Course Description
SCET’s Summer Venture Lab Program provides students the opportunity to take their new venture project or research one step closer to market. Utilizing the Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship, the curriculum provides best practices along with an emphasis on leadership, mindset, and networking in one of the most robust entrepreneurial ecosystems in the world.
Designed to accelerate your early-stage venture, our program begins with an honest, fact-based assessment of what stage your startup is in, then we prioritize decision-making and establish aggressive but realistic milestones to measure success. We emphasize a deep understanding of the customer and market, product-market fit, paths to market and the importance of storytelling in the Silicon Valley context.
Requirements: Enrollment in both ENGIN 183C and ENGIN 198. There is an application required. More details may be found on the Summer Venture Lab web page https://scet.berkeley.edu/global/summer-venture-lab/
Students must be part of an early-stage technology-based startup team. The entire team is not required to enroll. Each person enrolling must pay course tuition and fees. Early-stage means, at the minimum, your team has identified a business opportunity (a problem to solve) and by the time the course begins you have completed initial customer discovery which so far validates your problem hypothesis. Your team should have the goal of implementing a technology-based solution. If your team has advanced further from these fundamental requirements that is great. You are still eligible to apply if your team has developed a prototype for example or begun business model validation.
About Challenge Labs
Challenge Labs are 4 unit courses for students of all academic backgrounds who seek a rigorous, interactive, team-based, and hands-on learning experience in entrepreneurship and technology. These courses use a unique pedagogy, The Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship, that involves the use of games, industry guest speakers, team exercises, videos and labs to cover the early part of the startup lifecycle. In these highly experiential courses, students form start-up teams to create technology solutions or services to address a broadly-defined problem posed by an industry partner or social challenge.
Summer Venture Lab – Accelerate your early-stage startup
Meet the instructor, Mark Searle, as well as alumni of the program
Instructor
Mark Searle
Award-winning international serial entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience as co-founder, CEO and COO of a number of early-stage and growth-stage technology startup companies. Mark holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an AB with honors from Princeton University and was a Distinguished Graduate Student Instructor at UC Berkeley.