Prior to joining the faculty of the Kellogg School of Management, Gregg was the founder and CEO of Aware Records, where he signed the following bands to his joint venture with Columbia Records: Train, John Mayer, Five for Fighting and Mat Kearney. In addition, Gregg built A-Squared Management that directed the careers of artists such as The Fray, Michelle Branch, Liz Phair, Brandi Carlile, Jack's Mannequin, Mat Kearney, Five for Fighting and Rachel Platten. The artists Gregg has signed/or managed have sold more than 30 million CDs, in addition to multi-millions of singles and billions of streams of their individual songs.
Gregg Latterman is an Adjunct Lecturer of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School of Management where he teaches courses at Northwestern in Entrepreneurship. He created and teaches a class entitled, NUvention: Entrepreneurship for the Arts. Latterman also serves as a Program Lead for the Zell Fellows New Venture Track, a selective venture accelerator program designed to help student entrepreneurs successfully launch new businesses. In addition, Gregg helped lead and develop the Entrepreneurship Curriculum for Kellogg for the New World Symphony Entrepreneurship Sessions in Miami Beach.
Gregg has spent over two decades in the music and entertainment industry. While a CPA at Price Waterhouse Coopers in Boston, he put together a compilation of unsigned bands called the Aware Compilations in 1993 that became immensely popular and included unknown bands at the time like Hootie & the Blowfish, Matchbox 20, Jack Johnson, Train, John Mayer and many others. While building up Aware, he went to The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University to get his MBA and had ten employees by the time he graduated.
Gregg was one of the first entrepreneur's to combine music with television, film, and advertising campaigns. Gregg worked with the network ABC to bring The Fray's video of the song "How to Save a Life" into promotional spots for the popular television show "Grey's Anatomy." As a student at Kellogg School of Management, Gregg built the first online record store called, "Awarestore" in 1995 and later in 2008 the first music "app" while managing the band The Fray.
Gregg graduated in 2013 with a Masters in Positive Psychology at The University of Pennsylvania under Martin Seligman and now teaches "Positive Entrepreneurship" at Northwestern University. Gregg also teaches a course for the Farley School of Entrepreneurship at Northwestern titled Entrepreneurship for Engineers.
Gregg is an Angel Investor as well as an advisor and mentor for dozens of start-ups. Gregg graduated from Michigan State University in 1990 and the Kellogg School of Management in 1996.
**This course was formerly known as KIEI-466**
This experiential course is targeted to students who have business concepts that have been tested to determine that there is a compelling product-market fit. New Venture Launch will focus on fine-tuning the business model, building out financial projections and preparing investor pitches. A significant portion of the workload for this course will occur outside of the classroom. Students must be prepared to test and validate their business model hypotheses by engaging with potential customers and industry experts. Within the classroom, students will be encouraged to share learning experiences and help other student teams. The course work will be supplemented by guest speakers who are experts in functional areas related to the business model canvas. In addition, students will have access to a pool of alumni and local mentors who can assist in the development of their businesses.If you are not currently registered for New Venture Development, ENTR 464-0 and you are interested in this class, please contact entrepreneurship@kellogg.northwestern.edu
New Venture Discovery is designed to help students navigate the earliest stages of starting a new venture beginning with the identification of a problem in the market that is worth solving. The class teaches students tools and techniques to translate these problems into viable business concepts, with an emphasis on enabling an aspiring entrepreneur to get as far as possible, with as little as possible, as FAST as possible.
Student teams begin the quarter with nothing more than a series of hypotheses about a new venture, then design and execute a series of in-market experiments that either validate these assumptions, or force them to iterate aspects of their business model in real time. The objective of the course to guide students toward the achievement of "product-market fit" as a crucial first step in in the creation of a startup. From here, students can evolve their businesses by enrolling in the "Develop" and "Launch" courses that serve as the continuation of the new ventures curriculum.
New Venture Discovery course material ranges from customer discovery and design thinking, to rapid prototyping (of both offers and business models), bootstrapping methods and communicating/selling the vision for a new venture. The course format is a blend of lecture, fieldwork, cross-team collaboration and ideation sessions, outside speakers and expert mentoring.
**This course may not be dropped after the second week of the quarter**
