One of Olin's requirements is an entrepreneurship foundation course. Over the past decade, that course has taken a lot of forms. Last semester, the class was The Entrepreneurial Initiative, which everyone called FBE (left over from an old course title).
I went into FBE dreading it. I was taking it because it was a requirement and only because it was a requirement. That dread faded, but FBE was both frustrating and disappointing.
I'll start with the elements of the course that I liked. We had a four person teaching team, which was fantastic. The main professor is Lawrence, a design prof at Olin, and the other person who was almost always there was Gui, an Olin alum who started Artisan's Asylum. We also had Keith and Reed, who have worked with a lot of startups in the Boston area. Having four professors gave us exposure to a lot of different perspectives, but it wasn't so many as to be confusing or contradictory.
Before we started projects (which were businesses, ish), we spent a lot of time talking about entrepreneurship, money, and business, and I enjoyed those discussions. They made me more comfortable with being in the class and with the idea that entrepreneurship is one of the corners of Olin's triangle. (I don't necessarily agree, and I don't think that's how things actually play out, but it no longer seemed wrong.)
During the projects and after they were mostly done, Gui spent a lot of time talking to us and having us do exercises about profit and loss sheets. We were keeping one all along for our project, but with Gui we used them for projections. What would these businesses we were running look like over the course of six months? A year? Two years? We calculated how much we would have to pay ourselves in order to live. We played around with all kinds of numbers, trying to figure out where we could cut down on costs and what that would mean. Sure, we could not pay someone else to do bookkeeping, but then we would have to do that, and what would that really mean? The results were generally not pretty. One variation on my team's long term p&l had profit coming out to $42 per month for most of a two year period with 2 full time employees laser cutting thousands of coasters a month.
Because all of us now have experience running a business, even if it was in a pretty protected environment, I think most of us are less scared of it because we sort of know what we would be getting into. On the other hand, I think knowing what we're getting into also makes the vast majority of us less likely to start our own business.
My biggest problem with the class was the unevenness. I wanted FBE to be a business class, and it wasn't. We learned no accounting. Trying to fill out a balance sheet for the project should have been simple by the end. It wasn't, and the professors who were in class the day we worked on this were confused about the same things that were confusing us. I liked what we did for learning to pitch, but then, other than what teams picked up from each others' presentations, we never talked about marketing or ways/places to sell. We talked about Kickstarter, I guess, but that was aimed at the idea that in the future we might want to do a Kickstarter; the profs knew none of the teams were pursuing it for our course projects. My team specifically asked for advice on doing consignment, which was something we'd expressed interest in all along. The profs gave us a couple of additional suggestions for stores and answered a couple of questions about how to approach stores, but I still felt like we made a mess of some things that were definitely avoidable.
Should we have asked more questions? Definitely. Did the answers to the questions we did ask encourage us to ask more questions? Not always. The complete lack of course material on marketing seems intentional, and I don't know why that of all things would be left for us to learn all through doing. I have issues with do-learn when there's not enough learn following the do. We spent a lot of time at the end of the class doing reflection, and in our final presentations each team had to present a lesson the team had learned and then lessons each individual had learned. The problem wasn't that we didn't learn, but more that what we said we'd learned wasn't all that specific to the fact that the project was a business.
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