The unfortunate reality of entrepreneurship is that success isn't guaranteed.
“Of startups that have more than one employee, 70 percent survive at least two years, half last at least five years, and a quarter last 15 years,” says Harvard Business School Professor William Sahlman in the online course Entrepreneurship Essentials. “Even then, only a small fraction of the survivors get to be significant employers.”
Despite the risks, more than one million businesses were founded in the United States in 2022.
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DOWNLOAD NOWSo, what does it take to be a successful entrepreneur? In addition to curiosity, resilience, and strategic thinking, you need entrepreneurial skills, such as data analysis, relationship building, and pitching.
The good news is that whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or interested in joining a startup, you can build and hone the characteristics and skills to start, scale, and lead a successful business.
Harvard Business School Online offers two courses that can jumpstart your journey: Entrepreneurship Essentials and Launching Tech Ventures.
Both provide valuable foundations for starting a business but have key differentiators that may make one better suited to your goals. Here’s a comparison to help you decide.
Course Comparison: Entrepreneurship Essentials vs. Launching Tech Ventures
Entrepreneurship Essentials
Entrepreneurship Essentials is a four-week online course designed to guide your business from idea to launch. Taught by Sahlman, it’s the right fit if you’re an aspiring or early-stage entrepreneur or considering working at a startup.
In the course, you learn how to:
- Identify a business opportunity
- Validate an idea and assess the market
- Weigh entrepreneurship’s risks and rewards
- Hone and refine your business strategy
- Make vital early-stage financial decisions
- Explore and weigh options for raising capital
“While I have a deep business background, I wasn’t well versed in several important aspects of entrepreneurship, like investment structure, fundraising, and valuation,” says Maggie Robb, head of operations at Spire Inc., who took the course to pivot from working with large corporations to a young startup. “Entrepreneurship Essentials covered these topics well, and I was surprised at some of the additional takeaways I had.”
If your startup is past its early stages of determining product-market fit, raising funding, and crafting strategy, this course won’t be as applicable. Entrepreneurship Essentials provides a roadmap for any industry and a solid understanding of the startup world if you want to join a company as an early employee.
Launching Tech Ventures
Launching Tech Ventures is a five-week online course that provides comprehensive instruction for starting and scaling a tech business. Taught by HBS Senior Lecturer Jeffrey Bussgang—who's also a general partner at venture capital firm Flybridge Capital—this course focuses on the technology industry's unique processes and challenges.
In it, you learn how to:
- Harness frameworks and tools to craft and execute a high-quality, profitable business model
- Determine your value proposition, go-to-market strategy, and profit formula
- Secure funding through the venture capital (VC) process
- Navigate the startup ecosystem with an emphasis on systemic biases and ethical considerations
If you’re an aspiring tech entrepreneur or startup employee, this course will prepare you to excel in those roles. Additionally, if you want to invest in tech startups, this course can help you understand the metrics that dictate whether a venture has achieved product-market fit, has a profitable business model, and is ready for scaling.
While this course features similar themes to Entrepreneurship Essentials, its focus on technology makes it a stronger choice if you’re in that sector.
Types of Entrepreneurship Courses
Entrepreneurship Essentials and Launching Tech Ventures both provide foundational knowledge of the entrepreneurial process and landscape. Other HBS Online courses dive deep into specific skills that can make you a well-rounded, effective business leader, such as:
- Disruptive Strategy, which provides frameworks for understanding customer needs and assessing new opportunities and threats through the lens of disruptive innovation theory.
- Design Thinking and Innovation, which reframes problem-solving and idea generation as exercises in human-centered design and enables you to lead innovation within your organization.
- Negotiation Mastery, which teaches you how to secure maximum value for your organization through bargaining techniques, preparing you for contract and funding discussions.
Consider which course type would be most useful given your goals and entrepreneurship experience level.
The HBS Online Learning Experience
No matter which HBS Online course you take, the hallmarks of the learning experience remain constant, including:
- World-class faculty
- Self-paced online coursework with deadlines
- Engaging, interactive content
- Social interaction with fellow learners
- Real examples of business challenges faced by experts
- The HBS Online Community, a global network of business professionals
- Career growth and a positive return on investment
Through HBS’s signature case method, you’re presented with business scenarios faced by real founders. Each explain their challenge, then the course prompts you to consider how you’d respond. Afterward, you learn how they handled it and what insights they gleaned from the experience. By examining their successes and pitfalls, you can prepare for your own entrepreneurial journey.
You can also experience real-world results. In a recent survey of HBS Online learners, 42 percent received a $17,000 average salary increase upon completing a course—a 10-times return on their investment.
In addition, 36 percent used their knowledge to change careers, 31 percent got a promotion, and 91 percent said their course positively impacted their careers.
Jumpstart Your Startup Journey
To determine which course is best for you, consider your industry, role, skill set, and goals. If you’re an aspiring founder or investor interested in the tech sphere, Launching Tech Ventures can help you develop the skills to reach your goals. If you want to be an early startup employee or have an innovative business idea you want to validate, explore Entrepreneurship Essentials.
Whichever you choose, know you’re investing in your skills, future team, and business’s success.
Are you interested in elevating your entrepreneurial skills with HBS Online? Explore Entrepreneurship Essentials, Launching Tech Ventures, and our other entrepreneurship and innovation courses. Download our free flowchart to determine which is right for you.
