Entrepreneur, Investor, Startup Advisor | Head of Product, HBS Accelerate
Matt Fischer is an entrepreneur, investor, and startup advisor. He brainstormed, tested, and refined HBS Accelerate from an idea into a platform. Now Managing Partner at EF Capital and COO at ConstructTech, he continues to serve as Consultant for New Business at HBS. He earned an MBA from HBS in 2017.
Ready to start building a prototype? Before you start, it's important to validate that the problem your product addresses is a problem worth solving. Julia Austin, Senior Lecturer at HBS and expert in product development, shares helpful tips and tools to help you ensure that you're on the right track.
Lara Hodgson, Co-Founder and CEO of NOW Corp, shares practical lessons she learned while scaling 2 startups, including how to build a powerful and passionate founding team, get the most from your board, and maintain balance as you scale.
Before you begin discussing how to divide equity, the smartest thing you can do is to build in mechanisms to make your agreement dynamic. Learn the benefits and drawbacks of common methods.
Having a co-founder dilutes your equity and authority. When does adding a co-founder add more value than hiring an executive with similar skills? Understanding the unique role a co-founder plays can help you determine if and when you need one.
During scaling, the role of CEO differs dramatically from that of an early-stage startup. Your focus will shift from proving your idea works, building your product, and getting others on board, to hiring a competent leadership team, creating processes, and being the face of your startup’s mission and culture.
Research shows that establishing a founders’ agreement prematurely often generates founder conflict—a leading cause of startup death. Can writing a founders' agreement help you mitigate future conflicts and save your business? Before you rush into an agreement, understand the underlying mechanics and learn how to customize them to strengthen your co-founder relationship.
How do you assess the offer and navigate a term sheet, ensure you’re getting the best terms, prevent critical misunderstandings, and optimize your level of control and cash upon exit? HBS faculty, serial entrepreneurs and investors identified 3 different angles from which you need to examine terms.
As you scale, the strengths and habits that enabled you to launch—visionary thinking, working nonstop, or making decisions based on experiential knowledge—can become liabilities that damage your startup’s capacity for long-term growth and have serious negative consequences. In an interview with Shikhar Ghosh, Careem's co-founders Mudassir Sheikha, Magnus Olsson, and Abdulla Elyas reflect on their meteoric growth from 2012-2014. Candidly sharing the mistakes they made, they identify the consequences of rapid scaling and share practical advice for other founders.
A poorly-constructed agreement often leads to founder conflict which can kill your startups. We can’t promise that your founders’ agreement will prevent all founder conflict. But we can provide a framework that will help you avoid common mistakes and equip you to handle conflict.
It’s easy to find templates, checklists, and techniques that promise to improve your pitch. But even the majority of good pitches fail to raise venture capital. What drives investors’ interest? How do VCs make decisions? How can you turn your pitch into a great one that has investors eager to hear more about your startup?
Adam Enbar, serial entrepreneur and investor, shares how having a well-defined mission helped him grow his startup from a small idea into the Flatiron School, a rapidly growing coding school that is disrupting higher education.
As co-founder, CEO and President of her latest venture, Lara Hodgson doubled the company’s growth twice in four years. As she prepares her team to double in size again, she shares her insights on team building and why focusing on mindset is so important.
Kevin Ryan, founder of multiple billion-dollar tech companies, shares his insights on identifying big ideas in an exclusive interview with Shikhar Ghosh.
Many founders conflate raising a significant amount of venture capital or getting a high valuation as validation of their current business model. But as you scale, past behaviors stop working effectively and often processes are strained and break. How do you avoid the most common scaling mistakes?
How you divide equity reflects your values, directly impacts your co-founder relationship, and influences how your team and investors perceive your startup. Read more to learn methods for dividing equity that align with your values and can minimize conflict between founders.
Asking someone to co-found your business is one of the most critical decisions you'll make as a founder. How do you identify and choose the right person?
Kevin P. Ryan, founder of several multiple billion-dollar tech companies spanning industries from mobile gift registry to news shares his process for building a business and hiring an outside CEO.
You found a great co-founder. When should you formalize your relationship? You may be tempted to draft a founders’ agreement to demonstrate trust in the partnership, but before you make a legal commitment, make sure you’re aligned with your co-founder in 3 critical areas.
Many startups make fatal mistakes when calculating how much they need to scale. These 3 essential things can help you figure out how much capital you need to raise to scale effectively, without getting overwhelmed by options and opinions, or swayed by offers.
These slides contain all of the content hosts will display during the workshop.
Ready to turn your pitch into an outstanding one that has investors eager to hear more about your startup? Learn a tested framework that teaches founders how to build a strong, authentic, and compelling foundation to a pitch. Exercises allow you to practice delivering your pitch, get feedback, refine, and increase your chances of getting funding.
These slides contain all of the content hosts will display during the workshop.
Sunil Nagaraj, founding partner of Ubiquity Ventures and co-founder of Triangulate, reviews the key differences between the mindsets of entrepreneurs and investors. And he shares tips to help founders better understand their investors' mindsets and help them succeed.
Delivered