Welcome to a dedicated hub of knowledge curated exclusively for Schulze School of Entrepreneurship alumni. Discover a wealth of knowledge to help you start and grow your business, including idea validation, team recruitment, capital raising, and strategic business exits.

Gain insights from prominent figures such as Dick Schulze, the visionary benefactor of the Schulze School, as well as accomplished founders from enterprises like Minute Clinic, Zoom, and Fetch Rewards. Delve into the wisdom shared by renowned startup authority Steve Blank and distinguished professors from St. Thomas.

How to Validate your Idea

SNL Humor Can Illustrate [Un]Viable Business Models In a very funny 2014 skit from Saturday Night Live, Melissa McCarthy has a business idea – personally eating people’s leftover pizza – and is trying to get a small business loan for it from an incredulous bank officer, played by Jason Sudeikis. In the skit, viewed more than 9 million times on YouTube, McCarthy’s “business proposal plan” involves only a pizza box and a leftover slice of pizza. She keeps insisting that the bank officer cut her a check right away.

Learn From Leaders: Developing an Idea: Our interview subjects include Dick Schulze, founder and former CEO of Best Buy; Linda Hall, former CEO of MinuteClinic; Eddie Hartman, founder of LegalZoom; Scott Nash, founder of Mom's Organic Market; Seth Goldman, founder of Honest Tea; Jeff Freeland-Nelson, founder of Yoxo Toys; and Ann Winblad, founding partner of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

This first video focuses on how ideas develop -- and you will see that the process is not always neat or linear.

Talk With Real Customers Before the Launch: As online crowdsourcing has shown, people will support a proposed business or cause that moves them. For entrepreneurs, the ability to test a proposed product or service's uniqueness and appeal has never been better. EIX panelists Heidi Neck of Babson College, Kim Eddleston of Northeastern University and Dan Holland of Utah State University discuss how entrepreneurs can test the waters before they roll out their business ideas.

How to Acquire Your First Customer

Building a Company Step By Step Ch. 3: An Introduction to Customer Discovery: EIX is featuring interviews that explore the principles outlined in Steve Blank and Bob Dorf's book, "The Startup Owners Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company." This interview with Taralinda Willis, co-CEO of Curate, focuses on Chapter 3, An Introduction to Customer Discovery. 

Building a Company Step By Step, Chapter 5: Get Out of the Building: EIX is featuring interviews that explore the principles outlined in Steve Blank and Bob Dorf's book, "The Startup Owners Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company." This interview with Rachel Carpenter, founder of the financial data company Intrinio, focuses on Chapter 5, Get Out of the Building to Test the Problem: Do People Care? 

Building a Company Step by Step, Ch. 8: Introduction to Customer Validation: EIX is featuring interviews that explore the principles outlined in Steve Blank and Bob Dorf's book, "The Startup Owners Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company." This interview with Dan Reich explores Chapter 8: Introduction to Customer Validation.

How to Get Your Startup Funded

Learn from Leaders #2: Getting the Financing Your Venture Needs to Survive: This is the second video in our exclusive series called "Learn from Leaders," featuring advice for early-stage entrepreneurs and innovators from founders and CEOs of groundbreaking companies. Each of our Learn from Leaders videos focuses on an important step in launching a company. In this one, leaders talk about the harrowing process of finding financing and investors for their new ventures, which went on to become wildly successful.

The Harrowing Journey of Finding Investors Entrepreneurs are generally far more interested in creating a product or service and getting it to market than the tedious and often humbling process of obtaining funding. Yet, finding the right investors and determining how much to raise at what valuation will have a profound impact on whether the business thrives or fails in the long term.

Your Voice Can Influence Your Crowdfunding Success: People react to several aspects of crowdfunding pitch content: the logic of the research and reasoning behind it, the urgency of the problem it addresses, and facts indicating the product or service has a strong market and will be successful. But beyond pitch content, how a pitch is delivered may also have an effect, albeit subconsciously. When we hear someone speak, our brain’s subconscious perception of whether the speaker is passionate or prepared is influenced by two dimensions of expression, which scholars who study emotions call “valence” and “arousal.”

How to Manage Your Finances

How Long Can Your Company Go Without Revenue?: The Cash Burn Rate for early-stage companies measures their financial heartbeat. Startups can go months and even years without revenues (much less profits) so measuring and managing cash burn is a major chore for the management team of such firms. For most larger organizations that have generated revenues and profits for years, this concept of reporting “Zero Revenue Solvency Rate” would have been incomprehensible only a few months ago.

 A More User-Friendly Way to Track Liquidity: “Return on Equity” provides a general indicator of the level of earnings and operational cash flow a firm generates in relation to the cost of long term capital invested in the enterprise. As many entrepreneurs realize, “cash flow is king and queen” in a company’s financial management practices. But most traditional liquidity measures have inherent weaknesses, especially at privately held firms headed by entrepreneurs with little or no financial background. An alternative cash flow metric, the Net Balance Position (NBP) provides a simpler yet more effective way to measure the liquid situation of these firms. This article explains why, and shares some strategies that can increase cash flow of the enterprise.

These 10 Common Accounting Mistakes Can Doom Early-Stage Enterprises: This article will identify a variety of common finance and accounting pitfalls experienced by early-stage enterprises, why they matter, and how they might be corrected. My advice here is mostly targeted to companies that are already selling products and have hired employees. But even solo entrepreneurs in the pre-revenue phase will benefit from “thinking forward” through the issues discussed below so they can prepare for choices they may later face.

How to Build and Manage Your Team

How Best Buy Engages Employees in Putting Customers First Best Buy, which generates nearly $40 billion in sales a year and whose stock price has risen dramatically in the past four years, has a strategy for keeping customers coming back: a mission that focuses on the customer experience and emphasizes the importance of the customer in everything the company does, from recruiting to training to employee decision-making. 

Learn from Leaders #4: Building a Team: This is the fourth video in our exclusive series called "Learn from Leaders," featuring advice for early-stage entrepreneurs and innovators from founders and CEOs of groundbreaking companies. Each of our Learn from Leaders videos focuses on an important step in launching a company. This one focuses on how to attract and incentivize your startup team, and how those teams can evolve as the company matures. 

After the Big Idea: Entrepreneurial Success Through High Performance Start-Up Teams: In this article, we introduce the notion of the High Performance Team (HPT) – the “Holy Grail” of effective teams – and discuss the valuable and significant outcomes they generate. Based on empirical findings from research conducted on dozens of product and service development teams, we describe those essential elements that typify an HPT; discuss whether the elements are relevant to entrepreneurial start-up teams; and, if so, how to incorporate and nurture them. 

How to Grow Your Business

Trust But Verify: How Startups Can Build Healthy Strategic Alliances Outsourcing is growing trend for startups. Since new ventures often lack resources, they can augment their capabilities by working with other companies -- often much less expensive than hiring staff and bringing the function in house. Outsourcing also gives startups access to the same sophisticated capabilities that only larger companies once could afford.

To Grow, Serve Existing Customers Better or Find New Ones: There are only two ways to grow a company's revenue. One is gaining more customers. This occurs by either taking them away from competitors, which is generally difficult and expensive, or finding underserved customer segments and exploiting them, or expanding the products and services that you sell to existing customers. This generally occurs by finding new complementary goods or services to provide.

Learn from Leaders #5: Growing the Business: This is the final video in our exclusive series called "Learn from Leaders," featuring advice for early-stage entrepreneurs and innovators from founders and CEOs of groundbreaking companies. Each of our Learn from Leaders videos focuses on an important step in launching a company. This one focuses on how to take your business to the next level of growth, including the types of growth to avoid.