Launching technology ventures   in the age of ai

This class, taught to second year HBS students, is dedicated to helping train executives in the art of launching, building, and scaling start ups.

Welcome to the Launching Technology Ventures (LTV) website!  I (Jeff Bussgang) teach this class to second year MBA students at Harvard Business School along with my colleagues (in the past: Sam Clemens, Tom Eisenmann, Lindsay Hyde, Donna Levin, Jeffrey Rayport, Reza Satchu, and Christina Wallace) to help better prepare them as founders (to start their own companies), joiners (to join a startup as an early team member), or investors. 

This year, Allison Mnookin and I are co-teaching the course. When our students join startups, they typically do so in a product management, marketing/growth, business development or chief of staff roles. 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. Instead, we put the student in the role of decision-maker when there is no clear, "right" answer.  The class aims 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 weekly 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. 

AI has collapsed the time and cost of building software, so the course now focuses on how founders pair timeless methods with timely tools — experimentation, founder judgment, and building AI-native from day one. 

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. Fall 2026 will be the 16th year for Jeff, a former entrepreneur and now venture capitalist, who created the course in partnership with Professor Tom Eisenmann. Allison is teaching the class in Fall 2026 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 2026-2027 academic year plan and curriculum is here.

Enjoy! 

- Jeff Bussgang