Lifecycle of Startup

Venture businesses are modern, high-growth, high-impact enterprises. This lesson provides a crash course on startups, how they differ from traditional business models, and the key stages of launching and scaling a venture. You’ll explore the maturity process of a startup and the critical execution phases in its early development.

Startup Language & Communications

Running a startup is an unique experience. This lesson provides an orientation for first-time venture founders and executives pivoting into venture business, helping them navigate the fast-paced, growth-driven environment and understand the unique rhythm, mindset, and language of startup operations.

Pitching Structure And Narrative Arcs

Learn the fundamentals of entrepreneurial pitching, including how to write effective pitch scripts and create structured pitch decks. The focus will be on developing clear and concise presentations that effectively communicate business ideas to captivate various audience. The session will provide practical tips and techniques for organizing content and delivering compelling pitches with different narrative arcs.

Team Dynamics: Roles & Responsibilities

How big of a team do you need to launch a venture? This lesson explores the fundamentals of team dynamics, how they evolve with growth, the role of knowledge and feedback loops, and how early-stage founders can maintain a lean, highly productive, and mission-aligned team structure.

Branding

Launching an unproven business model requires market validation. This lesson explores the principles and importance of Product-Market Fit, guiding you in identifying key assumptions, formulating hypotheses, and de-risking the market aspect of building a venture.

Mitigate Your Venture Risks Using The VANGUARD Framework

Risks in starting, running, and scaling a venture can be mitigated. The Four Venture Risks Framework provides strategic guidance for venture operators—both entrepreneurs and executives—to navigate challenges, avoid common mistakes, and overcome execution pitfalls. By applying first-principles thinking appraoches, in this lesson we introduce this framework to help current and aspiring venture leaders make informed decisions and build resilient businesses from the get-go.

Manage Profit & Lost As A First Time Business Manager

Designed for those without a finance background, this lesson simplifies key financial controls and levers, helping you understand different revenue models through a profit and loss lens. You’ll learn to make informed operational decisions by analyzing business costs, sales margins, and growth vs. profitability dynamics, enabling you to effectively balance profitability and scalability while managing the pace of growth.

Startup Capital Options

What truly defines ‘smart’ capital? This lesson provides a comprehensive overview of the different types of venture capital funding, their typical requirements, and a practical approach to raising equity financing, offering synthesised insights from experienced practitioners.

The Sales Flywheel

This lesson explores how to achieve compounding growth and sustained sales momentum by shifting from a traditional sales funnel to a flywheel approach. You’ll learn how to synergise marketing and sales channels together to open up new tactical and opportunitic sales touchpoints, and build the foundation for product- and network-led sales growth.

Capturing Emerging Needs with Insights Selling

This lesson demystifies the enterprise sales process by introducing the buying center concept, exploring traditional solution selling, and diving deep into insight selling strategies. You’ll learn embedded tactics to engage organizations and institutions effectively, helping you shorten sales cycles and drive more strategic sales outcomes.

Head-on Strategy vs. Market Creation Strategy

How do you carve out your own space in a crowded market? This lesson explores the risks, key attributes, and case studies of two contrasting market growth strategies. It also provides an execution-focused perspective on market share dynamics for early-stage venture operators.

Network Effect: Critical Mass, Tipping Point and Virality

This lesson dives into the marketing mechanics driven by social networks and network effects at both the product and sales levels. With deconstructed case studies, you’ll learn the tactical building blocks that enable network effects to happen, accelerating your product or service toward critical mass and reaching the tipping point for product-led organic growth.

First Adopter Sales

Not everyone will pay for something they’ve never heard of. This lesson teaches you how to identify early adopters, craft effective sales strategies for engagement, and leverage social proof to build credibility—ultimately attracting more users and converting them into paying customers.

Building A MVP For Early Market Validation

In this lesson, you’ll learn best practices for building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) by developing a streamlined version of your offering that focuses on essential features solving key customer pain points. You’ll test market viability, leverage user feedback for continuous refinement, and establish key growth indicators to measure success and drive ongoing improvement.

Market Validation: Product-Market-Fit

Launching an unproven business model requires market validation. This lesson explores the principles and importance of Product-Market Fit, guiding you in identifying key assumptions, formulating hypotheses, and de-risking the market aspect of building a venture.

Product & Service Experiences

As you embark on the early stages of building a venture, you’ll learn to map out essential in-person and digital interactions to uncover customer needs during the discovery and market validation process. From there, you’ll design impactful experiences that drive satisfaction and loyalty.

Analysing The Finance Performance of A Venture Business

Clarity around financial performance is crucial for early-stage venture operators to ensure sustainability, attract investors, and make informed business decisions. You'll be equipped with financial metrics like profitability, burn rate, runway, and revenue growth rate. The session will also explore common financial pitfalls that early-stage ventures face—such as overspending, mispricing, and poor cash flow management—and provide practical strategies for optimizing financial health.

Sizing Up A Business Opportunity

Sizing up a business opportunity is crucial for early-stage venture success. This session will teach you how to evaluate market potential from both the top-down and bottom-up approach, analyze competition to estimate market potential.

Analysing Quality of Conversion Loop

In early-stage ventures, acquiring customers is only the first step—ensuring high-quality conversions that lead to retention and long-term growth is key. This session will break down the conversion loop, helping you to identify drop-off points, measure key metrics like lead-to-customer conversion rate, CAC vs. CLV, and retention rate, and optimize their processes for better engagement.

Analysing Customer Success For Early-stage Ventures

Customer success is not just about support—it’s a strategic driver of growth, retention, and long-term sustainability for early-stage ventures. In this session, you will explore the fundamentals of customer success, learn how to track key metrics like churn rate, customer lifetime value (CLV), and net promoter score (NPS), and analyze real-world case studies of startups that have successfully scaled their customer success strategies.

Venture Hiring Techniques

Avoid costly hiring mistakes! This lesson explores the key aspects of venture recruitment, helping you navigate the hiring process with a strategic approach. You’ll learn the advantages of venture hiring, what a realistic venture-culture-fit talent profile looks like, and how to improve talent discovery and search. Additionally, we’ll cover alternative hiring options to build a strong, mission-aligned team.