Fat Startup Case Studies With Sramana Mitra

Lessons From the Trenches of Building Fat Startups

What you'll learn

Through in-depth interviews with successful founders of fat startups, learn how they built their businesses.

How to identify promising startup ideas.

What the innovative trends and business models are in the identity management space to ignite your ideation.

When and how to bring on a team.

When to start raising funds for a startup.

How to scale your business.

What the exit options are.

Requirements

The only requirement for this course is an open mind and a willingness to learn.

Description

The 1Mby1M Methodology is based on case studies. In each course, Sramana Mitra shares the tribal knowledge of tech entrepreneurs by giving students the rare seat at the table with the entrepreneurs, investors and thought leaders who provide the most instructive perspectives on how to build a thriving business. Through these conversations, students gain access to case studies exploring the alleys of entrepreneurship. Sramana’s synthesis of key learnings and incisive analysis add great depth to each discussion.While we focus a lot more on lean startups than startups that require capital to get going these days, fat startups still play an important role in developing large-scale success stories with significant, defensible, competitive advantages.The bulk of the VC industry has moved away from the ‘fat startup’ category. Investors expect that you will have your product launched, customer acquisition model fleshed out fully, and a team in place before Series A.However, infrastructure software, hardware, networking, chips – they all need capital. Even in cloud software, to build complex technology like personalization, analytics and artificial intelligence requires some serious investment.I see a few trends after pondering and investigating the question: How do people fund ‘fat startups’ these days?One, you need a track record to get VCs to write big checks right away, so, often, it is the serial entrepreneurs who get these opportunities.Two, some VCs incubate such companies with their Entrepreneurs In Residences, who are again typically serial entrepreneurs.For first time entrepreneurs, the options are more limited.The most viable option is to bootstrap using services.Deep domain knowledge in a certain field may also give you access to capital.A coherent, high-powered team that is willing to work for equity and build a prototype, along with a clear vision of product, customer need, customer acquisition model may, sometimes, work as well.To learn more, let's get started.

Overview

Section 1: How to Build Fat Startups

Lecture 1 Introduction

Lecture 2 Fat Startup Case Studies

Lecture 3 Building an AI Unicorn with Glean CEO Arvind Jain

Lecture 4 Azul CEO Scott Sellers' 20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots

Lecture 5 Cleversafe Founder Chris Gladwin on Building a Unicorn Fat Startup

Lecture 6 Delphix CEO Jedidiah Yueh on Building Two Fat Startups

Lecture 7 EdCast CEO Karl Mehta on Building a Fat Startup in Corporate Training

Lecture 8 First-time Entrepreneur AppDynamic's Founder Jyoti Bansal Builds a Fat Startup

Lecture 9 More Fat Startup Case Studies

Section 2: Frequently Asked Questions about Fat Startups

Lecture 10 Is there any way to fund fat startups today?

Lecture 11 Are there VCs who fund fat startups at the concept stage?

Lecture 12 How do first-time entrepreneurs without a track record fund fat startups?

Lecture 13 Is it possible to fund fat startups in B to C?

Lecture 14 Is it possible to fund fat startups outside Silicon Valley?

Section 3: Additional

Lecture 15 Practice Exercise 1

Lecture 16 Practice Exercise 2

Lecture 17 Extra

Those with knowledge of or interest in fat startups who want to turn it into multi-million dollar revenue businesses by becoming startup founders rather than remain employees or contractors.,Aspiring founders who want to increase their chances of being accepted into top startup accelerators such as Y Combinator, Techstars, and 500 Startups.,Any entrepreneur who wants to learn from successful entrepreneurs who have been in your shoes.,Professors teaching technology entrepreneurship courses anywhere in the world.