Dear Students:
As discussed at the end of class today, here are some more details on the upcoming assignment for Wednesday plus some admin details:
Assignment for Wednesday
1. Each team should evaluate the three companies that were presented in class today for a potential investment
2. The team should evaluate from the perspective of a venture capital investor as we have discussed in the first two classes
3. Each team should prepare a 10-15 minute in-class presentation to discuss their investment evaluations. If we have time, teams should also be prepared for some Q&A about their recommendations. The actual amount of presentation time per team will be determined by the final number of teams we have by Wed.
4. The presentation should be accompanied by Powerpoint slides
5. In your investment evaluation, please evaluate each company in turn on the basis of:
a. Innovation
b. Value proposition
c. Attractiveness of the market opportunity, including market size, growth rate, trends and competitors
d. Marketing strategy
e. Sustainable competitive advantage
f. Team
g. Financials (you do not need to go into detail about the financials at this point, but you can start looking at and evaluating the big picture as included in the executive summaries and investor slides.
6. In addition to evaluating each company, you should present your investment ranking, 1 (top) to 3 (bottom) of the three companies and include your reasoning for this ranking
7. After class on Wednesday, you will be submitting your Powerpoint slides, as both the slides and the in-class presentation are deliverables for the assignment.
8. As each team will only have maximum of 15 minutes to present, you can optionally include additional slides in your Powerpoint deck to form part of your submission but which will not be included in your presentation.
9. You can access the presentation slides I used today at: https://files.me.com/dougabrams/x5s2tm The password is: sasinstudent.
Admin details
1. Email me a soft copy in a spreadsheet of your finalized team list by next Wednesday’s class. Include each student’s student identification number, full name, preferred name, primary and secondary email address in that order. Please sort the list by student ID number.
2. Highlight two students on each team to serve as the primary contacts for the team.
3. Students who are not yet part of a team, please join a team as soon as possible before Wednesday’s class so that you can participate in the first assignment.
4. Select a team name and include it in your email when you send the team list
Please let me know if you have any questions or would like additional information.
I look forward to seeing you in class on Wednesday.
Sincerely,
Douglas
