It's a Wrap!! 🎬
Teaching the Beta cohort of my online VC class was a highlight of 2022.
As 2022 comes to an end, I’m savoring the experience of having created and taught the very first cohort of Venture Fluent — my live, online venture capital course.
The Beta cohort was 7 months in the making. That journey started with a question from a VC friend who asked me how I’d like to scale my teaching beyond the 20 or so university students who enroll annually in my VC seminar to someday include hundreds, perhaps even thousands of learners?
He suggested that I create an online cohort-based course and use the Maven marketplace to promote and host it.
Along the way, I completed the Maven Course Accelerator and hosted my friends Lorine Pendleton and Jordan Weitz at the launch party several weeks before the start of class.
To be honest, I wasn’t so sure that there would be an audience for the course for busy, full-time working professionals who were curious about venture investing but who had precious little time to devote to yet another thing.
Wow, was I wrong! The course attracted interest from an incredibly impressive group of professionals — people with successful careers in law, finance, entrepreneurship, science, international development, consulting, and many more fields. The Beta cohort sold out 2 weeks before the start of class. Amazing! 💪
And the students in that first cohort were impressive indeed. Check ‘em out!
I was pleased to see the course attract an inaugural group of learners with diverse backgrounds as measured by profession, age, place of origin, etc. The Beta cohort also had more women than men, which was encouraging given the long-standing and documented gender bias against women in the venture capital industry.1
This was a sharp group of learners who brought their A game to our evening sessions and asked the very best questions, i.e, questions that only students with a beginner’s perspective could ask. As a group, they were incredibly patient as I experimented and learned how to adapt this material for the online format.
In return, I was fortunate to get their positive as well as constructive feedback, the latter of which I’ll use to make the next cohort even better (e.g., the next cohort will meet 1x per week for 6 weeks instead of roughly 2x per week.).
Based on student reviews, the course is now among the top-rated courses on Maven!
Here are some of the kind reviews that students have contributed:
One of the outcomes of Venture Fluent is the course equips students with insights from experienced investors they can use immediately in their own investing careers. A common theme from the reviews above, and across all the reviews of the course, was the high quality of the guest speakers who joined the Beta cohort.
Chris Fralic was our guest speaker for Module 2: Talent & Originating Deals. He’s a frequent guest speaker in my university VC seminar. Students love his humility, honesty, and frameworks for long-term success in venture capital. [Fun fact: Chris teaches a Maven course, and he’s the VC in the story above who suggested I teach on the platform!]
Taylor Davidson was our guest speaker for Module 5: Technical Considerations. Taylor has experience as a founder and VC, and he’s dedicated himself to helping thousands of entrepreneurs and investors learn how to work with the key financial models used in creating startups and venture funds. For Venture Fluent, he gave students a master class in capitalization tables, portfolio construction, and returns waterfalls. I learned a ton from Taylor, especially how to present this material to students who are just beginning their study of early-stage investing. [Taylor offers several Maven courses on these topics, which you should definitely check out if you’re new to startups or venture investing.]
Jenny Fielding was our guest speaker for Module 6: Launching a Career in Innovation Investing. I was impressed by how she’s steered her career in such a way so that she got the key experiences early in her career that set her up for the work she’s doing now. What a great lesson for students of VC and excellent example of speaker-topic fit!
Man, I really lucked out with these 3 speakers, and I’m grateful they made time to be a part of this first experience creating and teaching an online course.
As we end the year, I’m happy that I can make good on my promise to donate 10% of my revenue from the Beta cohort to organizations that are doing the hard work of creating opportunities for more people from underrepresented/underestimated backgrounds to work in VC. To celebrate the Beta cohort, I’ve made donations to two such organizations: HBCUvc and LatinxVC. [Disclosure: I sit on the board of HBCUvc.]
This is a week when many of those who are in a position to donate to charity finalize their giving plans for the year. If you’re one of those people, please make one of these organizations part of your annual charitable giving.
Finally, my thanks go out to you, dear reader, for following along as I’ve documented this journey. Perhaps we’ll meet in class in 2023. As a subscriber, you’ll be among the very first people to know when we’ll gather the next Venture Fluent cohort.
Sending you my best wishes for a good health, happiness, and unbounded learning in 2023! 🎉🥂🍾
Jorge
There’s been a lot written on this topic, so I’ll leave it to you to do the research if you want to learn more about gender bias in VC. I didn’t ask people to provide their gender identity when they applied to the course, and so the breakdown is based on the gender expression of students in the cohort.