Session Description: Starting with “Who Cares?” and “So What?”. About 75% of startups fail in the first 5 years due to a lack of product market fit – they build something nobody wants. The path to starting a new venture has always been - do what the big companies do. Write a business plan, create a pitch deck, find investors, design a beautiful product and hire a sales team to bring in revenue. Instead of designing, building and launching, start with deeply understanding what unmet needs your customers have and how motivated they are to solve them. This session will focus on understanding who your customers are and what value you might provide to them.

Cohort Overview: A growing number of startups are emerging from universities and research institutes — young enterprises that are accelerating innovation and changing the game in social entrepreneurship and in every field imaginable. Increasingly, graduate students are the founders or co-founders behind these new businesses.At Princeton, there is a robust innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem that connects graduate students, postdocs, alumni, faculty, venture capitalists, and industry.

During the course of 8 weeks, this program serves as a “crash course” for understanding the world of entrepreneurship, VC funding and startups. You will learn about the lingo, the economics, the process, and the landscape—and meet members of the broader innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem. You will also hear first-hand from graduate alumni founders about their entrepreneurial journeys -- and all of the challenges and successes they had along the way. The cohort culminates with a group project where graduate students will work across disciplines to synthesize and apply their learnings.

Cohort sessions are led by Princeton alums Jim Cohen ’86 and Mark Poag ’93, general partners of Fitz Gate Ventures. Fitz Gate Ventures is an early stage, network-driven venture capital firm.

For the first time this year, the cohort will include two guest lectures taught by Christina Pellicane, Assistant Director of Innovation at Princeton and Lead Instructor, NSF I-Corps Northeast Hub.

By participating in this cohort, you will see why the Venture Capital and Startups Learning Cohort has become one of GradFUTURES’ most popular offerings and why Jim and Mark were each awarded the Clio Award from the Princeton Grad School for the value this cohort has brought to Princeton graduate students over the years.