The common startup mythologies tend to promote the glamor of entrepreneurship. You will work hard in a basement or a garage with no money, but the brilliance of your idea will make you into a heroic (wind-swept) figure to whom investors, customers, and clients (and the popular press) will all be irresistibly attracted. These stories don’t map to reality for most.
In contrast, you need to get out of the garage, think more creatively so that you are adequately capitalized and can attract the talent you need for your enterprise development team. Competition and sustainable growth in the 21st century are enormous challenges which require your creativity and passion. They also require innovation, an equitable organizational structure, and a functional understanding of the regulations and law which either empower your enterprise to acquire (a) the capital in amounts and forms you can best utilize, (b) promote equity in compensation and ownership within your organization, and (c) maintain sufficiently control over the goals and direction of your venture.
During this 7-week course, we will quickly review and interrogate all common legal organizational form choices. We will then examine better choices in organizational legal form, their character and details, and learn how to create and utilize them and how they optimize and facilitate your ability to raise capital (which you will likely have to do over and over again). We will examine organizational designs which meet compensation equity and employee ownership goals, build the competitive and re-invention capacities of an enterprise, enable collaborative management and control, and sustainability. You will create your own innovative design and apply it to the preceding set of outcome metrics as part of the course. Further, we will examine pertinent enterprise law and regulation, like Reg. CF (Crowdfunding) and OPO (Online Public Offering) requirements and adapt our choices in organizational design and structure to make those options available.