an ag-bio company.