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Learner Reviews & Feedback for How to Finance and Grow Your Startup – Without VC by University of London

4.6
stars
463 ratings

About the Course

Who? If you’re an entrepreneur at any stage of your journey, or even an aspiring one, and you need money to start or grow your business, this course is for you. What? This course will introduce, and help you put to use in your startup, the five models through which your customers can – and will, if you ask them! – fund your business. These five time-tested models have been put to use by entrepreneurial superstars like Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Richard Branson and more. Sadly, though, the five models are rarely talked about and not widely understood. Until now! The five models will be brought to life by the real-world stories of an inspiring collection of incredibly creative entrepreneurs from around the world – including successes and failures – through a series of captivating no-holds-barred interviews with founders and others, and investors, too. Why? More than two generations ago, the venture capital community – VC’s, business angels, incubators, and others – convinced the entrepreneurial world that writing business plans and raising venture capital constituted the twin centerpieces of entrepreneurial endeavor. They did so for very good reasons: the sometimes astonishing returns they’ve delivered to their investors and the incredibly large and valuable companies their ecosystem has created. But the vast majority of fast growing companies never take any angel or venture funding. Are they onto something that most of today’s entrepreneurial ecosystem has missed? Indeed, should a business angel or VC be seen as the first port of call for getting your nascent entrepreneurial venture off the ground or growing it faster? Perhaps not. How? You’ll be asked to do a series of exercises – out in the real world – to put your growing toolkit to use in your business or the one you hope to start. Hands-on, practical tools to help your business start and thrive – without venture capital. You’ll join our discussion board of fellow participants, if you like, and learn from others who are putting the tools to work, just as you are. And to suit today’s fast-paced lifestyles, we’ve broken what you’ll get – short lessons, interviews, thought-provoking questions, even some optional things to read – into bite-sized chunks, so you can log in and grab them whenever and wherever you are. And what else? If, after checking out and perhaps completing this course, you find your company in a position where seeking venture capital turns out to be the right thing to do next, John Mullins leads an inspiring and hands-on executive education course at London Business School – this one face-to-face – called Financing the Entrepreneurial Business. There, among a room full of investors and entrepreneurs, you’ll study a series of captivating real-world cases and learn everything an entrepreneur – or an investor, for that matter – needs to know to handle the person who sits across the deal table and take an entrepreneurial business from start-up to exit. See https://www.london.edu/education-and-development/executive-education/topic/finance/financing-the-entrepreneurial-business#.WIVY_FyTQ-0 for info....

Top reviews

SK

Jul 18, 2020

A beautiful and well oriented course which helps proving your concept of business by customer funding and no external venture capital. Thank you so much to the course instructor and the whole team.

KK

May 12, 2017

It was an amazing opportunity wherein we had a great chance to both learn about various customer funded models through interviews, guest talks and practice them through assignments in parallel

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126 - 138 of 138 Reviews for How to Finance and Grow Your Startup – Without VC

By Dimitrios

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Jun 17, 2019

Very interesting course. Makes you think.

By Kayeye M J

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May 12, 2017

Nice lecture. I have learn a lot

By Alessandro A

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Jun 3, 2018

While the content of the course is valid and thought stimulating, the development of the course is barely sufficient in my opinion. It resembles too much as an advertisement of the professor's book, extended over 7 weeks of MOOC. The investor interviews are interesting at the beginning, but tend to become boring on the long run. Sometimes they fall into simple chit-chat and always go around the same topics again and again ("no need for VC funds / bootstrapping make you stronger and better / etc."). I cannot say that this course is bad because I did take some valuable insights from it. However, it is not an excellent course either, it is rather a middle of the pack type of MOOC. Peer reviews have been quite slow perhaps due to low attendance of the course itself.

By Gunay F

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May 22, 2020

I would appreciate to have a more direct interchange with the course Professor, to have him more engaged in the evaluation of our homework, his participation in our discussion forums.

By Hieronymus D

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Sep 15, 2019

Less financing, more a pricing model focus.

also far to often does he recommend hos book.

By Mehwish k

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Oct 23, 2017

it was amazing and very knowledgeable

By Adhitya B

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May 8, 2016

Very Useful

By Γιώργος Κ

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Jan 9, 2022

The course is only a collection of interviews of other entrepreuners. I do not believe it provides any specific knowledge and the topics discussed are too generic. The interviews are nice, but I would expect a clear guide on how to bootstrap your own start-up without VC.

By Lucas G

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Jan 9, 2020

The ideas behind this course are good but seem like the main focus is to promote a book that the author has written on the topic. Insufficient people taking it as for the peer review system to work. It took 25 days for my last submission to be reviewed.

By Asrarul K M

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Sep 8, 2018

This course is basically a collection of interviews with some experts and indirect advertisement toward's the instructor's authored book on the subject

By ELEONOR P

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Apr 12, 2022

Assigments are really hard to submit and confusing to follow through or understand.

By Eloi G

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Nov 15, 2020

This MOOC should just take 5 slides. No need to even do videos.

By Aurelien T

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Nov 29, 2023

very poor content...I gave up after one week....