Funding a New Venture

This Course uses a fictional business to allow the learner to settle deeply into an entrepreneur’s shoes. Using the business as a realistic context, the learner is challenged to raise funding from a range of sources to launch the company, move the company successfully from a startup to a rapidly expanding “Phase 3” firm, and analyze the business’s innovative position in the market.

Private

Faculty

Prof. George Abe

Prof. George Abe

Professor

George Abe is a lecturer and Faculty Director of the Strategic Management Research (SMR) Program at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. His teaching responsibilities include entrepreneurship, business plan development and field study program advisories. SMR is the field study program, required of all Executive MBA students.

He was Business Development Manager for the UCLA Office of Intellectual Property, which is responsible for patent protection and commercialization of UCLA research.

Previously, he was a venture partner with Palomar Ventures, a VC firm in Santa Monica, California. Before Palomar, he was a Business Development Manager at Cisco Systems. Prior to that he was with Infonet Services Corporation (NYSE:IN, now BT) where he designed Infonet’s IP data service.

From 1998 until 2006, he was a member of the board of directors of Switchcore AB, a publicly traded fabless semiconductor designer in Sweden. He has also held board of director positions with various startup companies and not-for-profit organizations.

He is the author of Residential Broadband, which presents an analysis of high-speed residential networking, published by Cisco Press.

Education

B.A. Mathematics, UCLA
M.S. Business, Quantitative Methods, UCLA

Course Learning Objectives:

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

  • Evaluate options for friend and family fundraising, based on a set of facts about a business, and determine if each should be approached.
  • Propose a plan for raising funds through crowdsourcing, based on a set of facts about the business.
  • For a business that is expanding, create a plan for seeking additional funding from angel investors and/or corporate strategic investors.

Syllabus

Module Components:

Video Lectures:

  • Overview of Very Early Stage Funding Mechanisms
  • Not-So-Early-Stage Funding: Approaching Strangers
  • Bringing in and Managing Early Investors 

Readings:

  • Bootstrapping Business Start-Ups
  • Crowd-funding of Small Entrepreneurial Ventures

Case-Study:

  • Dazzle Boutique 

Quiz:

  • Funding a New Venture

Support

Please email [email protected] for any support required with respect to the program, course or platform.