CISC 492 - Software Startups

Winter 2023

Instructor:	Doug Wightman (dhw (at) queensu.ca), (650) 283-6823
	Office Hours: by appointment
	NEW ROOM LOCATION: GOODWIN 247

Class time:	Tuesdays 6:30-9:30 p.m.

Course Description

Interdisciplinary course in entrepreneurship and software development. Student teams write a business plan and complete a significant programming project. Course topics will include methods to create and evaluate new software enterprises.

Prerequisites: CISC 235, COMM 200, or permission of the instructor

Objectives
This course introduces students to the creation and evaluation of software enterprises. Working on interdisciplinary teams, students develop a business plan and software prototype. Expectations for students are commensurate with their prior experience, including current field of study. There are multiple roles to be filled on each team, including roles that do not require programming experience.
Lecture material will include business and software development case studies, and methods for developing scalable software systems.
Each week, students present their current work to the class. During the first half of the course, student teams develop business plans and software proofs-of-concept. During the second half, the student teams focus on developing their software systems and validating their business plan.
This course is not only for students with immediate entrepreneurial aspirations. This is an opportunity for students to extend their critical thinking and domain-specific expertise, developing a project with commercial potential within the structure of a course.

Topics
Entrepreneurship (topics introduced with software business case studies)

Evaluation of business opportunities, including financial valuation
Negotiation, including general methods and specific case studies for shareholders' agreements and other contracts
Methods for working effectively with an interdisciplinary team
Design thinking, and other creative problem solving methods

Software Development (topics introduced during in-class workshops)

Product management
Design patterns for web development
Software as a service, and integration using REST or SOAP APIs
Introduction to SQL
Efficient data processing

Course Structure

Project Reports
Opportunity Analysis	20%
Technical Analysis	20%
Final Report	35%
Presentations	10%
Class Participation	10%
Lessons Learned (individual)	5%

Schedule*

* Subject to change until the start of class!

Week	Date	Topics	Readings	Due
1	Jan. 10	Brainstorming	How to start a startup, Brainstorming rules, Software is eating the world, Steve Wozniak interview, Startups are an act of desperation
2	Jan. 17	Pitch #1	Needfinding, Business Model Canvas, Theory X and Theory Y, Scott Adam's Career Advice, Richard Hamming: You and Your Research, Uber's Virtuous Cycle
3	Jan. 24	Mission, North Star	Getting Real, The Lean Startup, How to Start a Startup, The Mom Test, Minimum Viable Tests, North Star Metric
4	Jan. 31	Prototyping	Prototyping, Dropbox YC Application, The Airbnbs (Paul Graham), How to Plan an MVP (Michael Seibel), Sketch, Figma
5	Feb. 7	Corporate structure, venture financing	Venture Deals, Introduction to stock options, Advice for splitting founder equity
6	Feb. 14	Databases	Schlep (Paul Graham), Firebase, Supabase, Figma data plugins, Table columns "trick", JSON vs Protobuf, Corporate Structuring (Matt Benson)
7	Feb. 28	Storyboarding	Storyboarding, Fast (Patrick Collison), Ten Types of Innovation	Opportunity Analysis
8	Mar. 7	Financial modeling	P/E Ratio, Customer acquisition cost, Discounted cash flow, Clearbanc, Pipe, PR FAQ, PR FAQ Template, Lilium press, Intro to HCI
9	Mar. 14	Decks	Sequoia Pitch Template / Business Plan, DocSend Pitch Deck Advice, YouTube Pitch Deck, Dropbox Pitch Deck, Rippling Company Memo, Rippling Memo Notes and Metrics, Greylock Roblox Investment Memo, Sequoia YouTube Investment Memo, How to Prepare a Board Deck (note: not a pitch deck!), Narrative Violations, Moore's Law for Everything (Sam Altman)
10	Mar. 21	Artificial Intelligence, Prototype Feedback	Ark Invest Big Ideas 2021, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data, Neural network (feature map), AlexNet, Ever Cleverer (image), The Great AI Awakening, SenseTime, AI and Compute (OpenAI), Generative Adversarial Networks (This person does not exist, Nvidia Maxine), GPT (GPT-3, MIT Tech Review), Early days, Unsupervised learning, AlphaGo -> AlphaZero -> MuZero, AlphaFold	Technical Analysis
11	Mar. 28	Vision	Your Startup is a Movement, Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species, Tesla Master Plan, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, What You Do is Who You Are
12	Apr. 4	Final Presentations	Do what you love, and iterate (Ira Glass) longer version, What it takes to be great (Jerry Seinfeld and Howard Stern - coarse language content warning)	Final Report, Lessons Learned