JEFFREY ESCHBACH is an entrepreneur and tech innovator, with over 20 years of experience creating new products and businesses. He is the founder and CEO of Page Vault Inc., an award-winning company that transforms internet content, such as websites and social media profiles, into admissible evidence for law firms.
He is also an active angel investor who is immersed in Chicago’s flourishing startup scene. He founded Chicago Early Growth Ventures, which invests in early-stage deals around the Chicagoland area. In just under three years, the group has attracted hundreds of members and invested in more than 60 portfolio companies.
Jeffrey built his career managing new product introduction teams at best-in-class corporations, including Intel Japan and Motorola Research Labs. He guided novel ideas through the full development life cycle, maturing tech concepts into customer-needed solutions. His leadership positions have spanned technical R&D, product management and corporate strategy, with assignments across Asia, Latin America and the US.
He has earned eleven patents related to cloud computing and integrated numerous innovations into high-tech products. Jeffrey’s work has directly impacted context-aware communication systems, virtual and augmented reality platforms, and mission-critical wireless networks. He is also frequently requested to lecture and advise on startup and innovation topics, including lean startup methodologies and best practices for corporate environments.
Jeffrey is a National Science Foundation Fellow and earned both his BS with distinction and MS in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University. He later received his MBA with highest honors from the Kellogg School of Management, focusing on Entrepreneurship and Tech Strategy. He currently teaches entrepreneurship at both Kellogg and the McCormick School of Engineering and serves as the Associate Director of Venture Creation for the Kellogg Entrepreneurship Program.
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**
