Academics

Entrepreneurship is a career path for many students upon graduation or later in their career. Launching a new venture raises unique challenges given that a sustainable business model has yet to be determined and financial resources are initially limited. This pathway offers a curriculum that combines strategy, finance, organizations, and marketing in pursuit of successful new venture creation. The pathway includes a sequence that allows interested students to develop and launch new companies (ENTR 462, 464, and 466), coupled with courses that develop discipline-based skills of particular relevance to building new firms.

Faculty sponsors: Ben Jones (Strategy), Mitchell Petersen (Finance)

Profitably growing and scaling businesses is a central challenge for business leaders. It reaches across all business functions and components, including

• Strategy (e.g. when are external market conditions right for growth and how do market opportunities link with internal capabilities?),
• Operations (e.g. how to scale efficiently to meet demand and maintain quality, given a potentially steep but uncertain growth path),
• Finance (e.g. how to choose capital structure in light of growth opportunities),
• Marketing (e.g. how to acquire new customers, extend brands, and link customer needs to internal product development), and
• Organizations (e.g. how to maintain core cultural advantages yet shift organizational design and shift key team members as business grows).

The pathway emphasizes functional depth and experiential learning on these dynamic topics in management with applications to small- and middle-market enterprises (SMEs). As such, the pathway will be of particular interest to students with career aspirations in:

• C-Suite of SMEs
• Family Business
• Private Equity/Search Funds

Faculty sponsors: Ben Jones (Strategy), Mike Mazzeo (Strategy)

The driving theme behind Kellogg’s Venture Capital and Private Equity (VC/PE) pathway is to identify and exploit the potential sources of value in private, public, and closely-held firms by VCs and PEs. This interdisciplinary pathway provides students with the analytical framework and tools necessary to successfully conduct venture capital and private equity transactions, execute mergers and acquisitions, and engage in corporate restructuring activities. The pathway is structured along potential sources of value that VC/PE investors can extract. This pathway has different tracks depending on whether students are interested more in Venture Capital, Growth Equity, or LBOs. It also has a strong international component for those students who are interested in exploring the practices in countries that do not have common law legal systems.

In venture capital, investors may generate value in early stage companies by engaging in operational and strategic engineering that focuses on getting the most from the company’s resources. For investors in the growth equity segment of the private equity industry, these same skills apply. In addition, growth equity investors may redesign a company’s governance structure to reduce frictions between management and shareholders and between non-controlling and controlling shareholders, resulting in management decisions more aligned with shareholder interests. In doing so, they will use financial contracts that are characterized by steep incentives for the management team. Private equity investors engaged in leveraged buy-outs (LBOs) and restructuring create value with operational and governance changes, as well. They may also exploit inefficiencies in capital markets by restructuring a company’s liabilities or by purchasing undervalued assets and selling them at or above their fundamental value.

The VC/PE pathway emphasizes financial, operational, and strategic skills for venture capital investors, adds approaches to corporate governance for growth equity investors, and provides a greater emphasis on accounting and financial skills for LBOs and corporate restructuring. In addition to the Evanston classes, students interested in working for start-ups (series B and further) or venture capital firms should consider the San Francisco immersion program offered in the winter.