Guild Offering for Fall Semester:
Launching Tech Ventures
Seize the keys to winning money and launching any tech startup:
Learn to brand, negotiate, and pitch new ventures like a boss.
Ever had a high tech business idea? Ever want to launch a startup and make it happen?
Launching Tech Ventures prepares students to attract capital to their ideas. It does so via an accelerated introduction to three techniques critical to raising capital and funding startups, yet too often underpracticed and underutilized:
Branding, Negotiation, and Presentation.
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To successfully deliver a presentation, to win financial negotiations thereafter, and to negotiate with potential investors and customers, entrepreneurs must first understand, plan, and execute strong Branding. To that end students explore the strategic possibilities of centrality versus distinctiveness, self-awareness versus customer awareness, effective storytelling, and mapping branding campaigns into effective marketing media.
To prevail in post-presentation questions, term sheets, and ongoing contracts—all of which follow a successful presentation!—
entrepreneurs require immersion in the scientific foundations of Negotiation. To this end students examine negotiation techniques ranging from organizational principles to psychological bases, and from verbal tactics to the strategic logic of arbitration.
To prepare for the rigors of seeking and acquiring capital, the broad outlines of rhetoric must be investigated and applied to oral Presentation. Students then apply principles of Presentation to the special question of attracting capital to a specific value proposition, in both live and filmed formats.
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To achieve these goals students form teams to brand, draft, refine, rehearse, pitch, and negotiate business plans based upon research by one or more team members.
What do you get out of the course?
Skills that last a lifetime, no matter where you go and whatever you do. Confidence to speak publicly. Know-how to get noticed. Mastermind feedback. Filmed and live work product. A chance to pitch actual VCs. Best pitches and teams are entered in Pitchlab’s talent directory; all successful graduates receive a Guild Certificate of Completion.
Graduates embody powerful Branding, Negotiation, and Presentation skills. As a result they are well positioned for entrepreneurial competitions now, translating research into commerce soon, and real-life capital acquisition in the future.
This course is a force multiplier whether
you intend to move quickly on the entrepreneurship front or climb the corporate ladder at an established firm: These skills are required. And every year students win big money, from federal grants to venture pitch competitions, from senior projects to scholarship competitions, from VCs to Angel Investors.
