Free 33-Video Course
Entrepreneurship for Graduate StudentsTreat your venture idea as a testable theory
Entrepreneurship for Graduate Students is a free 33-video course from Subthesis: 18 core lessons and 15 fundamentals videos. It teaches graduate students to treat a venture idea as a testable theory, gather honest evidence, and reach a well-evidenced decision to found now, found later, join a venture, pivot, or not now. Lessons cover university ownership and disclosure, problem and solution testing, business models and pricing, unit economics, structure, money, funding, intellectual property, launch and wellbeing across four venture types, while the fundamentals cover practical skills such as interviews, surveys, small experiments, cash models, pitches and websites. The course is education, not legal, tax, financial or immigration advice, and every lesson ends with questions to bring to the right office or professional.
Free Course
Entrepreneurship
for Grad Students
Produced by Subthesis
Course at a glance
18
Core lessons
From base rates to the found-or-not-now decision
15
Fundamentals
Interviews, surveys, cash models, pitches, websites
330
Quiz questions
Ten per video, every answer explained
Course outline
33 videos: 18 core lessons and 15 fundamentals · click any lesson to start
Core Lessons
- Lesson 0
How to Use This Entrepreneurship Course: Education, Not Advice
- Explain where information becomes individualized advice and why the course stays on the education side
- Describe the four venture types (scalable startup, small venture, social venture, research commercialization) and the joiner path
- Summarize the evidence on entrepreneurship education, including its modest effects and why lower intentions can mean learning your fit
- Lesson 1
Graduate Student Founders: Survival Rates, Risk, and Failure
- Interpret student intention data such as GUESSS while naming who was surveyed
- Explain why a business closure in official statistics is not always a failure
- Describe why research on founder earnings is contested and why skewed returns make averages misleading
- Lesson 2
Found, Join, Wait, or Walk Away: Your First Venture Decision
- Distinguish founder, joiner and neither interests and what research says drives each
- Inventory your means: who you are, what you know, whom you know, plus time and money
- Set affordable-loss limits for time, money and reputation and write stop rules in if, by, then form
- Lesson 3
Who Owns Your Startup Idea? University IP, Funding, Resources
- Describe institutional ownership, inventor ownership and inventor's choice
- Explain how status, funding and incidental versus significant resource use shape ownership under many policies
- Separate thesis copyright from rights in inventions, software and data
- Lesson 4
Publish or Protect: Disclosure Timing, Conflicts, and Ethics
- Explain why talks, posters, preprints, theses and pitches can be public disclosures
- Contrast absolute novelty with grace-period systems at the level of concepts
- Identify common conflict-of-interest and conflict-of-commitment triggers for graduate students
- Lesson 5
Your Theory of Value: Testable Hypotheses Before You Build
- Explain what the 2020 and 2024 scientific-approach trials found, keeping the two studies separate
- Distinguish a gap in the literature from a need in the market
- Write a light theory of value in five parts
- Lesson 6
Customer Interviews That Do Not Mislead You: How Many to Run
- Design interview questions about past behavior, workarounds and money and time already spent
- Distinguish stated preference from revealed preference
- Plan about 12 to 30 interviews per distinct segment and explain the saturation studies behind that range
- Lesson 7
Market Sizing and Competitors: Bottom-Up Estimates Explained
- Build a bottom-up estimate from reachable customers, realistic price and purchase frequency
- Test how sensitive an estimate is to its weakest assumption
- Explain why top-down "one percent of a huge market" claims mislead
- Lesson 8
Testing a Solution Ethically: Smoke Tests, Pilots, Pre-Sales
- Match each solution test to the hypothesis it tests and know what it cannot show
- Apply five ethical rules for honest smoke tests, pilots and pre-sales
- Write a value proposition with a resonating focus on one or two quantified points of difference
- Lesson 9
Business Models and Pricing: How Ventures Capture Real Value
- Distinguish a business model, the whole activity system, from a revenue model, which covers capture only
- Map a model on an unmodified, credited canvas and mark each note as evidence or assumption
- Describe common business model patterns and how new models recombine them
- Lesson 10
Unit Economics, Consulting Capacity, and Social Impact Models
- Calculate contribution margin, acquisition cost, payback period and lifetime value, and spot the pitfalls in each
- Explain how a healthy-looking ratio can hide a long payback and a cash problem
- Describe the hours cap in expert services and how leverage and productizing address it
- Lesson 11
Co-Founders, Equity Splits, and Legal Forms for New Ventures
- Compare legal form categories on seven dimensions that apply across countries
- Summarize the evidence on solo versus team founding, equity splits and founder control, with each study's population and limits
- Explain vesting, cliffs, leaver terms and IP assignment as concepts
- Lesson 12
Financial Literacy for Founders: Cash Flow, Runway, and Taxes
- Read the balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement as concepts
- Explain cash versus accrual accounting and why a profitable venture can run short of cash
- Use burn rate, runway, working capital and the cash cycle
- Lesson 13
How New Ventures Get Funded: From Savings to Venture Capital
- Describe how most new ventures are funded and how rare venture capital is
- Match funding sources to the four venture types by what they ask in control, repayment, reporting and ownership
- Explain valuation, dilution, convertible instruments, liquidation preference and board seats as concepts
- Lesson 14
Patents, Trade Secrets, and Disclosure Timing for Researchers
- Compare patents, utility models, copyright, industrial designs, trade secrets, trademarks and database rights, including what each does not protect
- Explain the three shared patentability criteria and why systems differ on software, business methods and diagnostics
- Explain disclosure, grace periods, priority dates and international applications as concepts
- Lesson 15
Trademarks, Open Source Licenses, AI, and Who Owns Your Code
- Explain why names are checked before branding and why trademark rights are territorial
- Distinguish a business name, a domain name and a trademark
- Compare permissive, weak copyleft, strong copyleft and network copyleft licenses as concepts
- Lesson 16
Launching a Venture: First Customers, Marketing, and Hiring
- Plan founder-led outreach and channel tests with thresholds, cost caps and stop dates
- Describe selling as discovery and how business, consumer and government buyers differ
- Apply honest marketing principles, including disclosing material connections inside the content
- Lesson 17
When to Pivot, Persist, or Stop: Founder Risk and Wellbeing
- Describe five failure patterns and read closure data knowing that closure is not always failure
- Summarize wellbeing research with its populations and limits, and name protective factors
- Explain pivots as accumulated changes and use stop rules and thresholds to persist, pivot or stop
Fundamentals
- Fundamental 1
What Research Says About Validating New Business Ideas Early
- Distinguish randomized trials, natural experiments and observational studies
- Summarize what the trials of a scientific approach found about pivots and idea termination
- Explain the limits of each study, such as self-selected samples and short follow-up
- Fundamental 2
Customer Personas and Segments Built on Evidence, Not Hunches
- Explain the origin and purpose of personas as a design and communication tool
- Distinguish evidence-based segments from invented stereotypes
- Build segment cards with an evidence trace beside every attribute
- Fundamental 3
Customer Data Privacy and Consent When Validating a New Idea
- Describe the eight OECD privacy principles in plain terms
- Apply data minimization by mapping every data point to a hypothesis
- Write specific consent and purpose statements with a deletion date
- Fundamental 4
Recruiting Interview and Survey Participants Without the Bias
- Choose a purposeful sampling strategy that matches each validation question
- Write a short screener based on recent behavior, with a fit rule set in advance
- Avoid friends-and-family, convenience and power-imbalance bias
- Fundamental 5
Qualitative Interviews for Founders: Questions, Probes, Notes
- Structure a semi-structured interview from opening to close
- Write past-behavior questions and neutral probes
- Spot leading and double-barreled questions
- Fundamental 6
Analyzing Customer Interview Notes: Coding, Themes, Decisions
- Code interview notes close to the words and keep a codebook
- Group codes into themes and build an affinity board with a partner
- Count people by segment and keep disconfirming evidence visible
- Fundamental 7
Survey Development for Validating a Business Idea Step by Step
- Decide when a survey is the right tool and when interviews should come first
- Write single-idea, neutral, past-behavior questions with balanced options
- Design surveys that reduce satisficing and acquiescence
- Fundamental 8
Designing Small Startup Experiments: Metrics and Thresholds
- Design a test with one hypothesis, one primary metric and a threshold set in advance
- Explain why small numbers swing by chance and how peeking inflates false positives
- Estimate whether a planned sample is large enough to be informative
- Fundamental 9
Competitor and Substitute Analysis From Real Customer Evidence
- Identify direct and indirect competitors, substitutes, workarounds and doing nothing
- Explain the threat of substitutes and the role of switching costs
- Build a comparison matrix using customer-named criteria and their own words
- Fundamental 10
Building a Simple Cash Flow and Unit Economics Spreadsheet
- Lay out every assumption in one labeled tab, separate from calculations
- Build monthly cash in, cash out, net cash and a running balance that reflects payment delays
- Calculate runway, contribution margin, payback and lifetime value
- Fundamental 11
Writing a One-Page Venture Brief and an Honest Short Pitch
- Condense a full venture brief into a seven-part one-page summary
- Write a six-to-eight-sentence pitch that states evidence, its limit and the biggest unknown
- Tailor the ask to one audience, such as a funder, partner, program or customer
- Fundamental 12
Website Design for New Founders: Clarity, Trust, Accessibility
- Plan each page around one audience, one job and one honest next step
- Apply usability heuristics as practitioner rules of thumb
- Describe the four WCAG principles and run six starter accessibility checks
- Fundamental 13
SEO Basics for New Founders: How Search Engines Find Your Site
- Explain how search engines discover, index and rank pages
- Write accurate titles, meta descriptions, headings, link text and alt text
- Separate documented guidance from myths such as the keywords meta tag
- Fundamental 14
GEO Basics: How AI Answer Engines Find and Cite a New Venture
- Explain how AI answers retrieve, ground and cite web pages
- Describe what the first GEO study measured and its stated limits
- Explain why a later benchmark found most GEO methods largely ineffective
- Fundamental 15
Free Help for New Founders: Mentors, Advising Centers, Clinics
- Name the main types of free and low-cost founder help and what each cannot provide
- Read country examples as illustrations of how systems differ, not defaults
- Explain how voluntary and public-body chambers of commerce differ
Questions, corrections, or a topic the course should cover?
Who it is for: Master's and doctoral students, postdocs and early-career researchers weighing whether to found, join or wait on a venture, including scalable startups, small practices, social ventures and research spinouts.
Entrepreneurship for Graduate Students is education, not legal, tax, financial, or immigration advice. Bring questions about your own situation to your university technology transfer office, a licensed professional, or the right campus office.