How to Teach Technology Entrepreneurship with Sramana Mitra

Entrepreneurship is not a career. It is a way of life.

For me, this journey began as a graduate student at MIT in 1994. The world watched Netscape go public that spring, and the Internet swept over us like a virus. As I wrote my Masters thesis, I also wrote my first business plan. We were, as a generation, shaping the Internet during those early years, and, my degree in hand, I was ready to jump into the unknown – from then on really, I have been jumping into unknowns at every turn.

Fortunately I’ve had great mentors – people who took an interest in my destiny, stopped along the way, and taught me a thing or two. In turn, I have tried to stop along the way to pass on certain nuggets of my own learning. In the summer of 2006, as the technology industry resurfaced from the nuclear winter that followed the dotcom meltdown, I was invited to speak at a startup workshop.

My session was supposed to focus on Positioning. At a Silicon Valley law firm, some sixty entrepreneurs packed a conference room to listen to me. I asked each to pitch his business idea in one minute, following which I gave feedback for another minute or two. My 90-minute rapid-fire session, alas, was not enough to accommodate all the pitches. In the lobby, even as we spilled onto the front steps, I tried to respond to some more, but it was hardly satisfactory.

In fact, it has always frustrated me to realize that I did not have enough time in my day to stop for each entrepreneur who asked for guidance. Friends – seasoned entrepreneurs – have expressed the same frustration.

In 2006, I started capturing case studies of technology entrepreneurs and their journeys, systematically. My thought then was that I have access to successful entrepreneurs. They’re willing to share their journeys with me. Most first-time entrepreneurs around the world do not have such access. How can they learn from the masters?

Over time, thousands of entrepreneurs have shared their journeys with me. This tribal knowledge has now been encapsulated in the 1Mby1M methodology and curriculum as case studies. Hundreds of entrepreneurs who have built billion dollar Unicorns, hundreds who have built venture funded startups, and hundreds of entrepreneurs who have successfully bootstrapped their businesses are part of this comprehensive case study repository.

You can easily simulate the experience of having lunch with Fred Luddy who built ServiceNow to a Unicorn or with Sridhar Vembu who bootstrapped his Unicorn, Zoho.

Today, especially with the post-Covid shift to online learning en masse, we have the opportunity to equip teachers all over the world with these world class case studies. Whether you are a professor in Madagascar or Macedonia, you can teach technology entrepreneurship with the same calibre of case studies and guest speakers as Stanford or MIT.

A good chunk of the 1Mby1M curriculum is now available on Udemy at a very affordable price point. We recommend that you group these courses into four parts or semesters.

Bootstrapping

How Investors Think

Domain Specialization

Startup Ideation

In 1Mby1M, you will find a different take on incubation and acceleration than the fund-raising driven focus of YCombinator, Techstars, or the vast majority of MBA programs out there. Our mission is to help democratize entrepreneurship education, incubation and acceleration by nurturing a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1M and beyond in annual revenue, thereby creating a trillion dollars in global GDP and 10 million jobs.

We believe Entrepreneurship = Customers + Revenues + Profits.

Financing is Optional.

Exit is Optional.

Our mantra is Do NOT go to VCs as beggars. Go as Kings. Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later.

Over 99% of the entrepreneurs who seek financing are rejected. Our methodology applies not only to the 1% venture-fundable entrepreneurs, but also the other 99%.

For more information, check out the external resources.

In teaching the 1Mby1M methodology of building technology startups, we recommend you start with Bootstrapping. If you’re teaching within a quarter or a semester system, an entire quarter or semester should be dedicated to driving home the importance and the mechanics of this critical subject.

What is bootstrapping? Bootstrapping means building a business without external financing. This differs from businesses funded by investors.

We need teachers of entrepreneurship to encourage entrepreneurs to focus on the fundamentals of their business first rather than raising money. Deglamorize funding, glamorize bootstrapping, and help correct the misconception that entrepreneurship equals financing. Paint a picture of the realities of an alternate, deeply satisfying universe where businesses are built by focusing on customers, revenues, and profit. That’s what entrepreneurship is all about and bootstrapping is the best way to start a business.

In a world battered by economic uncertainty, entrepreneurship is the only sustainable path forward. And core to the success of these ventures is the art of bootstrapping.

The key bootstrapping techniques and strategies have been packaged into the following courses on Udemy with numerous case studies to illustrate each point:

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later with Sramana Mitra

Teach the importance of bootstrapping, key techniques, and how bootstrapping to a fundable stage can help gain attention from investors.

Teach entrepreneurs not to waste their precious time and money by chasing investors before chasing customers. The waste stems from a widespread misunderstanding of how investors think. Over 99% of founders chase funding before they are fundable. Using this course, teach them how bootstrapping can help a startup reach that fundable stage. Once fundable, a startup can go to investors like a king, not a beggar.

Bootstrapping a Startup with a Paycheck with Sramana Mitra

Use this course to enlighten student entrepreneurs on the practicalities of starting a company while holding onto a full-time job. Introduce them to entrepreneurs who have built sizable businesses while navigating the messy, cash-strapped startup phases using their own paychecks, or their spouses’ income. Familiarize them with these pragmatic stories and dispel any doubts about starting a business while working full-time. Pragmatism is a core focus of the 1Mby1M methodology.

Bootstrapping a Startup with Services with Sramana Mitra

Offering a service is one of the best ways to bootstrap. This remains a controversial point of view. Most industry observers take the position that companies get distracted if they try to bootstrap a product with a service. But from where I sit, bootstrapping products with services is a tried and true method, especially in B-to-B Tech.

How to Bootstrap Startups by Piggybacking with Sramana Mitra

Shed some light on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Developer Ecosystems, one of the most exciting trends in the technology industry.

The company that has knocked the ball out of the park with its PaaS strategy is Salesforce. They launched their platform in the mid-2000s and many substantial companies and numerous sustainable small businesses have been built on it. Veeva, for example, was built this way with a small amount of capital, and boasts over $1B in revenue and over $20 billion in market cap.

My hypothesis is that of the 200+ SaaS companies that have achieved scale, we would see a set that would break out and become significant PaaS players.

Bootstrapping by piggybacking on these PaaS players is a highly recommendable mechanism for a capital efficient strategy.

How to Bootstrap a Startup to Exit with Sramana Mitra

I’m a big advocate for building small, capital-efficient startups. Not all entrepreneurs need to chase Unicorns. Not all investors need to chase Unicorns. Point out that there are many more viable ideas for those smaller ventures and there are considerably more opportunities for their exits, which means cashing in earlier on an entrepreneur’s hard work.

One type of exit is under $50 million and to achieve that, the strategy should be to build a capital-efficient company that shows product-market fit in an efficient, bootstrapped manner.

How To Succeed As A Solo Entrepreneur with Sramana Mitra

How does one teach how to succeed as a solo founder? It is actually quite simple. Guide your students to just find a niche, start solo, run lean, and get to product-market fit and paying customers.

Capital efficient ventures remain the best way to build healthy, robust businesses for a large number of entrepreneurs. Illustrate this with the help of examples like ServiceNow, which was started solo by Fred Luddy. The company is public and worth over $125 billion.

Assessment

An entrepreneurship teacher prepares students for the real world. Use the case studies provided in the course to illustrate bootstrapping techniques, discuss different scenarios and paths of the entrepreneurial journey, and discuss what they have learned from each case study and how they plan to apply that wisdom.

Papers

At the end of each of the six Udemy courses, have your students write a paper on a case study of their choice from that course. Grade them on the subtleties and nuances of their understanding of the relevant issues.

Final Project

Group your students into teams, and ask them to pick a particular case study from the curriculum, and do a presentation on it. There are six specific courses tackling six specific topics. Split your class into six teams, and have each team tackle one topic with one case study that they present and lead discussion on. Grade the teams on presentation.

Estimated Timeline

Your course should be split into six parts, one part dedicated to each Udemy course.

Roughly speaking, students should dedicate 15-20 hours per Udemy course including studying the online lectures and texts, in-class discussions, papers, and presentations.

Outcome

At the end of your course, students should feel confident about starting a business and putting one foot before the other. Even if they do not go onto the other courses in your 4-part series, you have given them a life-changing experience. Even if they decide to become an entrepreneur in middle-age, not immediately, they are likely to remember you, and the sense of empowerment that you have equipped them to face life with.

Considering how omnipresent the topic of fundraising is in the entrepreneurship media, it is entirely reasonable to dedicate a quarter or a semester to teaching how investors think.

Raising funding for startups is a low probability game. Fewer than 1% who try actually succeed.

Where startup ecosystems are immature, the probability gets even lower.

The bar to raise seed funding is getting higher and higher. Seed investors are mostly operating as growth investors, expecting that the entrepreneur will somehow manage to bridge the gap and bring a concept to realization. In fact, what these investors really want is to invest in businesses that have traction, not just validation.

In short, they want to come to the rescue of victory.

Entrepreneurship teachers should teach their students how to go from concept to traction and how to bridge the seed capital gap. Try to communicate the negative impact of trying to raise funding when a business is not validated and has weak fundamentals.

Stress on the importance of bootstrapping a business to validation before thinking about outside capital. Teach how investors at pre-seed, seed, and post-seed stages think and what level they expect a business to be at. This will help startups attain that elusive Holy Grail of investor-entrepreneur fit and improve the chances of success in raising funds. Guide student entrepreneurs on when is the right time to raise money and how much they should raise.

Help them understand the fundraising process and the early-stage investment ecosystem. It consists of friends and family financing, pre-seed, seed, post-seed, small Series A, and large Series A. We cover those stages in our Udemy courses one by one:

How Pre-Seed Investors Think About Startups with Sramana Mitra

How Seed Investors Think About Startups with Sramana Mitra

Post-Seed and Pre-Series A Investors on Startups with Sramana Mitra

Assessment

After a student goes through these three courses, assess them on their understanding of the early stage investment ecosystem. Offer case studies and scenarios and have students present how they would get such startups funded.

Unicorns

Unicorn is a startup with an estimated valuation of over $1 billion. More than 1000 unicorns exist as of 2021. More are being hatched every month.

Snowflake, Atlassian, ServiceNow are examples of startup unicorns. They’re massive, multi-billion dollar publicly traded companies now. Yet, they all started as an idea, took one step after another, grew in size, and so on.

That said, not every business idea can be scaled to a Unicorn. The billion-dollar question is what are the characteristics of the opportunities that have the potential to scale to a Unicorn startup?

We discussed the topic with a number of entrepreneurs who have succeeded in building their own Unicorns, and this course synthesizes those inspiring conversations.

A vast majority of venture capitalists are chasing Unicorns. It is important to understand the dynamics of what makes a Unicorn trajectory – 0 to $100M in revenue in 5 to 7 years – and how investors assess such potential.

Teach our Unicorn case studies with this Udemy course:

How To Build Unicorn Tech Startups with Sramana Mitra

Funding Niche Businesses

I’ve interviewed hundreds of investors, especially micro-VCs and angels who are playing in the early stage game. As I expected, a large number of investors are still chasing Unicorns. However, I am pleased to report that I have spoken with a number of investors who recognize the niche opportunities; they are interested in investing small amounts and harvesting through smaller exits.

This is an important nuance to teach through our dedicated Udemy course:

Alternatives to Unicorn Chasing Investors with Sramana Mitra

Investor-Entrepreneur Fit

Drive home the importance of Investor-Entrepreneur fit. The next semester will cover case studies specific to a domain or a region and the following courses cover the investor perspective on some of those.

How Seed Investors Think About Deep Tech with Sramana Mitra

How Women Investors Think About Startups with Sramana Mitra

How Investors Think About Startups in India with Sramana Mitra

How Investors Think About European Startups with Sramana Mitra

How Investors Think of Startups in Latin America with Sramana Mitra

How Investors Think About Startups in the Midwest with Sramana Mitra

And finally, VCs use specific questions in due diligence. This course goes over the questions they ask.

VC Due Diligence Questions For Startups With Sramana Mitra

Assessment

Using the case studies, create scenarios using dummy companies and financials. Test which path would the student take – VC funding or bootstrapping. If so, which investors would they approach?

Estimated Timeline

Your course should be split into five parts, as outlined above.

Roughly speaking, students should dedicate 20 hours per part, including studying the online lectures and texts, in-class discussions, papers, and presentations.

Outcome

At the end of your course, students should know that they need to be fundable before going out to raise money, and that not all businesses warrant venture financing. They should also have developed a keen sense of investor-entrepreneur fit.

Every student is different, every entrepreneur is different, and every sector is different. It is important to study domain-specific case studies to validate a concept, discover product-market fit, and learn about various forms of startup funding. Based on your student’s interest, point them to the right resources that can help them understand a domain’s opportunities and pitfalls.

Our courses consist of in-depth interviews with the startup founders who have successfully built ventures in healthcare, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, online education, and cloud computing or SaaS. It is very helpful to trace how they gained traction, created market entry strategies, positioned their products, and so on. If your students study them carefully, they’ll be several steps ahead of the competition.

Thus, the third quarter or semester of our curriculum is to delve deep into domain-specific case studies.

How to Build E-commerce Startups with Sramana Mitra

How to Build 2-Sided E-commerce Marketplaces with Sramana Mitra

How To Build AI Startups with Sramana Mitra

How to Build Online Education Startups with Sramana Mitra

How to Build Digital Health Startups with Sramana Mitra

Geography Specific Case Studies

The region a business is located in plays a vital role in the market dynamics. The market for a business might be saturated in one region but could have white space in another. Concept arbitrage is a common tactic in finding business ideas. So, this course not only provides insights into the challenges and opportunities in a region, but it could also be a goldmine of ideas for businesses.

India

There are now thousands of entrepreneurs in India, and many more Indians are starting their own businesses as we speak. Even with mistakes, disappointments, and setbacks, all things considered, startup founders continue to want to realize their ambitions, no matter what.

India’s greatest achievement in the last decade has been the consistent unleashing of the entrepreneurial movement. The risk tolerance of the Indian population has increased. No longer is it the Holy Grail to lust after fat salaries at multinationals. The dream of building something of your own seduces people in India, even if that implies a built-in risk of failure.

The following course has some inspiring examples of successes both big and small during the early stages of their journeys.

Entrepreneurship Case Studies from India with Sramana Mitra

Use this course to teach students about some of the biggest entrepreneurship success stories out of India – how they got their start through in-depth conversations with several of India’s most successful founders. Also, discuss the little-known success stories and what they can learn from those too.

Latin America

The Latin America startup movement has accelerated recently. We’re seeing lots of e-commerce in various domains, of course, but also FinTech, AgTech, even B-to-B SaaS.

One of the first major Latin American successes was MercadoLibre, out of Argentina, which went public on NYSE in 2007. In fact, I worked with MercadoLibre early on and got to know a lot about the company’s thought process as they developed their strategy for dominating the continent’s e-commerce trend.

As other countries have figured out, if someone is trying to build a global B-to-B tech company, typically, these days, a SaaS venture, they’d need to access the US market relatively early in their progression. They can validate in their local market, get some customers going, but quickly, start the process of penetrating the US customer base.

Now, e-Commerce or FinTech are very different animals. These startups tend to be much more local businesses. One can build a very large e-commerce or FinTech business without ever leaving Brazil or Argentina, Mexico, or Colombia.

The following course features conversations with several successful Latin American entrepreneurs, as well as lessons learned and their best advice.

How to Build Tech Startups in Latin America with Sramana Mitra

Europe

My hypothesis is that Europe continues to be a mecca of culture, and there is adequate technical expertise on that continent to come up with more significant concepts that may become drivers of major trends.

The role I see for Europe is in reaching out to the rest of the world and taking a leadership stance in developing taste. Whether it is educating the Chinese market about French and Italian wines, or packaging culture for the consumption by Silicon Valley’s geeks, there is a European renaissance possible. But it will likely not be one concentrated in Paris or Florence; rather, it will be an international renaissance whereby Europe exports its strengths in culture, preservation, cuisine, and style to a world growing in wealth and sophistication.

The advantages of that kind of wide-ranging taste-making will benefit Europe both on its own soil and throughout the world, and it will help to promote economic growth across all European countries.

In pure tech, also, Europe is making great strides in building global ventures. The number of tech Unicorns is growing steadily.

The following course features conversations with several successful European entrepreneurs, as well as lessons learned and their best advice.

Entrepreneurship Case Studies from Europe with Sramana Mitra

Optional Course

If your students are largely from non-technical backgrounds, you may also consider the following course to encourage them:

How Non-Technical Founders Build Startups with Sramana Mitra

Assessment

A great assessment is to have each student pick a case study and evaluate if a concept arbitrage is possible in your region. Example: If you’re teaching this course in Ghana, have your students each pick a concept and analyze if there is enough whitespace to replicate that business in Ghana. If the analysis yields the conclusion that the market is already saturated, that is fine too. The important exercise is to learn how to assess.

In that process, also, students can explore how they would do things differently, and why.

A tool for assessment is this Udemy course:

VC Due Diligence Questions For Startups With Sramana Mitra

Estimated Timeline

Your course should be split into three parts: domain specific case studies, geography-specific case studies, and a case study project.

Roughly speaking, students should dedicate 50 hours on the first part, 20 hours on the second part, and another 50 hours on the third part. This includes studying the online lectures and texts, in-class discussions, project work, papers, and presentations.

Outcome

At the end of your course, students should have a sense of multiple tech startup domains and an idea about how to find gaps in the market to position a new idea.

Teachers need to inspire their students to ideate, guide them on how to evaluate their ideas and make sure they are viable and scalable.

Entrepreneurs often come up with 10 different ideas and have to sift through them to decide which one to pursue. How does one prioritize their best startup ideas? What are their most innovative startup ideas? Which of their business ideas may be fundable?

The entrepreneurship universe is littered with startup failures. Startup success often hinges upon the ability to come up with viable startup ideas.

Students will often ask you if there is a strategy that can be followed for the idea stage.

Yes, there is a strategy. Firstly, one has to develop an understanding of the domain in which they want to build a startup. It is important to learn about the hot domains within which a lot of startup activity is happening right now. They need to understand the dynamics of each, find a gap in the market, and position a startup idea as a solution accordingly. We started this domain-specific knowledge building exercise in the previous quarter / semester.

Secondly, they need to master the ideation process itself. For this, we start the fourth quarter or semester of this series with the Udemy course:

Startup Ideas for the Post Covid World with Sramana Mitra

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed consumer behavior in a major way. As we move through the virus-era, much more will likely change. With this realization, we ran a poll in June 2020 asking which topics readers would like me to cover and discuss. The overwhelming winner was startup ideas. This course covers in detail eight of my startup ideas that you can use as case studies to teach your students the ideation process.

1. K-12 Education – In the post-Covid world, a new learning paradigm needs to emerge. Here I detail a Unicorn idea that can attract venture capital.

2. Meaningful Friendships Through Literature and Film – My own literary group, like many others, has had to go virtual and operate through a video conferencing platform in the wake of the Covid menace. The startup idea outlined here is born out of this experience with an eye on the isolation that humanity is facing in the post Covid world.

3. Distributing the Workforce – One of the unambiguous trends of the Covid era is the success of work-from-home for certain industry sectors such as Tech, Finance, Legal, Consulting, etc. The Unicorn startup idea outlined here involves managing this transition and its associated nuances.

4. Facilitating Travel Experiences – There are two major trends that the world will need to take in stride in the Covid era: air travel will become expensive and people will be working remotely. The startup idea addressing these trends as explained here would be a $5-$10 Billion market cap company, a Unicorn.

5. Artists and Collectors Shift Online – As you may know, I have a special interest in Art, and have observed its dynamics for many years. I have concluded that the time has come for Artists and Collectors to move online and interact in a fluid marketplace. The idea that I discuss here is a Unicorn idea with the potential to become a highly valued company that would achieve a billion dollar plus valuation.

6. Home-Based Healthcare – Certain sectors of industry are facing extraordinary levels of job loss in the post-Covid era. While some of these jobs may come back, it is widely believed that some trends are permanent. The retail sector faces one of the greatest shifts: the move to online shopping seems irreversible. The startup idea detailed here facilitates the retraining of service sector employees as healthcare professionals.

7. Restaurants Delivering Prepared Food as a Subscription – In the Covid era, people have been forced to cook a lot more than they were used to. Some have embraced home-cooking. Others have found it to be a burden. On the other hand, restaurants are facing an existential moment, gasping for survival. I believe for a certain segment of the population, a subscription service to a set of restaurants would work really well, and share my vision for this startup here.

8. Managing Philanthropy – In a world economy devastated by Covid, threatened by climate change, ravaged by simultaneous natural disasters, the need for philanthropy has never been higher. The startup idea shared here is a philanthropy management software solution (SaaS) that would be sold to banks with wealth management practices.

And finally, whenever I evaluate a tech startup idea, I always do VC-style due diligence on it. This course goes over the specifics of my analysis process that should be used to analyze a startup idea before writing a single line of code.

VC Due Diligence Questions For Startups With Sramana Mitra

Assessment

This is more of a practical, hands-on course where the students bring together the previous three quarters / semesters of learning, and work on a startup idea of their own. They can do so in teams.

The teacher should have enough knowledge of the 1Mby1M case studies to be able to point students to comparables and blue prints that they can draw lessons from.

In parallel, the class should attend my free 1Mby1M pitch roundtables that is held every week on Thursdays.

The class should be structured around and graded based on four rounds of pitch sessions:

1. Concept pitches and instructor + peer feedback

2. Bootstrapping Strategy pitches and instructor + peer feedback

3. Go-to-Market Strategy pitches and instructor + peer feedback

4. Financing Strategy pitches and instructor + peer feedback

Assess their understanding of the ideation, bootstrapping, fundraising, and got-to-market processes by asking them to replicate a pitching session where they will pitch an idea and also evaluate their peers’ ideas.

Estimated Timeline

Your course should be split into two parts: methodology and practice.

Roughly speaking, students should dedicate 20 hours to methodology and 100 hours to developing the project. This includes studying the online lectures and texts, in-class discussions, project work, papers, and presentations.

Outcome

At the end of your course, students should have a sense of how to come up with a new business idea, develop strategy for it, and how to pitch it.

I believe, strongly, that entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial capitalism can be democratized, and wealth can be created in the middle of the pyramid using capitalistic principles. In the next 2-3 decades, the potential for distributed capitalism is very high and the outcome should be extremely positive around the world. That is the mission upon which my current work with One Million by One Million is based.

The 1Mby1M curriculum is predicated upon a philosophy of bootstrapped, capital efficient entrepreneurship, precise positioning, efficient go-to-market strategy, and aligns with the trends of the present day. It follows a methodology that addresses many of the common fallacies, the primary one being that entrepreneurship equals fund-raising. No, entrepreneurship equals customers, revenues, and profits. Fund-raising is an optional tool and can be powerful if you know how and when to use it.

The curriculum is a combination of video lectures and case studies, and we have the absolute best repository of case studies for early stage entrepreneurship anywhere in the world. Harvard, Stanford, MIT – nowhere would you find such a collection of case studies, because no one else has focused so intensely and precisely on the very early stages of business building. We have.

At 1Mby1M, we teach how to be a sophisticated entrepreneur, not a simplistic one who runs after investors all the time. We teach how to create value and valuation, how to preserve ownership, and many other critical topics.

Most importantly, you have the benefit of several hundred successful entrepreneurs – luminaries in their fields – sharing with you their lessons from the trenches through our case studies. By taking those courses, you can gain instructive perspectives on how to build a thriving IT-business methodically, step by step, instead of guessing.

Our philosophy of democratization includes making it affordable for millions of students all over the world to access the methodology and the curriculum. Our Udemy courses are priced at $39.99-$89.99. Udemy offers steep discounts regularly, and with a bit of strategic monitoring, the courses can be acquired for $10-$15. This, we believe, is rock-bottom pricing, and it puts the 4-semester program suggested above at:

1. Bootstrapping – 6 courses – $60-$90

2. How Investors Think – 11 courses – $110-$165

3. Domain Specialization – 8 courses – $80-$120

4. Startup Ideation – 1 course – $10-$15

All told, to teach the 1Mby1M methodology, your students need to spend $250-$500 in acquiring our Udemy courses.

The four quarters or semesters worth of courses, in total, constitute about 500 hours of intensive learning.

We’re looking for thousands of instructors in every corner of the world who want to teach this methodology to aspiring entrepreneurs.

Together, we can make a material impact on the world economy.

We look forward to working with you!

To continue the conversation, please join our 1Mby1M Ambassador Group on LinkedIn where we will be offering more support and an opportunity to network around these ideas.