University for Entrepreneurs: the One Learning Program That Makes MBAs Obsolete
It is no secret that a life of a startup or a young company is a non-stop challenge, especially for its founders: How do I launch my product? Where do I get funding? How do I do market research? Why can’t I increase sales volume?
Generally, all of these can be solved by trial and error, but founders cannot always afford an approach like this: sometimes, an overly bold hypothesis or a wrong estimate can make the whole startup fall into pieces, especially if the company is low on resources. Another way of solving problems is finding a mentor who could talk you through the process, but finding a qualified mentor with time to spare is a challenge itself.
Finally, there is always an option of getting an MBA, but this idea, too, has several flaws. Firstly, a regular MBA requires startup founders to actually attend classes which becomes a problem if their business requires frequent travelling (which it does, as potential investors are often based halfway across the world). Secondly, a curriculum offered to a group of complete strangers is bound to be generalized as colleges cannot tailor their programs for every new intake. Thus, a curriculum may contain topics that founders already know and miss those they need to solve the problems of their startups, while they still have to go through the whole course.
Thirdly, startups are running if and as long as the founding team is united by the same interests.
If one of the founders has to spend lots of time studying instead of working, the whole project may fall apart. All of this may turn formal business education not in a breakthrough, but in a waste of time and money. The University we are building is designed to avoid these very issues.
The structure of the university consists of five key elements: the Playbook, Insights, Mentors, Virtual/Blended Format, Fundraising.
1. The Playbook
There are processes that keep every business running: sales, marketing, funding, product development, etc. Every young company or a startup often has problems with one of these processes.
We composed our Playbook of different modules that correspond to these startup processes. Each of the modules, in turn, contains several task blocks which a startup has to cover.
The exact composition of modules and the overall duration of a course is tailored and adjusted for every startup depending on their problems, goals, and level of maturity. However, the most important part here is the content of these “tasks”. Traditional college education is largely based on reading and listening, which has low information retention rate compared to experiential learning where students proceed to immediate practice.
Keeping this in mind, we designed the “tasks” not as pages of theory to read, but rather as examples of startups that successfully solved the very same issues in the past.
As a founder, you see the cases of other founders working on similar issues. We expect you to research the cases and approaches described, and then try to apply what you think is useful in your own company.
Sounds complicated? Here’s an example. Imagine that you’ve founded a startup aimed at business clients and cannot think of how exactly to launch your product. The Playbook gives you a set of cases where other startups faced the same problem in the past and found great solutions. Having looked at them, you come up with your own solution. You write a number of emails to offer your product, get responses, identify potentially interested clients and then send a second wave of emails to talk them into an in-person meeting. After the meeting, you draw a scheme of their business life cycle and build a pilot project that would improve how they operate. After trying the pilot, you get practical experience of what it’s like to launch a product — an insight.
2. Insights
In our University, the term “insight” stands for practical experience gained when trying to solve problems using the ideas drawn from the Playbook.
The Playbook cases themselves represent the best insights: the best stories of how startups solved problems in the past become our learning materials.
When our students find really great solutions for their problems using our Playbook, then their own cases get turned into learning materials for the next generations of students.
Now, you must be thinking: sounds interesting, but how do you define which cases are good enough to become learning materials? How do you define what’s good enough in the first place?
Answer: we don’t define it. Our mentors do.
3. Mentors
Our mentors are the acknowledged industry leaders and experts with huge experience. In our University, mentors have two tasks:
First, mentors interview startup founders when they enroll for our course and help us compose the right curriculum for each startup depending on its level of maturity, goals, and conditions.
Second, using their knowledge and professional experience, they seek, identify and select the best cases of how different startups or companies solved various problems. Then these cases get structured into topics and modules, eventually forming the Playbook.
Moreover, mentors answer whatever questions startup founders may have that cannot be answered by the Playbook (however, we pride ourselves on the fact that the Playbook covers 95% of them).
4. Virtual/blended format
Remember my complaints about having to sit in the class? Our format of learning makes sitting in class unnecessary.
We have built a special online portal that stores all our learning materials together with records and learning progress of each startup. All our data is stored in the cloud and can be accessed from wherever startup founders need to be for their businesses.
They founders log into the portal, upload startup metrics, go through our virtual diligence room and receive an individual learning plan — all while flying between, say, Hong Kong and Silicon Valley.
Same works for the first interview with our mentors: if both mentor and startup founder are based in the same location, we organize an in-person meeting. If not, then we set up a conference call where they discuss the learning process.
5. Fundraising
For startup founders, our course is free of charge (it is sponsored by our corporate partners) and is focused on giving them access to the best funding opportunities.
The learning progress of each startup is visible to mentors and investors registered at the portal, and the better each startup solves every block of tasks and every module, the more acknowledged mentors it gets.
Startups that show the best traction get shortlisted for potential funding.
Overall, our University is much more than just a decentralized school of business: it is a global acceleration program for early stage companies.
