Overview

The last twenty years have seen a significant acceleration in technological advancement. The increased scale of data processing allowed human DNA sequencing and training of LLMs. Macroeconomic cycles became shorter and more volatile due to the global connectivity of users and symmetrical immediate access to new data.

Technology-enabled start-ups have shortened the companies’ lifecycle from tens of years to months – from founding to IPO. Having access to global consumers and being supercharged by media, new ventures build scale at unprecedented speed.

Venture Capital (VC) stands behind the development and funding of some of the most successful trillion-dollar companies in the world, including Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Tesla and Nvidia. This course looks at the venture industry from multiple angles: entrepreneur/founder, investor/asset manager, and other stakeholders, including governments, employees, and society. We analyse key drivers that define the success and resilience of the businesses: team, product, market, processes, and financing.

We will use the VC lens to better understand the overall approach to investments and asset management. There are many valuable parallels across different asset classes – whether you are looking to buy your first apartment, invest in commercial real estate, buy an expensive piece of contemporary art, or launch a private equity fund focused on infrastructure. It is useful to develop an underwriting framework early in your career so you can improve it with time, enriching it with new learnings and personal experience. It is an integral part of innovation efforts in technology, healthcare, robotics, transportation and materials. From student entrepreneurship to IPOs, the industry has developed frameworks and models that can help to create, fund, develop and grow companies and ideas.

This course will cover decision making and financial analysis from the lenses of VC investors and companies founders.

We will cover some of the industry’s history and look at iconic companies that disrupted the world. We will discuss the current VC ecosystem and its most recent developments. We will use cases to develop a practical understanding of concepts and tools related to valuation, financial modelling and management of VC investments. The course will use recent investment cases in the technology and other sectors, and we will also look at VC Funds fundraising and structuring.