FBE 527 - Entrepreneurial Finance: Financial Management for Developing Firms

This class makes me look really smart in Founders Dilemmas. Kind but VERY dry lectures without much discussion. Hard to focus when you're being talked at.

Relatively easy course. Very practical for entreprenuers or investors. The professor is funny and doesn't take things too seriously. The course has minimal quant material and the professor always apologizes for making us do any math at all. I recommend this class to anyone.

Professor is friendly and fatherly and does everything with the students' welfare in mind. He is not PC and willing to be independent minded, which is honestly refreshing given the campus culture of fear. The content of the class is taken from the textbook with a segment at the beginning of each class reserved for current events taken from the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Content is not too difficult, but not too relevant for my chosen career path, but still at times interesting.

The professor is nice. Financial concepts and models of this class are quite different from traditional corporate finance and sometimes hard to understand. Some charts, definitions, and their applications are obscure, and the professor doesn't explain them well. I do enjoy conversations about recent WSJ news at the beginning of classes. Due to the compressed semester, the pace is fast. I don't think I have enough time to fullly digest what I've learned before hurrying through assignments.

The professor is nice but is extremely unengaging and hasn't adapted this course to the online learning environment. His lectures are copied straight out of the textbook, which was written quite a while ago by the professor who used to teach this class, so much so that he won't even change examples or terms that he admits are innappropriate in today's context. There are a lot of busy work assignments that I don't think he even looks at. Also this class feels very 'old boys club'-eque. With all that said, it seems like it's an easy A/A- course, but I wouldn't recommend unless you actually have a feasible business idea and want to create a private placement memorandum for it.

Professor Bristow does a good job at teaching the material and making the projects directly applicable to the real world (you work on your own startup PPM for the duration of the course and have a "usable" document at the end of it). Most of the material covered really just relates to general finance though, with less focused on early stage startups than I would have though.

Really interesting, especially for a Thursday evening class. Professor Bristow is funny and very lax with laptops in class, etc. Learned a lot about how entrepreneurial finance differs from the corporate finance we learned in Core, and think this class is important for anyone who thinks they might start their own business someday.

Arthur is a really genuine guy and will go out of his way to help professors learn. His class can be dull at times but you can tell he cares. Great class, but you will have to be engaged and motivated to learn something

Duke Bristow is cool and the class is useful. He spends a lot of time talking about current events (mostly focusing on macro-economic issues) and has pretty strong stances on the Fed. It's not my favorite class but the workload is pretty light.

The professor made me loose all my interest in this class. I really regret taking this class with him. Maybe I'll learn some from the textbook...

Great class for anyone interested in starting their own business, or that wants to know about alternative ways to financially manage a firm. The professor brings some interesting view points to issues we are all familiar with, i.e. financial crises, etc.; which makes you questions your own beliefs.

This would be useful if you want to work for a VC firm or if you want to start your own business. It goes over the nuances of being a start up, so some of the things learned in traditional corporate finance don't apply.

Too much time spent on the Wall Street journal in each class, but overall a good course

This course was more focused on the economy's impact on entrepreneurs e.g. interest rates, inflation, employment rates, etc. I really liked Bristow's teaching style and think that it was a valuable class. There were a couple of big multiple choice tests, and the rest of the work was around a startup pitch made via PPM.

Build and develop a PPM and business model for a future business venture. Best suited for students interested in starting their own business, especially those interested in starting immediately.

You get to build financial models based on your own business idea. Professor teaches directly from textbook, but overall helpful class, makes you learn the finance from a different perspective.

A little dull, but definitely gives you the fundamentals of starting a business.

The professor teaches straight out of the textbook. The main work is a semester-long project of developing a PPM for a prospective company. This is definitely a useful skill to know and a great opportunity to practice. Midterm was not that challenging. Professor has somewhat unique takes on government and entrepreneurship and politics, which maybe came up more than they usually would given the election this fall.