This is a course about how to start and grow a successful high potential enterprise. Since the Haas School is principally about professionally managed businesses, the course will focus on businesses that are not small by design, but with hard work and good luck can be expected to develop into complex, major enterprises. A key vehicle for this effort is the business plan. The plan helps the entrepreneur attract support from others, because it tells them what the business is about and what its strategy will be. It helps the entrepreneur to manage a growing and necessarily complex set of dynamics by providing mileposts and indicting the resources that will be required to achieve them. And it provides a continuously updated set of standards against which to compare actual performance. The course will deal with opportunity recognition and assessment, venture capital, marketing strategies for the start-up, benchmarking success, corporate governance and going public.

Course Syllabus (pdf)