Online Business Administration Models

Career Focus

This course will be of interest to students who:

• Want to join a startup and are looking for tools to evaluate companies and founding teams they are interested in working with
• Intend to invest in startups or serve as startup advisors and board members
• Those who will join early-stage startups (typically in a product manager, business development, sales, marketing, or growth role).
• Are interested in corporate innovation and applying the patterns of startup failure to corporate innovation efforts or incubator programs.

The class focus is on pre-product-market fit technology-based ventures in a range of information technology-based sectors. Business models covered range from SaaS to freemium to e-commerce to transaction-based.

Educational Objectives
The course will look at how the company model, as well as the founders, team, investors, and partners involved, should be adapted for growing and emerging markets. In these industries, entrepreneurs frequently must construct the missing infrastructure (such as payments and logistics) in order for their businesses to succeed. Competition and government involvement are also drastically different. When Romanian firms grow worldwide, they frequently confront these hurdles, which include rules and legislation as well as cultural drift.

When operating outside of the EU, financial capital requirements and tactics must be altered to account for markets with less developed venture capital and funding sources. Because of the scarcity of capital in such markets, critical decisions must be made. The escape path is one of those options.

Course Content and Organization
The students will analyze management difficulties in early-stage companies and the spectrum of experiments that are undertaken during this era of development through a series of business iterations and feedback from start-up founders and subject matter experts. We’ll look at six modules from the perspective on how to build an online platform:

1. Business Online Models – what is possible and what’s coming (including web 3.0)
2. Ideation and Customer Value Proposition Experiments
3. Go to Market Strategy
4. Business Model Experiments
5. The Startup Founding Team
6. Financing and Exit