Welcome to the Launching Technology Ventures (LTV) blog!  We (Jeff Bussgang and Christina Wallace) teach this class to second year MBA students at Harvard Business School to help better prepare them as founders (to start their own companies), joiners (to join a startup as an early team member), or investors. When our students join startups, they typically do so in a product management, marketing/growth or business development role. We do not focus on raising capital as there are other courses at HBS that do so.

The class is taught using the case method, which eschews the classic lecture-style format and, instead, puts the student in the role of decision-maker when there is no clear, "right" answer.  The goal of the class is to focus on the practical tools required to conceive, build and launch a startup - particularly pre product-market fit startups.  Thus, the focus of the class tends to be more tactical than strategic. The class meets twice per week and runs for 14 weeks (i.e., 28 sessions). In each session, we focus on the experiments that startups run -- whether they are customer value proposition experiments, business model experiments or go to market experiments -- and how to be more effective at running those experiments in a startup environment. In short, our thesis is that startups are Experimentation Machines.

You can see the schedule of sessions and guests that attend the class to help us bring the case to life in the tab above labeled "LTV Course Schedule".  There are supplemental readings that we assign to each case to help round out the students' exposure to the topic at hand, which can be seen in the tab above labeled "LTV Syllabus".

Over 2000 Harvard MBA students have taken the class. Spring 2025 will be the 15th year for Jeff, a former entrepreneur and now venture capitalist, who created the course in partnership with Professor Tom Eisenmann. Christina, an experienced entrepreneur and author, is teaching the class in Fall 2024 for her second year.

For those not able to take the class through the HBS MBA program can take an online version of the class. To learn more about the online offering through HBS Online, see here:

A more detailed description of the 2024-2025 academic year plan and curriculum is here.

Enjoy!

- Jeff Bussgang and Christina Wallace