The ATDC Entrepreneur Education Series gives early-stage Select and Open members a basic understanding of entrepreneurial best practices. The courses combine classroom-style training and workshops to give you the foundational tools required to advance your entrepreneurial journey.

Customer Discovery is the mandatory starting point for the Education Series. The rest of the classes are intended to be taken in the order listed below, although they may be skipped. Check the Events Calendar for listings of upcoming workshops.

Customer Discovery

This three-part workshop is a concentrated, unique program that helps founders and technologists of concept-stage startups begin interacting with customers early in the development of their companies. Customer Discovery utilizes coaching to provide a personalized learning experience. During the course of the workshop, you will develop a customer engagement action plan, a positioning statement, market-sizing data and a product development plan.

Financial Literacy for Startups

This three-part workshop teaches founders the essentials for a thorough understanding of their business models. We will discuss terminology that investors expect you to know, understand and use, as well as the details and underlying assumptions of financial models. Finally, we will dive into your individual business’ financial model.

Executive Summary Workshop

This two-part workshop looks at the most important and often overlooked document for early-stage startups: the one-pager. Angel investors, strategic partners, prospective co-founders and others read this document to make a decision on whether to partner with you. The workshop will review the best practices for executive summaries and coach you on how to nail this written pitch.

Investor Readiness

This two-part workshop focuses on the final steps (after Customer Discovery, Financial Literacy and Executive Summary) required to prepare for talks with investors.

Part I: The Art of the Pitch

Part II: Term Sheets and Due Diligence

Sales 101

This two-part workshop focuses on developing your sales skills.

Part I: Closing the First Five Sales

Part II: Building a Repeatable Sales Process