Registration for the Spring 2026 Venture Deals course is open. The course kicks off on March 2nd and, as always, is free.

Since we revamped the course in 2022, over 32,000 people have enrolled. This version includes entirely new video content and two sections we added that I think are important — Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Venture Capital, and Mental Wellness in Entrepreneurship.

The course is self-guided and based on our book Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist, now in its fourth edition.

Sign up at venturedeals.techstars.com.

We’ve moved the Venture Deals Community from Slack to Mighty Networks where we have much more functionality and flexibility.

Once again, we’ll do a weekly AMA with a variety of people participating.

For now, registration is open. Please sign up if you want to take the Spring 2021 Venture Deals Online Course.

Our summer session had over 10,000 registrants and over 2,000 people completing the course. We got a lot of feedback about things to improve, several of which we are introducing into the Fall session.

Once again, we’ll do a weekly AMA with a variety of people participating. We are also creating a new Venture Deals online community available to all past and current participants of the course. We’ll provide the link for the online community on day one (we’ll be using Mighty Networks, which I’ve loved for my virtual Startup Community.)

For now, registration is open. Please sign up if you want to take the Fall 2020 Venture Deals Online Course.

Today’s post is from Ruben Porras, who is a Techstars alum (Director of Operations at CreatorBox.) He wrote Black Lives Matter. At Work. In Life.

The country, collectively, has grieved five times in 60 years. People of color have collectively grieved five times in 2 weeks. And we carry that into work, school, our relationships, and are expected to be okay— even if and when we’re not.

…

Well, white friends, white allies, I’m done being uncomfortable alone. If you’re a white ally in racial justice, if you’re committed to being anti-racist, if you see that our peace, our harmony, our healing, and progress are bound together, then its time for you to share in this uncomfortability.

I encourage you go to read Ruben’s post Black Lives Matter. At Work. In Life.

We are running the Venture Deals Online Course from June 28, 2020 – August 21, 2020. We usually only run it twice a year (Spring and Fall), but given the Covid crisis, we’ve had many requests to run it this summer.

We’ve now had over 20,000 people take it. The last cycle was particularly fun as several of the AMAs I did had around 1,000 people on it. Someone also set up a Slack channel for the course which I was active in and met a number of new friends.

Registration is open now. Please sign up if you want to take the Summer 2020 Venture Deals Online Course.

We’ve run the course six times now and have had over 25,000 people take it.

It’s free, although it’s recommended that you have a copy of our book Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist. The 4th Edition is out with plenty of new and improved stuff.

The course runs for seven weeks with the following syllabus.

• Week 1 – Introduction of key players/Form or join a team
• Week 2 – Fundraising/Finding the Right VC
• Week 3 – Capitalization Tables/Convertible Debt
• Week 4 – Term Sheets: Economics & Control
• Week 5 – Term Sheets Part Two
• Week 6 – Negotiations
• Week 7 – Letter of Intent/Getting Acquired

If you are interested, sign up now and tell your friends who are interested in venture deals.

https://youtu.be/RWUx5qm-xrg

If you’re an entrepreneur who wants to raise capital and grow your business, this online course teaches you the basics you need to know for working with VCs. And, if you are starting off as a VC or a lawyer for venture capital deals and you want a refresher on the core issues in a term sheet, this online course is for you.

Venture Deals is a seven-week, collaborative, “learn-by-doing” online course where you will watch videos from us along with doing project work as virtual teams. The workload for the course is about four to six hours per week, includes several live video AMAs with me and Jason, and covers the following topics.

• Week 1 – Introduction of key players/Form or join a team
• Week 2 – Fundraising/Finding the Right VC
• Week 3 – Capitalization Tables/Convertible Debt
• Week 4 – Term Sheets: Economics & Control
• Week 5 – Term Sheets Part Two
• Week 6 – Negotiations
• Week 7 – Letter of Intent/Getting Acquired

The course is a great accompaniment to our book, Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist, which is about to come out in a new and improved 4th Edition that will be available by the time the course starts on September 8, 2019.

It’s free, and you’ll be joining over 23,000 people have taken the course in the past. Sign up for the course here!

The Venture Deals Online Course for this spring starts this Sunday May 14, 2017 and runs through July 3, 2017.  The Kauffman Fellows Academy and Techstars are co-hosting the course. It’s free – all you need to do is sign up.

This is the fifth time we are running the course. So far more than 5,000 people around the globe have done it and we’ve gotten to meet and collaborate with entrepreneurs from six continents.

While our book Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist is the basis for the course, we have extensive exercises, additional content, and a highly engaged community to answer questions. Jason and I make regular visits, both in the online discussion sections as well as periodic AMAs. In addition, the team from Techstars is also engaging throughout the program.

If you are interested in entrepreneurship and how startup deals work, here’s a great chance to go deep on this with me, Jason, Kauffman Fellows, and Techstars.

This will be the third time we are doing this course. We are having a lot of fun with it and love the dynamics of working with the Kauffman Fellows Academy. The feedback has been generally excellent and we’ve tried to take into consideration all the suggestions we’ve heard about what we can do better.

We’ll be actively involved with hangouts during the course as well as on the message boards. If you are interested in really understanding how venture deals and startup financings work, please join us for the course.