Entrepreneurship & Strategy
My philosophy on teaching is that it has to be cumulative, actionable, and relevant (CAR)
Cumulative: Effective learning happens when student are able to connect the dots between distinct concepts or pieces of seemingly disconnected knowledge from prior sessions/courses.
Actionable: Strategy & Entrepreneurship is fundamentally a practical domain. Thus, all learnings should revolve around actionable knowledge.
Relevant: Core assumptions change over time, meaning that what was supported 10 years ago might not hold today. Relevant teaching is about helping students learn about what holds in this very day and age.
Courses Taught
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Introduction to Entrepreneurship SP21 (Nominated for U. of Washington Excellence in Teaching Award) 4.7/5.0
ENTRE 370 introduces the fundamentals of entrepreneurship by taking a journey through different phases of a venture’s lifetime—that is, of ideation, validation, and resource assembly. Launching a new venture involves generating an idea (ideation), validating customers and a market (validation), and assembling resources such as talent and capital to execute the idea (resource assembly). Thus, these topics are the focus of the course.
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Foundations of Global Business - Strategy AU21 4.8/5.0
FGBUS 250 is an introductory global business course that touches on the fundamental concepts of strategy needed to understand global business operations and trends. This course illustrates the big picture of global business and is designed to maximize integration of the most important business topics and minimize any overlap of key learning points across the curriculum.
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Introduction to Entrepreneurship WI22 (Star Teacher Award) 4.8/5.0
ENTRE 370 introduces the fundamentals of entrepreneurship by taking a journey through different phases of a venture’s lifetime—that is, of ideation, validation, and resource assembly. Launching a new venture involves generating an idea (ideation), validating customers and a market (validation), and assembling resources such as talent and capital to execute the idea (resource assembly). Thus, these topics are the focus of the course.
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Foundations of Global Business - Strategy SP22 4.7/5.0
FGBUS 250 is an introductory global business course that touches on the fundamental concepts of strategy needed to understand global business operations and trends. This course illustrates the big picture of global business and is designed to maximize integration of the most important business topics and minimize any overlap of key learning points across the curriculum.
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Strategic Management WI24 (Star Teacher Award) 4.9/5.0
MGMT 430 explores the fundamental query of business strategy: What makes certain companies perform better than others? The aim of this course is to help students cultivate a robust set of analytical/critical thinking tools to understand where the performance differential stems from, in addition to applying it in practice. The primary goal is to present a collection of influential theories/frameworks that can significantly improve strategic choices in multifaceted, complex, and evolving business landscapes.
Teaching Statement Summary
Normalizing Failure & Teaching How to Fail Well in Entrepreneurship Classes:
(Winner of PhD Program Teaching Award 2022)
Successful entrepreneurship requires knowing how to skillfully calculate and conduct failure. Trying to avoid failure is largely problematic since it removes the entrepreneur from finding a viable/valuable business idea. The better alternative is to fail well via experimentation. Thus my teaching embraces the ethos of experimenting (and the resulting experience of failures) and is deeply embedded in the course materials and design. Keep in mind that the term ‘experimenting’ I use here is broader than just randomized control trials or the likes. It encapsulates all activities that involve some sort of testing or trial-and-errors that yields insight via an interative combination of action and cognition.
In ENTRE 370, I teach students how to fail in a systematic way. During class, students are subject to scenarios where they will inevitably experience small failures (that I call ‘micro-failures’ – adapted from the academic term ‘small failures’). Theoretically, small failures are deemed to be useful since 1) the size of failure is manageable/digestible/bearable and 2) the source of failure is relatively easy to identify and thus remedy compared to larger failures.