Startup CEO: The Online Course

As most of you know by now, I wrote a book that was published last fall called Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business.  I’m excited to announce that, starting on January 20th, the book has now been turned into Kauffman Fellows Academy (KFA) online course called Startup CEO.  Similarly, Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson’s highly successful Venture Deals is also going to launch as Venture Deals KFA online course on February 24th. Both will be offered initially on the NovoEd platform.

The parties involved in getting it off the ground (besides me) were the team at Kauffman Fellows Academy and NovoEd.  Clint Korver, a serial entrepreneur and Stanford adjunct professor, spearheaded the project, and between filming the course and now, he switched jobs from KFA to be the COO at NovoEd, so he has been on all sides of this.   NovoEd is a very unique online educational platform that gives students the ability internationally to work together in teams and collaborate on assignments and peer review one another’s work.  So far over 1,300 people have signed up for Startup CEO from countries as far-flung as the China, Brasil, Iran, the U.K., Australia and, of course, Silicon valley..  This is an exciting extension of the book for me to watch unfold.

The class itself is a very unique format, a bit of “the entrepreneur’s studio” model.  For each chapter of the book (there are 48), I filmed a 5-10 minute Q&A with Clint in front of a live audience of a dozen startup CEOs in New York.  This was a serious production – much more than I expected – with a three-person former CNN production team of Kevin Rockwell, Chuck Afflerbach, and led by former Emmy Award winning CNN Correspondent Rusty Dornin.  Preparing for the class this way was fun and gave me a good opportunity to further crystallize the main point or theme of each chapter.  Having a live audience was super helpful to see what worked and what didn’t work.