Learn how the best startups were built by pitching one yourself.
ENG 8, Intro to Entrepreneurship, runs every quarter (fall, winter and spring) and meets Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 3:10 to 4:00 pm. Teams of 3 to 4 students build an eight-slide investor pitch, one slide a week.
Is this class for you?
Honest expectations, so you can decide quickly.
Open to everyone
ENG 8 is open to all majors and has no prerequisites. Most students come from outside engineering, and many arrive without a startup idea.
What to expect
- Readings before most classes.
- Cold calls: you will be asked to speak, and timidity is not tolerated. Bad ideas are welcome.
- No screens in class.
- Team work, with assigned team seats.
- 10 entrepreneurship events across the quarter.
This course is built for students who want to keep going. It is the first step into the Student Startup Center pipeline.
Simulate founding a company
Study a real startup or build your own idea
Pick a technology startup no more than 15 years old and pitch it as if it were raising venture funding today, or work on your own idea.
Build an 8-slide investor pitch
One slide and one short write-up each week, which you stitch into your final presentation and paper.
Talk to customers and founders
Run customer discovery interviews, and hear founders and investors who sometimes disagree with each other.
Meet the SSC community
Go to events at the Student Startup Center. Ten of them count toward your grade.
The arc of the quarter
A pitch deck is the short slide presentation a founder uses to convince someone to back their idea. Each week you work through one slide, in the order an investor would ask the questions.
- 1Problem
- 2Customers
- 3Market
- 4Business model
- 5Team
- 6Investors
Those questions are the same ones a customer, a grant committee, a hiring manager or a boss inside a large company will ask. Not every good venture is a high-growth startup. Small businesses, social ventures and bootstrapped companies use the same thinking, and the readings cover the downsides of venture money too.
See the eight slides- About 2,600
- students have taken ENG 8 since Winter 2019
- About 3 in 4
- ENG 108 students took ENG 8 first
What students have said
“ENG 8 was the most beneficial course I took this quarter. It taught me so much about not only startups but the finances and strategies that go into them.”
“It gave us future entrepreneurs a safe space to make our mistakes rather than making them in the real world.”
“His class really inspired me to do my own startup. When I came to him with my idea, he was immediately willing to help me.”
“The class is highly interactive and encourages expression and free-thinking.”
“Since he is a VC himself, he has experience in deals daily which gives him an edge over others in terms of this subject.”
Where does it lead?
ENG 8 is the top of the Student Startup Center pipeline. See the courses and programs students take next.