The Lang Center offers courses focused on launching a startup, investing in ventures, and scaling a company. Explore relevant courses for each of these areas in the Course Planner.
- Launch: For students planning to start their own business during or after graduation from business school. Students are encouraged to take Foundations of Entrepreneurship → Launch Your Startup → Entrepreneurial Greenhouse
- Invest: For students looking to learn about investing in startups through venture capital (early stage and growth) and angel investing. Students are encouraged to take Foundations of VC → Venture Capital Seminar
- Scale: For students aspiring to accelerate the growth of their own startup or to work in an innovation role at an existing startup. Download the Course Planner at right to see a list of relevant courses.
Featured Courses
Foundations of Entrepreneurship serves as the gateway course to the entrepreneurship curriculum at CBS. Specific topics covered include: characteristics of successful startups and entrepreneurs; techniques for generating, identifying, and evaluating new ideas; forming and maintaining effective partnerships; customer discovery and acquisition; entrepreneurial finance, valuation and deal-making; entrepreneurship in international contexts; startup culture; exits; career tradeoffs; and learning how to pitch yourself and your business.
Please note that, while all are welcome, this course is designed for students who have limited-to-no experience in the startup ecosystem. This course also serves as a prerequisite for Launch Your Startup. If you believe that you should be enrolled in LYS without having to take Foundations, please complete this survey.
Launch Your Startup is an accelerated course for students who are ready to apply learnings from earlier classes and experience. They are already actively engaged with their target market, ready to advance their customer discovery and market research, design and test minimum viable products, develop customer acquisition strategy, and prepare investor-ready financials for fundraising.
Entrepreneurial Greenhouse Students who have launched their startup or are launching imminently can apply to enroll in Entrepreneurial Greenhouse. Greenhouse has a competitive admissions process and is designed as an accelerator, serving as a capstone to the Entrepreneurship Track.
Entrepreneurial Strategy provides an integrated strategy framework for growth-oriented entrepreneurs. Students learn how to create and capture value as small, young, companies facing high uncertainty in the evolution of markets, industries, and underlying technologies. The course discusses these choices in the context of real startup companies that have recently faced strategic dilemmas in creating and commercializing an idea. This course is particularly appropriate for anyone interested in starting a company, creating a new industry, evaluating a new company’s sustainable advantage, and launching new products in existing companies.
Foundations of VC explores venture capital and angel investing so that students understand and experience the process of investing in early stage (primarily tech) startups: 1. Sourcing deals, 2. Conducting due diligence, 3. Valuing startups, 4. Negotiating term sheets, and 5. Managing a portfolio. Students understand the seed stage investing landscape (players and resources) and understand the structural differences between venture capital and angel investing. This course does not go into sector specific investment strategies or growth stage investment.
Foundations of Innovation offers students the opportunity to tackle the challenge of bringing to market elegant and efficient solutions to strong customer needs. The ability to innovate plays a pivotal role in the growth and success of many areas of business. This challenge is relevant whether working for a startup or a large company or selling products or services to individual consumers or companies. The course provides methodologies, strategies, and tools structured around the basic steps of the innovation process: 1. Opportunity Identification / Idea Generation, 2. Design, 3. Testing, and 4. Launch.
Think Bigger What is a big idea? Where does it come from? In Think Bigger, students wrestle with these questions and more, so they can start to think big about how to approach problem-solving. Students develop the skills they need to discover foreseeable and transformative ideas, and learn how to frame for solutions and articulate their value. They are challenged to be their most creative selves with hands-on experiential exercises (both inside and outside of the classroom) designed to take them through the processes of discovering, ideating, evaluating, and editing ideas. All students receive direct feedback and coaching from influential business minds (entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, leaders, et al.) from across New York City. The course culminates in a final "big idea" pitch in front of a distinguished panel of successful minds from across the city.