MIT Logo Nuts and Bolts of New Ventures MIT Course 15.393
Nuts and Bolts of New Ventures - 2025
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Session 1 - Tuesday 1/21/2025
Session 2 - Wed 1/22/2025
Session 3 - Thurs 1/23/2025
Session 4 - Tues 1/28/2025
Session 5 - Wed 1/29/2025
Session 6 - Thurs 1/30/2025
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Session 3:
Legal Issues;
Organizational and People Issues

Thursday, January 23, 2025
6:00pm to 9:00pm Eastern Time, Room: 10-250

Part 1: Legal Issues

Identifying and dealing with legal issues in a New Venture.   Securities laws - How to avoid Going to Jail without passing Go and without Collecting $200.   Intellectual Property Law-Patents, Copyrights, Trademarks and Tradesecrets.   Major hidden tax traps in starting a business-how to avoid generating phantom income and taxes.

General questions and answers on legal issues for the entrepreneur - What you always wanted to know about the law but were afraid to ask/pay for.

Reading:  Read Articles from the Boston Business Journal "Starting Up" column: Speaker:
Joe Hadzima
Joe Hadzima Senior Lecturer,
MIT Sloan School of Management
Serial Entrepreneur, Mentor and Investor.

Joe has been involved with over 120 new ventures over the last 30 years as an entrepreneur, lawyer, board member and venture capitalist.

Presentation Slides:    To Be Posted Following Session

Part 2: Organizational and People Issues

Most ventures which fail do so because of people issues, not technology, market or funding issues.   What people are needed to take an idea and make it a reality?   How do you identify good team members and avoid problems?   Building an External Team and an Internal Team.   Developing and implementing a philosophy for the business.

This session will tackle questions such as:

  • In a world that seems focused on advancement via technology, how important is it to build a top-quality team?
  • Do you have a story about when you made a really good hire?
  • How about one where you did this badly?
  • What were the key differences between the good hires and the bad hires?
  • How has this changed your approach to interviewing for new hires? Are you better at hiring?
  • How do you keep your team focused and motivated? How do you motivate, recognize and reward top performance?
  • What about firing? Have you ever done it? What can you share about that experience?
  • What are the pros and cons of issuing stock/options and how does that affect the culture of the company you're building?

We will discuss "People Issues" with a panel assembled by Vivian Vitale:

The People Panel for 2025 has not been chosen.   The Panel for 2024 was:


Reading:
Timmons, Jeffrey A., New Venture Creation- Entrepreneurship for the 21st Century, Chapter 7 "The New Venture Team".   See, Course Reader.

Speaker:
Vivian Vitale
Organizational Consultant
Human Resource Executive - Founder led companies

Vivian Vitale Ms. Vitale has over 30 years of experience in people management in high technology organizations; the last 20 years as part of the leadership teams of RSA Security, Unica Corporation, Care.com, and, most recently, Veracode.
Read her bio here.

Presentation Slides:    No Slides Were Presented

 

 

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