Launch school update

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Launch school update

So today is the last day of launch school 2010 and Nieman Lab did a nice follow up piece on it:

Did the students all pass with flying colors? Of the ten companies, one dropped out, a few didn’t make much progress, but about half made a serious dent in meeting their summer goals.

“Some people think they want to run a business,” Spiers told me, “then you go do the actual work and you realize you don’t. It’s better to learn that in the classroom setting.”

Spiers says she thought the program was successful enough that she’s planning on another course in the spring. She expects the structure to largely stay the same. This time around, the class met for 12 weeks, along with individual meetings with each founders. Once a week she brought in an interesting speaker. The multiple perspectives helped round out the curriculum.

A couple of the companies are mentioned in the article: Clare Mazur and Erica Cerulo’s OfAKind and Brooke Mooreland’s Fashism.com.

And thanks to all of the guest speakers: Rick Webb, Rachelle Hruska, Jen Bekman, Peter Feld, Alexa von Tobel and John Caplan.

The program went really well overall, and I’m teaching a formalized version of it as an undergraduate class at Duke in the spring, and possibly doing it again here in the same format. It was incredibly rewarding to work with such a great group of emerging entrepreneurs and I probably learned as much from them as they did from me.