FINAN 5773 - Forming & Funding the Entrepreneurial Firm

This course will address corporate formation and the trade-offs between LLCs, C corps, S corps, and proprietorship structures. Students will create capitalization tables, and learn how dilution arises from the issuance of new shares. The course simulates five different financing options: Crow Funding; Family, Friends, Fools and Feds; Angel Investors; Venture Capitalists; and IPOs. The pedagogical methods is experiential learning through live simulation. The class is organized into startup teams that will create different versions of a business plan to address the market's needs. Teams must make corporate formation decisions, allocate to founders and then to successive investors, create financial models, and prepare for an IPO. Through all financing rounds they must convince their peers to invest in their ventures.