Tunde Cserpes, Ph.D.
People Strategy in Startups
3rd semester master's elective, running yearly since 2021
Guests in previous years: Rikke Hvarre (Seaborg Technologies), Ditte Bak (InCommodities), Lars Andersen (Seed Capital), Lasse Chor (Startup Aarhus), Natasha Overmeyer (Stanford), Marc Olsen (Voluntas), Danny Kim (Wharton), Christian Erfurt (Be My Eyes).
Our careers are influenced by the company we work for, and this is even more pronounced when the organization is scaling fast. Academic literature has often held established companies as the benchmark, yet theories describing large firm behavior do not always apply to companies in growth phases. This course provides strategic insights into the challenges faced by scaling firms and is especially suited for students interested in late-stage entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial finance, and strategy. The primary aim is to clarify that startups are fundamentally different from large corporations and to prepare students to navigate these differences throughout their careers.
PSS uses the same choice-based frameworks as most entrepreneurship classes teach. However, PSS uniquely decenters the entrepreneur and shifts the focus to the various pivotal roles within the startup ecosystem—joiners, investors, board members, and community builders.
This class develops students' counterfactual mindset, a crucial skill in strategic decision-making. They learn to explore chain of event decisions typical to strategic decision making while conditioning on the contextual factors and imagining realistic “what if” scenarios.
Throughout the years, students analyzed counterfactual scenarios such as:
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What if the knowledge base of the CEO wasn't in tech but in business? (online bank)
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What if the company didn't choose to acquire another company after getting a series A round but grew organically instead (data analytics company)
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What if the company didn't hire staff locally when expanding its business to a new country but used HQ staff to cover tasks? (whole service production industry)
Companies we worked with in previous years
Summary of course ideas:
Other videos in the series (click on the title to watch):
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The SME Context: age and growth
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Differences between working for a traditional firm and an SME
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The career consequences of getting a job at an SME
Key takeaways for the public
A Race against Time: Managing People in Fast-growing Startups
I gave a talk to the general audience about her class, People Strategy in Startups, at the Festival of Research on April 28, 2022.
Tweetable take-away: Startups are not just scaled-down versions of large companies! @idnut ’s research explains that to overcome the inevitable challenges that result from racing against time, fast-growing companies need to know how people strategy plays out differently in such environments.
Applied Quantitative Methods for Management Research
Ph.D. course
What does it mean when seminar participants or journal referees claim that your manuscript has an endogeneity problem or no identification strategy? How can you create a research design that allows us to make causal claims in a paper? With a point of departure in counterfactual thinking, this Ph.D. course introduces a toolbox of analytical techniques to better ground causal claims in academic texts.
The covered methods are the state-of-the-art quantitative tools in management research. We focus on visualizing the assumptions underlying specific research designs using directed acyclic graphs, and introduce several statistical techniques based broadly on two perspectives that address the limits and opportunities of making causal claims based on observational data, i.e. structural equation modeling and quasi-experimental design. We learn the methods by reading about the underlying intuition behind them, by seeing them work in academic texts, and by replicating them using software packages.
The ultimate goal of this class is to spark an interest in quantitative analysis and de-mystify the concepts and skills involved. In doing so, it will facilitate that Ph.D. students become engaged and collaborative contributors to the academic community.
Entrepreneurial Strategy in the U.S. Beer Industry
Entrepreneurship and Business Planning
Bachelor level course
Standalone modul
This module introduces the entrepreneurial strategy compass (Gans, Scott and Wu 2019) as an analytical toolbox to analyze four go-to-market strategies. Students will learn about four contemporary U.S. craft beer businesses as exemplars.
