Rebecca Kahnweiler
Adjunct Lecturer of Entrepreneurship
Program Co-Lead for the Zell Fellows: Venture Track and Zell Fellows Alumni and Community Development Lead
Rebecca has deep roots in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, in Chicago and internationally. Her first venture, Sector3, is active today as a Peruvian consultancy accelerating female-led businesses in partnership with local and international aid organizations. After returning to Chicago to pursue her MBA at Kellogg, Rebecca co-founded Wise Apple to scale the delivery of healthy meal options for children throughout the Midwest. She subsequently held leadership roles at Bonfire and MightyNest.
Rebecca is currently the Managing Partner of Chicago based LongJump, a first-check, founder-led fund, investing in the next generation of founders. LongJump is the most active pre-seed investor in Illinois, providing capital, connections, and community to help founders build fast-growing, scalable businesses.
An avid adventurer, Rebecca has visited 50+ countries and spent the summer after college cycling from Texas to Alaska to raise funds for the MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Rebecca has an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and degrees in Finance and History from the University of Texas at Austin. While at Kellogg, Rebecca was a Zell Fellow and a Forte Fellow. She lives in Glencoe with her husband, two kids and their bernedoodle Betty.
Innovation Frontiers (ENTR-987-5)
Innovation Frontiers examines how innovation ecosystems function, how capital flows through them, and how the relationship between investors and founders shapes what gets built. The course goes beyond the mechanics of venture deals to explore the full landscape of innovation financing—from early-stage ventures in software and AI to the longer-cycle capital structures required in deep tech and life sciences—and how the ecosystems where companies are built determine who wins, who gets funded, and why. Structured as a three-quarter cohort experience (0.5 credits per quarter; 1.5 total), the course combines rigorous classroom discussion, practitioner engagement, alumni mentoring, and immersive field visits to two deliberately contrasting innovation ecosystems—San Francisco and Boston. San Francisco is visited twice: first to examine early-stage company formation and the impact of AI on venture (Fall), and again to engage with growth-stage dynamics, board governance, and portfolio management (Spring). Boston provides a sharp contrast—deep tech, life sciences, research-anchored deal flow, longer capital cycles, and fundamentally different investor-founder relationships—and challenges the assumptions students formed in San Francisco. Chicago serves as an ongoing local reference point throughout the year, with dedicated classroom sessions exploring the home ecosystem through guest speakers and comparative analysis.
Innovation Frontiers II (ENTR-986-5)
Innovation Frontiers examines how innovation ecosystems function, how capital flows through them, and how the relationship between investors and founders shapes what gets built. The course goes beyond the mechanics of venture deals to explore the full landscape of innovation financing—from early-stage ventures in software and AI to the longer-cycle capital structures required in deep tech and life sciences—and how the ecosystems where companies are built determine who wins, who gets funded, and why. Structured as a three-quarter cohort experience (0.5 credits per quarter; 1.5 total), the course combines rigorous classroom discussion, practitioner engagement, alumni mentoring, and immersive field visits to two deliberately contrasting innovation ecosystems—San Francisco and Boston. San Francisco is visited twice: first to examine early-stage company formation and the impact of AI on venture (Fall), and again to engage with growth-stage dynamics, board governance, and portfolio management (Spring). Boston provides a sharp contrast—deep tech, life sciences, research-anchored deal flow, longer capital cycles, and fundamentally different investor-founder relationships—and challenges the assumptions students formed in San Francisco. Chicago serves as an ongoing local reference point throughout the year, with dedicated classroom sessions exploring the home ecosystem through guest speakers and comparative analysis.
Innovation Frontiers I (ENTR-985-5)
Innovation Frontiers examines how innovation ecosystems function, how capital flows through them, and how the relationship between investors and founders shapes what gets built. The course goes beyond the mechanics of venture deals to explore the full landscape of innovation financing—from early-stage ventures in software and AI to the longer-cycle capital structures required in deep tech and life sciences—and how the ecosystems where companies are built determine who wins, who gets funded, and why. Structured as a three-quarter cohort experience (0.5 credits per quarter; 1.5 total), the course combines rigorous classroom discussion, practitioner engagement, alumni mentoring, and immersive field visits to two deliberately contrasting innovation ecosystems—San Francisco and Boston. San Francisco is visited twice: first to examine early-stage company formation and the impact of AI on venture (Fall), and again to engage with growth-stage dynamics, board governance, and portfolio management (Spring). Boston provides a sharp contrast—deep tech, life sciences, research-anchored deal flow, longer capital cycles, and fundamentally different investor-founder relationships—and challenges the assumptions students formed in San Francisco. Chicago serves as an ongoing local reference point throughout the year, with dedicated classroom sessions exploring the home ecosystem through guest speakers and comparative analysis.
New Venture Discovery (ENTR-462-0)
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**
