Entrep Finan Venture Capital

1.5 Credits · Level: Graduate, Juris Doctor

Every year thousands of new ventures are started and a nearly equal number of existing businesses are closed down. Almost all of these ventures are single founder/employee type of ventures where the founder has neither the desire nor the possibility of creating a significant business organization. A small fraction of such ventures however hold the promise to grow into large businesses. In this course we will focus heavily on such promising ventures. The reason for this focus is self-evident - business that are unlikely to grow fast have little or limited need for external financing-making such ventures irrelevant for a course titled Entrepreneurial Finance & Venture Capital. This course is designed to illustrate challenges faced by an entrepreneur in financing and growing a new firm. Exploiting a promising opportunity frequently requires an entrepreneur to marshal scarce resources, especially external capital. The course will focus almost exclusively on issues relevant to the financing of entrepreneurial ventures. We shall devote significant amount of time on understanding the role of Venture Capital (and to a lesser degree on Angel Investors) in financing new start-ups. The course requires and reinforces the skills needed to analyze a business with a strong emphasis on financing deal terms and valuation techniques. The course concludes by examining the harvesting of entrepreneurial ventures whereby the entrepreneur and the financiers realize the returns for their effort. The course is driven almost exclusively by case studies, many of which are based on start-ups or young firms.